Anxious by Nature, Except for a Few

Al-Maarij describes ordinary human character in blunt psychological terms before naming an exception: 'man was created anxious, when touched by evil, distressed, and when touched by good, withholding' (70:19-21), a portrait classical commentary reads as candid rather than condemnatory, describing an inherited tendency the surah then immediately qualifies with 'except those who pray' (70:22), moving directly into the same list of the constant in prayer, honest with wealth and faithful to trust that closely parallels a similar list near the opening of Al-Muminun.

Commentators read the sequence as a deliberately unflattering starting diagnosis followed by a genuine remedy rather than a permanent verdict on human nature, since the exception it names, sustained prayer and its accompanying discipline, is presented as available rather than restricted to a spiritually gifted few. The verse is cited in later Islamic devotional and psychological writing as an early scriptural acknowledgement that anxiety and self-protective withholding are ordinary features of human temperament to be actively countered through cultivated practice rather than treated as fixed and unchangeable traits. Some later commentators extend the diagnosis to communal as well as individual life, reading anxious self-interest as a recurring obstacle to collective generosity that sustained worship and discipline are likewise able to address.