Luqman's Advice to His Son: Wisdom from the Quran
In short
There's a chapter of the Qur'an named after a man who wasn't a prophet, a king or a scholar. Luqman was, by most accounts, an enslaved African labourer — and God preserved his advice to his son in scripture for all time. Seven short instructions, covering belief, parents, accountability, prayer, courage, humility and how loudly you talk. This is the long version: each instruction taken on its own, the Arabic behind it, why the sequence is deliberate, what the surah pointedly does not say, and why the ordinary source of this wisdom is part of the point.
What's on this page
- A chapter named after a slave
- Where this chapter sits
- What hikmah actually means
- Hikmah across the Qur'an
- Who Luqman was
- Ya bunayya — how he speaks to his son
- One: don't associate anything with God
- Two: what you owe your parents
- Three: the limit on obedience
- Four: the mustard seed
- Five: establish the prayer
- Six: speak up — and the invoice
- Seven: don't turn your face away
- Eight: your pace and your volume
- Why the order matters
- The same values, said out loud
- What the surah doesn't say
- The tongue and the heart
- A note on the Kant quote
- How you pass this on
- Common questions
A chapter named after a slave
Here's the detail I keep returning to. The Qur'an has 114 chapters. A handful are named after prophets — Yunus, Yusuf, Ibrahim, Muhammad ﷺ. One is named after Luqman, who was not a prophet, not a king, and not a scholar of any recognised school.
Most reports describe him as an African, enslaved, working as a carpenter, a shepherd or a tailor. A man with no status whatsoever in the society around him. No lineage anybody was writing down, no office, no wealth.
And God preserved his parenting advice in scripture, to be recited by hundreds of millions of people fourteen centuries later. Whatever else Surah Luqman is doing, it's making a point about where wisdom is allowed to come from.
I want to sit on that before getting to the content, because it changes how the content reads. This isn't advice issued from a throne. It's a working man telling his son what he'd worked out, in the ordinary way a father does when he realises the boy is growing and he won't always be around to say it. And it turned out to be worth keeping permanently.
I'll be honest about my own reading habits here. For years I read Surah Luqman as a list — seven things, tick them off, move on. It wasn't until I paid attention to who was speaking, and in what tone, that the chapter opened up.
Where this chapter sits
Surah Luqman is the 31st chapter, and it's Meccan — revealed in the period before the migration to Madinah, when the Muslim community was small, under pressure, and had no political power at all.
That context does something to the advice. This isn't legislation for a functioning state. It's what you tell someone who has to live decently while the surrounding society is hostile and there's no institution behind them.
The opening
The surah opens with the verses of the wise Book — al-kitab al-hakim, from the same root as hikmah. The theme is set before Luqman is named.
The middle
The advice to the son, verses 12 to 19. Personal, quiet, domestic. The heart of the chapter.
The close
Verses on the limits of human knowledge: nobody knows what tomorrow brings, or where they will die. Wisdom framed by ignorance.
So the structure is deliberate. A wise book, a wise man's advice, and then a reminder that the wisest human being still doesn't know what happens tomorrow. The chapter is careful not to let you overrate the thing it's praising.
What hikmah actually means
The word the Qur'an uses is hikmah, and it's worth separating from what English usually means by "wisdom".
The Arabic root h-k-m carries the sense of restraining or preventing. It's the same root that gives us hukm (a judgement or ruling), hakim (one who judges, or one who is wise), and the word used for the bridle that controls a horse. Wisdom, on that reading, isn't accumulated information. It's the thing that stops you doing the stupid available option.
Knowledge
Knowing what's true. You can hold a great deal of it and still make a mess of your life.
Hikmah
Knowing what to do, when, and how much. Putting the right thing in the right place.
The restraint
The root sense of holding back. Often wisdom is visible as the thing a person didn't say.
يُؤْتِي الْحِكْمَةَ مَن يَشَاءُ وَمَن يُؤْتَ الْحِكْمَةَ فَقَدْ أُوتِيَ خَيْرًا كَثِيرًا
He gives wisdom to whom He wills, and whoever has been given wisdom has certainly been given much good. Qur'an 2:269
Note that it's described as given rather than earned. You can study your way to knowledge. Hikmah is granted — which is presumably why it turned up in a slave rather than a scholar.
