A Verse Given as an Answer to a Confession

Hud's verse that 'good deeds do away with misdeeds' (11:114) is transmitted in hadith collections including those of al-Bukhari and Muslim with a specific occasion attached: a man came to the Prophet confessing he had kissed a woman not his wife and asking whether he must be punished, and the Prophet, rather than answering directly, is reported to have recited this verse to him, prompting a companion to ask whether it applied to him alone, to which the Prophet answered that it applied to everyone in his community. The episode is cited across later Islamic ethical writing as a model for how repentance and continued righteous conduct are presented as outweighing a single failing, applied generally rather than reserved for the specific case that occasioned the verse.

Hud's repeated refrain of prophets rejected and peoples destroyed, which the Prophet is reported to have said aged him, is also cited in later devotional literature on prophetic patience, commentators noting that the surah offers no relief from its severity until its final verses, making its structure itself, rather than any single episode within it, part of what later readers found demanding. Classical biographers list this hadith among the reports illustrating the Prophet's preference for guidance over punishment whenever a genuine, voluntary confession was involved.