The Bee
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[16:90]
BEHOLD, God enjoins justice, and the doing of good, and generosity towards [one’s] fellow-men; and He forbids all that is shameful and all that runs counter to reason, as well as envy; [and] He exhorts you [repeatedly] so that you might bear [all this] in mind.

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* v.90 : Lit., “the giving to [one’s] kinsfolk (dhu ’l-qurbā).” The latter term usually denotes “relatives,” either by blood or by marriage; but since it occurs here in the context of a comprehensive ethical exhortation, it obviously alludes to man’s “kinsfolk” in the widest sense of the term, namely, to his “fellow-men.”
* The term al-munkar (rendered by me in other places as “that which is wrong”) has here its original meaning of “that which the mind [or the moral sense] rejects,” respectively “ought to reject.” Zamakhsharī is more specific, and explains this term as signifying in the above context “that which [men’s] intellects disown” or “declare to be untrue” (mā tunkiruhu al-‘uqūl): in other words, all that runs counter to reason and good sense (which, obviously. must not be confused with that which is beyond man’s comprehension). This eminently convincing explanation relates not merely to intellectually unacceptable propositions (in the abstract sense of the term) but also to grossly unreasonable and, therefore, reprehensible actions or attitudes and is, thus, fully in tune with the rational approach of the Qur’ān to questions of ethics as well as with its insistence on reasonableness and moderation in man’s behaviour. Hence my rendering of al-munkar, in this and in similar instances, as “all that runs counter to reason.”