A definition I keep coming back to
The classical commentators often gloss hikmah as putting each thing in its proper place. That covers more than it looks. The right words in the wrong moment aren't wise. The right amount of firmness applied to the wrong person isn't wise. Placement is most of it.
Hikmah across the Qur'an
Luqman isn't the only place the word appears, and reading the others fills the term out.
ادْعُ إِلَىٰ سَبِيلِ رَبِّكَ بِالْحِكْمَةِ وَالْمَوْعِظَةِ الْحَسَنَةِ وَجَادِلْهُم بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ
Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good instruction, and argue with them in a way that is best. Qur'an 16:125
Here hikmah is a method, not a possession. It sits next to good instruction and gentle argument, which tells you the sort of thing it is: a manner of dealing with people, not a body of doctrine.
وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحِكْمَةَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُم مَّا لَمْ تَكُونُوا تَعْلَمُونَ
And He teaches you the Book and wisdom and teaches you that which you did not know. Qur'an 2:151
The Book and wisdom are listed as two separate things taught together. Text on one side, and the understanding of how to apply it on the other. You can have the first without the second, which is a problem the Qur'an appears to anticipate.
Who Luqman was
The Qur'an tells us almost nothing biographical, which is itself informative. What we have comes from commentary, and I'd hold it loosely.
Not a prophet
The majority view. The Qur'an says he was given hikmah, not revelation — and the distinction is maintained deliberately.
Probably enslaved
Reports describe him as an Abyssinian or Nubian slave. Ibn Kathir records several such accounts.
A manual worker
Variously a carpenter, a tailor or a shepherd. Nothing that would have earned him a hearing.
Held in high regard
Sought out for judgement despite his status — which in that society is remarkable in itself.
There's a narration that he was offered prophethood and chose wisdom instead, feeling unequal to the burden. I'd treat that as a commentary tradition rather than established fact, but it fits the character the surah presents: a man acutely aware of his own limits.
وَلَقَدْ آتَيْنَا لُقْمَانَ الْحِكْمَةَ أَنِ اشْكُرْ لِلَّهِ وَمَن يَشْكُرْ فَإِنَّمَا يَشْكُرُ لِنَفْسِهِ
And We had certainly given Luqman wisdom, saying, "Be grateful to Allah." And whoever is grateful is grateful for the benefit of himself. Qur'an 31:12
Notice what wisdom is immediately paired with: gratitude. The first thing a wise man is told to do is say thank you. And the verse adds the reason — the gratitude isn't for God's benefit. It changes the person doing it.
I find it hard to get past the fact that a slave is told to be grateful, and is described in the same breath as having been given much good. The chapter is quietly reordering what counts as a good life.
Ya bunayya — how he speaks to his son
Before the content, the tone. Three times in the sequence Luqman addresses his son as ya bunayya. It's a diminutive — "my little son", "my dear boy". The affectionate form, not the formal one.
He is about to say some serious things. He is going to tell the boy that his own parents can be disobeyed under certain conditions, that nothing he does in private is unobserved, and that standing up for right will cost him. Every one of those lands inside a term of endearment.
The thing most of us get backwards
We tend to think severity signals seriousness. The surah suggests the opposite. The heaviest instruction in the whole passage — don't associate anything with God — is delivered with the softest possible address. Warmth is what makes hard advice survivable.
I used to give advice the other way round: gentle content, stern delivery. It didn't work. Nobody remembered the advice, they remembered the tone.
One: don't associate anything with God
يَا بُنَيَّ لَا تُشْرِكْ بِاللَّهِ إِنَّ الشِّرْكَ لَظُلْمٌ عَظِيمٌ
O my son, do not associate anything with Allah. Indeed, association with Him is a great injustice. Qur'an 31:13
The word for the wrong being described is zulm — injustice, misplacement, putting something where it doesn't belong. Not "error", not "sin", not "unbelief". Directing worship away from God is described as a filing mistake of cosmic proportions.
That framing is worth sitting with, because it makes the offence intelligible rather than arbitrary. If everything you have came from one source, attributing it elsewhere isn't just wrong in a rule-breaking sense. It's inaccurate.
Why this comes first
Everything after it is behavioural — how to treat parents, how to walk, how to speak. But conduct without a foundation is just etiquette. He fixes the direction of the whole life before advising on any of its details.
And there's a practical reason too. Good manners built on nothing tend to hold until they become expensive. Good manners built on accountability to God hold when nobody's watching and nothing is gained.
