A Verse Read as Naming the Evil Eye

Al-Qalam describes the hostility of the disbelievers toward Muhammad in strikingly physical terms: they would 'almost trip you up with their eyes when they hear the message' (68:51). A number of classical commentators read this verse as acknowledging the reality of the evil eye, an envious or malicious glance believed capable of causing harm, and cite it as scriptural grounding for a belief widespread across the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Middle East, one later hadith literature addresses directly with prescribed protective supplications; other classical and modern exegetes read the verse instead as a vivid figure of speech for intense hostility and read too much specific doctrine into it, so the verse's precise theological weight on this question is treated as genuinely disputed rather than settled by the text alone.

Islamic theology as a whole affirms belief in the evil eye's reality on the strength of hadith rather than this verse in isolation, while treating protective measures against it as compatible with, rather than a departure from, reliance on God, a balance classical scholars were careful to maintain against any suggestion that fear of the evil eye implied a power operating outside or against divine permission.