The 365 · Verses · Day 231 · Justice
The balance came down with a purpose - that you never tip it too far.
أَلَّا تَطْغَوْا۟ فِى ٱلْمِيزَانِ
“So that you may not exceed in the balance. (Quran 55:8)”
Svenska: för att ni inte skall överskrida [dessa] mått
The story
The previous ayah set the balance in place; this one gives its reason. God sent down the balance, al-Sa'di explains, precisely so that you would not exceed the limit within it - alla tatghaw, that you not transgress. Then he says something bracing: if the matter of justice were left to your intellects and your opinions, there would arise disorder that only God comprehends, and the heavens and the earth themselves would fall into ruin. The balance, in other words, is a mercy that saves us from ourselves. Left to private judgment, each party quietly redefines 'fair' as 'what suits me,' and the whole fabric frays. Al-Zamakhshari sharpens the vocabulary: to transgress the balance (tughyan) is excess and overreach, tipping the scale beyond what is due - the counterpart to the deficiency (khusran) named in the next ayah. So the warning is not merely about a grocer's thumb on the scale. It is about the human tendency to overreach the moment we hold power over another's due, whether that due is weight, wage, verdict, or word. The balance is set; the command is simply: do not push past it. Justice begins as restraint - the discipline of not taking the extra inch that lies within reach.
In the language
Al-Zamakhshari draws out a precise structure across these three ayahs. The command, he says, is to evenness (taswiya); the prohibition falls on two opposite failures - tughyan, which he glosses as 'transgression and excess,' the scale pushed up beyond what is owed, and khusran (named in the next ayah), which is 'short-changing and deficiency,' the scale pulled below. Justice (qist) is the narrow ridge between them. This is why the same passage forbids both tilting up and tilting down: cheating is not only giving too little. Al-Zamakhshari's pairing shows that self-serving excess - taking more than your due - is as much a violation of the mizan as stinginess is. The word tughyan itself belongs to the family of overflowing and overreaching bounds; here it is aimed at anyone whose hand rests on a scale. The lesson in the grammar: fairness is not 'as much as you can get away with.' It is a single true point, and every deviation from it, in either direction, is named a wrong.
Why this verse
This ayah answers a question we rarely ask aloud: why do we need an external standard of justice at all? Because, al-Sa'di warns, if fairness were left to each person's judgment, everyone would bend it toward themselves and the world would unravel.
Bring it into today
Watch for the moment of overreach. It usually arrives disguised as your due: the extra concession you press for because you have leverage, the last word you take because you can, the benefit of the doubt you extend generously to yourself and to no one else. Al-Sa'di's insight is that your own judgment is not a reliable scale - the instant a situation favours you, 'fair' quietly redefines itself. So build in a check outside yourself. Before you close a deal or win an argument, ask what a fair-minded stranger would say you are owed, and stop there - even when more is within reach. This week, find one negotiation where you hold the upper hand, and deliberately leave the extra inch on the table. That restraint is not weakness or loss; it is you refusing to become the one who transgresses the balance.
A reflection to carry
A humbling claim is buried in this short ayah: your own sense of fairness cannot police itself. Al-Sa'di says that if justice were handed to human judgment, the heavens and earth would fall into ruin - not from malice, but because the mind bends 'fair' toward its own advantage without noticing the tilt. Think of a dispute where you were sure you were right. Were you weighing the matter, or only your side of it? The discipline asked here is small but constant: to suspect your own scale precisely when it tells you that you deserve more. Overreach rarely feels like theft - it feels like justice, your justice.
Sources: al-Saʿdī, al-Zamakhsharī (al-Kashshāf). The Qur'an and its translation are verified; the scholarship is retold faithfully in our own words and credited to its sources, never reproduced verbatim.
Also on Day 231
A verse, a healing, and a Sunnah, every morning.
Subscribe, free