Two: what you owe your parents
The next passage is a parenthesis in God's own voice, inserted into Luqman's speech. The commentators note the shift — the "We" of divine address interrupts the father's words to underline the point.
وَوَصَّيْنَا الْإِنسَانَ بِوَالِدَيْهِ حَمَلَتْهُ أُمُّهُ وَهْنًا عَلَىٰ وَهْنٍ وَفِصَالُهُ فِي عَامَيْنِ أَنِ اشْكُرْ لِي وَلِوَالِدَيْكَ إِلَيَّ الْمَصِيرُ
And We have enjoined upon man care for his parents. His mother carried him, weakness upon weakness, and his weaning is in two years. Be grateful to Me and to your parents; to Me is the final destination. Qur'an 31:14
Wahnan 'ala wahn — weakness upon weakness. Not a general statement about motherhood but a description of the physical cost, accumulating. Each month heavier than the last, and then two more years of feeding.
What strikes me is that the verse doesn't argue for gratitude in the abstract. It just describes what happened to your mother's body. The obligation is presented as a fact you can verify rather than a principle you have to accept.
The wider Qur'an says the same thing at greater length.
وَاخْفِضْ لَهُمَا جَنَاحَ الذُّلِّ مِنَ الرَّحْمَةِ وَقُل رَّبِّ ارْحَمْهُمَا كَمَا رَبَّيَانِي صَغِيرًا
And lower to them the wing of humility out of mercy, and say, "My Lord, have mercy upon them as they brought me up when I was small." Qur'an 17:24
The wing image is a bird folding itself down over its young. It's the posture of protection reversed — the grown child lowering himself over the parents who once did it for him.
Three: the limit on obedience
Then comes the limit, and it's placed immediately after the debt for a reason. The Qur'an establishes how much you owe your parents, and only then tells you what they cannot ask for.
وَإِن جَاهَدَاكَ عَلَىٰ أَن تُشْرِكَ بِي مَا لَيْسَ لَكَ بِهِ عِلْمٌ فَلَا تُطِعْهُمَا وَصَاحِبْهُمَا فِي الدُّنْيَا مَعْرُوفًا
But if they endeavour to make you associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them but accompany them in this world with kindness. Qur'an 31:15
Reading: If parents demand something wrong, you're released from your duty to them.
What the verse says: don't obey — and keep company with them in kindness. The obedience stops; the relationship and the good treatment do not. That's a much harder instruction than either simple obedience or clean rejection.
The verb jahadaka is strong — they strive against you, they press hard. So this isn't a mild disagreement. It's sustained pressure from the two people you owe most, and the answer is still: hold your position, and stay kind.
I think this is the most practically demanding line in the passage. Most of us can manage obedience, and most of us can manage a clean break. Refusing an instruction while remaining warm, present and useful to the person who gave it — that takes something else entirely.
Note also the scope. The exception is specifically about being pressed into associating partners with God. It isn't a general licence to override parents whenever you disagree with them, which is how the verse is sometimes used.
Four: the mustard seed
This is the image that does the most work in the whole surah.
يَا بُنَيَّ إِنَّهَا إِن تَكُ مِثْقَالَ حَبَّةٍ مِّنْ خَرْدَلٍ فَتَكُن فِي صَخْرَةٍ أَوْ فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ أَوْ فِي الْأَرْضِ يَأْتِ بِهَا اللَّهُ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَطِيفٌ خَبِيرٌ
O my son, indeed if it should be the weight of a mustard seed, and it should be within a rock or in the heavens or in the earth, Allah will bring it forth. Indeed, Allah is Subtle and Acquainted. Qur'an 31:16
Three layers of concealment stacked deliberately: the smallest thing, inside the densest thing, anywhere in creation. And it still comes out.
The two names at the end are chosen carefully. Latif suggests a subtlety fine enough to reach into anything — the word carries the sense of penetrating where nothing else can. Khabir is knowledge of the inside of a matter, not its surface. So the verse doesn't just say God sees. It says God's knowledge is of a kind that concealment isn't relevant to.
What I find striking is that this is a father's advice, not a warning from a judge. He's not threatening his son. He's giving him a working assumption to carry through life — and it runs both ways.
The warning half
The private wrong nobody sees is not actually private. There is no category of hidden action.
The consoling half
The small good nobody noticed isn't lost either. The unwitnessed kindness is on the record.
Most people quote this verse as a threat. Read in context, sandwiched between advice about family and advice about prayer, it reads more like reassurance. Nothing you do quietly is wasted.
Five: establish the prayer
يَا بُنَيَّ أَقِمِ الصَّلَاةَ وَأْمُرْ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَانْهَ عَنِ الْمُنكَرِ وَاصْبِرْ عَلَىٰ مَا أَصَابَكَ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ مِنْ عَزْمِ الْأُمُورِ
O my son, establish prayer, enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong, and be patient over what befalls you. Indeed, that is of the matters requiring determination. Qur'an 31:17
Three instructions compressed into one verse, and the order inside it is as deliberate as the order of the seven.
Prayer comes first. The verb is aqim — establish, set upright, make it stand — rather than simply "perform". You're being told to build something that stays up, not to complete a task.
Why prayer sits before public action
Because the person who is going to tell others what's right needs somewhere to be corrected himself. Five times a day, standing in a position that makes self-importance difficult. Public reform without private worship tends to curdle into something else.
I'd add something from experience. The advice to establish prayer arrives immediately after the verse about nothing being hidden. That's not accidental either. Prayer is the main thing most people do that has no external audience and no visible product. It only makes sense if the mustard seed verse is true.
Six: speak up — and the invoice
The middle clause of 31:17 is the social one: enjoin what is right, forbid what is wrong. And then, immediately, the third clause: be patient over what befalls you.
He doesn't promise that standing up for what's right will go well. He assumes it won't, and tells his son to be patient with the consequences. Most advice on courage omits the invoice.
That's the honesty I like most in this passage. There's no suggestion that speaking up will be appreciated, or that truth wins on its own timetable. The patience clause is attached to the courage clause because the two arrive together.
'Azm al-umur — the matters requiring determination, or resolve. It's the language of things that need a decision made in advance, before the pressure comes. You don't work out whether you're going to speak up in the moment. You settle it beforehand.
Enjoin what's right
The positive half, and the one people skip. Not just objecting to wrong — actively calling towards good.
Forbid what's wrong
The half people do loudly. Note that it's second, and that it's bracketed by prayer before and patience after.
Be patient
Not patience in general. Patience with what befalls you as a result. The cost is anticipated.
Seven: don't turn your face away
وَلَا تُصَعِّرْ خَدَّكَ لِلنَّاسِ وَلَا تَمْشِ فِي الْأَرْضِ مَرَحًا إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يُحِبُّ كُلَّ مُخْتَالٍ فَخُورٍ
And do not turn your cheek in contempt toward people and do not walk through the earth exultantly. Indeed, Allah does not like everyone self-deluded and boastful. Qur'an 31:18
The Arabic la tusa'ir khaddaka is vividly physical — don't twist your cheek away. It describes a specific gesture: the slight turn of the face that says you're not worth looking at. Anyone who has been on the receiving end knows exactly the movement being described.
The word sa'ar was reportedly used for a disease in camels that makes the neck twist to one side. So the image is that arrogance is a deformity — something visibly wrong with how you're carrying yourself, obvious to everyone but you.
The detail that changes the verse
This comes from a slave advising his son. He had every reason to know what being looked past feels like. It isn't an abstract warning against pride — it's a man who has been on the wrong end of that gesture telling his child never to make it.
And notice the object: lil-nas, to people. Not to believers, not to your community. To people, without qualification.
Eight: your pace and your volume
The last instruction is the smallest, and I think the most surprising thing to find in scripture.
وَاقْصِدْ فِي مَشْيِكَ وَاغْضُضْ مِن صَوْتِكَ إِنَّ أَنكَرَ الْأَصْوَاتِ لَصَوْتُ الْحَمِيرِ
And be moderate in your pace and lower your voice; indeed, the most disagreeable of sounds is the voice of donkeys. Qur'an 31:19
God preserved, in the Qur'an, a father telling his son not to shout. That's the level of detail being treated as worth eternal record.
Why volume, of all things
Because raising your voice is usually about dominance rather than communication. It's arrogance made audible.
The donkey comparison
Deliberately unflattering. A braying donkey is loud precisely because it has nothing to say — volume substituting for substance.
Pace and voice together
Both are how you occupy shared space. He ends on the smallest possible unit of daily conduct.
Iqsid — be moderate, aim at the middle — is from the root that gives qasd, intention or aim. There's a suggestion in it of walking like someone with somewhere to be, rather than either strutting or dawdling. Neither performance nor aimlessness.
The counterweight is worth stating: this is not an instruction to be timid. The same passage told him to forbid wrong, which sometimes requires being heard. What's being ruled out is volume as a substitute for having a case.
Why the order matters
Read the whole sequence together and the architecture becomes obvious.
1. God
Get the direction of worship right. Everything else is built on this.
2. Parents
The closest human relationship, with its limit stated honestly.
3. Accountability
The private life. Nothing is unseen, including what nobody witnesses.
4. Prayer
The daily practice that keeps the first item alive.
5. Society
Speaking up for right and against wrong, with patience for the cost.
6-7. Conduct
How you look at people, how you walk, how loudly you talk.
It moves outward in rings — God, family, the private self, daily practice, community, then strangers, then the smallest details of how you carry yourself in public. A complete ethical framework in seven verses, delivered as a father talking to his child.
And it closes at the level of gesture. Not with a grand principle but with your walking pace. Whoever arranged this sequence understood that a worldview which never reaches your voice and your gait hasn't actually arrived.
The same values, said out loud
Something worth noticing: the values in this private conversation between a father and his son turn up again, centuries later, stated publicly to a crowd.
In the farewell sermon, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ told an assembly at Arafat that no Arab has superiority over a non-Arab, nor a white person over a black person, except by God-consciousness. He reminded them that their lives and property were inviolable, and that they should treat women well.
Luqman told his son not to turn his face from people in contempt. The farewell sermon told a nation the same thing, in the language of law and public order. The domestic version came first.
I think that's the honest way to read the surah's placement. It's not a decorative story. It's the ethic being taught at the scale where it actually gets transmitted — one parent, one child — before it's ever announced from a pulpit.
What the surah doesn't say
Worth listing, because the omissions are as pointed as the content.
Nothing about success
No advice about trade, standing, or getting ahead. A poor man does not tell his son how to escape poverty.
Nothing about the son's future
No career, no marriage, no plan. Only character, which is the part you carry into any circumstance.
No complaint
An enslaved man's advice contains no bitterness about his condition and no instruction to resent anyone.
No self-reference
He never cites his own experience or reputation. Not once does he say "when I was your age".
That last one stayed with me. The whole speech is instruction without autobiography. He gives his son the conclusions and keeps the story to himself.
The tongue and the heart
Outside the Qur'an, the commentary tradition preserves sayings attributed to Luqman. They're not scripture, and I'd treat them as literature rather than proof — but the best of them is worth having.
His master, testing him, asked him to bring the best two parts of a slaughtered animal. Luqman brought the tongue and the heart. Later, asked for the worst two parts, he brought the tongue and the heart again.
The point of it
Nothing in a person is better than these two when they're sound, and nothing is worse when they're corrupt. The same organs, and the entire difference is in their condition.
Other sayings turn up in the collections, Ibn Kathir's among them:
On silence
That he regretted speaking many times, and never regretted staying silent. If speech is silver, silence is gold.
On kindness
That gentleness is the head of wisdom — the part that leads, with everything else following behind it.
On company
That a man is known by whom he sits with, and that consulting people costs nothing and saves a great deal.
On honour
That truthfulness, keeping trusts and leaving alone what doesn't concern you are the pillars a reputation stands on.
Whether he said all of these or not, they're consistent with the man in Surah 31. I'd quote them the way I'd quote any good proverb — for the sense, not as evidence.
A note on the Kant quote
One correction worth making, since this quotation appears in nearly every article on this subject.
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life." — Immanuel Kant.
Kant didn't say it. The first half is Herbert Spencer, from his 1854 essay "The Art of Education" — fifty years after Kant died. The second half was constructed by the historian Will Durant while paraphrasing Kant's ideas, and Durant joined the two. It's a good line. It just isn't Kant's.
Small point, but it's the same pattern that produces fabricated hadith and invented scholar quotations: a phrase that says something we like, attached to a name that lends it weight. Nobody sets out to deceive. Someone paraphrases, someone else drops the quotation marks, and a generation later it's in every article.
The habit of checking is worth more than any individual quotation. And in an article about wisdom, using a fabricated line about wisdom would be a particular kind of failure.
How you pass this on
The obvious question after reading Surah Luqman is what to do with it, and I don't think the answer is a curriculum.
Keep it short
Seven items across seven verses. Not a course. Children remember short things said often, not long things said once.
Lead with warmth
Ya bunayya before every hard sentence. If the delivery stings, the content is lost.
Say the cost out loud
He told his son that doing right would bring trouble. Advice that promises an easy ride gets discarded on first contact with reality.
Include the small things
How you walk, how loudly you talk. Character shows up in gestures long before it shows up in decisions.
Where I've landed: what stays with me is the source. Not a prophet, not a king — an enslaved labourer whose advice to his own child God chose to preserve permanently. And the advice itself is almost entirely unglamorous: worship correctly, look after your parents, remember you're seen, pray, speak up, don't look down on people, don't shout. If wisdom were about complexity, this chapter wouldn't exist. It reads instead like someone who had worked out the few things that actually matter and wanted to hand them over before he ran out of time. That's most of what any of us can do.
Common questions
Who was Luqman in the Qur'an?
A man given wisdom (hikmah) by God, after whom the 31st chapter of the Qur'an is named. The majority view is that he was not a prophet. Commentary reports describe him as an Abyssinian or Nubian slave who worked as a carpenter, tailor or shepherd, and who was sought out for his judgement despite having no social standing.
What advice did Luqman give his son?
Seven instructions in Qur'an 31:13-19: don't associate anything with God; be grateful to your parents; obey God over them if they command wrong, while still treating them kindly; know that even a mustard seed's weight will be brought forth; establish prayer, enjoin good, forbid wrong and be patient with what follows; don't turn your face from people in contempt or walk arrogantly; and be moderate in pace and lower your voice.
What does hikmah mean?
Usually translated as wisdom. The Arabic root h-k-m carries the sense of restraining or holding back — the same root as hukm, a judgement, and the word for a bridle. It suggests knowing what to do and when, and often being visible in what a person declines to say or do rather than in what they know.
Was Luqman a prophet?
The majority of scholars say no. The Qur'an states he was given wisdom rather than revelation, and maintains that distinction. There is a commentary narration that he was offered prophethood and chose wisdom instead, feeling unequal to the burden, but this is best treated as a commentary tradition rather than established fact.
Is Surah Luqman Meccan or Medinan?
Meccan. It was revealed before the migration to Madinah, when the Muslim community was small and had no political power. That context suits the content: it is advice about how to live decently under pressure, not legislation for a state.
What does ya bunayya mean?
It is the affectionate diminutive of "my son" — closer to "my dear boy" than to a formal address. Luqman uses it before his hardest instructions, which tells you something about how he expected them to be received.
What does the mustard seed verse mean?
Qur'an 31:16 says that even something the weight of a mustard seed, hidden inside a rock or anywhere in the heavens or earth, will be brought forth by God. It stacks three layers of concealment to make the point that nothing is unobserved — which works as both a warning about hidden wrongs and a promise about unnoticed good.
Should you obey parents who tell you to do something wrong?
Qur'an 31:15 addresses this directly: if they press you to associate others with God, do not obey them — but accompany them in this world with kindness. The obedience stops while the relationship and good treatment continue, which is harder than either blind obedience or outright rejection. Note the scope: the verse is about being pressed into shirk, not a general licence to override parents whenever you disagree.
Why does the Qur'an mention lowering your voice?
Qur'an 31:19 pairs a moderate walking pace with a lowered voice, and compares an unpleasant voice to the braying of a donkey. Both instructions are about how you occupy shared space. Raising your voice is usually about dominance rather than communication, and the donkey comparison suggests volume standing in for substance.
What is the story of Luqman, the tongue and the heart?
His master asked him for the best two parts of a slaughtered animal and he brought the tongue and the heart; asked later for the worst two, he brought the same two. Nothing in a person is better than these when they are sound, and nothing is worse when they are corrupt. This comes from commentary literature rather than the Qur'an or hadith, and is best treated as a proverb rather than a report.
Did Kant say "wisdom is organized life"?
No. "Science is organized knowledge" is Herbert Spencer, from an essay published in 1854 — fifty years after Kant's death. The second half was written by the historian Will Durant while paraphrasing Kant's philosophy, and Durant combined the two phrases. The attribution to Kant is a later error.
How many verses contain Luqman's advice?
The advice runs from Qur'an 31:13 to 31:19, seven verses, with 31:12 introducing him as having been given wisdom. Verses 14 and 15, on parents, are a parenthesis in God's own voice inserted into his speech.
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