The Dua of Nuh: Forgiveness for Me, My Parents and Every Believer
Some prayers in the Quran are short enough to memorise in a single sitting, yet wide enough to hold the whole world. The dua of Nuh (peace be upon him) is one of them. After nine and a half centuries of calling his people to Allah — inviting them, warning them, and being turned away — the last recorded words of his mission are not a complaint and not a farewell. They are a prayer for forgiveness, and it does not stop at himself. It moves outward, ring by ring, until it has gathered in his parents, his household, and every believing man and woman who will ever live.
But that is only one of the two prayers this article stays with. In another surah, the Quran records an earlier prayer of Nuh that turns in the opposite direction: not outward to everyone else, but inward, to his own self. Having asked Allah for something he had no knowledge of, Nuh seeks refuge in Allah from his own asking, and declares that without Allah’s forgiveness and mercy he himself would be among the losers. Put the two prayers together and you have a complete portrait of how a prophet asks: the widest generosity toward others, and the strictest humility about himself.
If you would like the broader journey through the prayers of all the prophets, our survey of the Duas of the Prophets in the Quran walks through them one by one. Here, we slow down and remain with Nuh alone — with the two prayers Allah chose to preserve from his long life of calling.
1. The Last Verse of Surah Nuh: A Prayer That Refuses to Stay Small
Surah Nuh, the chapter named after him, does not end with the flood, the ark, or the drowning of a nation. It ends with a dua. The final verse of the surah is Nuh speaking to his Lord, and this is what he says:
رَّبِّ ٱغْفِرْ لِى وَلِوَٰلِدَىَّ وَلِمَن دَخَلَ بَيْتِىَ مُؤْمِنًا وَلِلْمُؤْمِنِينَ وَٱلْمُؤْمِنَـٰتِ وَلَا تَزِدِ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ إِلَّا تَبَارًۢا
“My Lord, grant pardon to me, and to my parents, and to everyone who enters my home as a believer, and to all the believing men and believing women, and do not increase the wrongdoers but in ruin.” (Quran 71:28)
Read it slowly and notice its shape. It is a single sentence, yet it contains five asks: pardon for me, pardon for my parents, pardon for everyone who enters my home as a believer, pardon for all the believing men, and pardon for all the believing women — before it closes with a sixth clause about the wrongdoers, which we will come to in its own section below. Nothing is wasted and no one is forgotten. A man who had spent nearly a thousand years among people who mostly refused him ends his recorded speech by asking Allah to forgive people he would never meet, in generations he would never see.
Notice, too, where the prayer begins. It begins with himself: “My Lord, grant pardon to me.” Before Nuh asks anything for anyone else, he places his own need first. That order is not selfishness; it is honesty. The one making the dua is himself a servant in need of pardon, and he says so before he intercedes for a single other soul. The widest dua in the surah grows out of the most personal confession: I need forgiving first.
2. Ring by Ring: The People This Dua Gathers In
The structure of the verse is a map of a believer’s loves, drawn in widening circles. It deserves to be walked through ring by ring.
The first two rings are himself and his parents:
“My Lord, grant pardon to me, and to my parents” (Quran 71:28)
Parents come immediately after the self — before the household, before the ummah, before anyone. A prophet who had outlived generation after generation still names his mother and father at the head of his prayer. For anyone building a habit of dua, the order here is a lesson in itself, and if you want to gather the Quranic and prophetic prayers for parents in one place, our guide to the Dua for Parents collects them.
The third ring is the home:
“and to everyone who enters my home as a believer” (Quran 71:28)
Not “my family” by blood, and not “my people” by tribe — everyone who enters his home as a believer. The door of the house becomes the boundary of the circle, and faith is the only condition of entry. Whoever crosses that threshold believing is carried into the prophet’s prayer. There is something deeply warm in this ring: the home is not a fortress shut against the world, but a place whose guests are prayed for by name of their faith.
The fourth ring breaks the walls altogether:
“and to all the believing men and believing women” (Quran 71:28)
All of them — and note that the verse names the believing men and the believing women separately, so that no one is merely implied or folded into someone else’s mention. Every believer, male and female, known and unknown, present and unborn, is asked for by name of their shared description: believing. Nuh had spent his life calling one small nation; his final prayer embraces a nation without borders. This is dua for others at its largest possible scale, and it is worth comparing with the wider teaching on Making Dua for Others in Islam — Nuh’s verse is where that teaching reaches its widest circle.
3. The Closing Clause: “Do Not Increase the Wrongdoers but in Ruin”
Then comes the clause that startles many readers, precisely because it follows such tenderness:
“and do not increase the wrongdoers but in ruin” (Quran 71:28)
How can the same breath ask pardon for every believer on earth and ruin for the wrongdoers? The verse itself holds the answer in its own ordering. The pardon is asked for people under one description — believing. The ruin is asked against people under another description — wrongdoing. Nuh does not sort people by tribe, wealth, or closeness to himself; his own home is in the prayer only “as a believer.” The two clauses are one justice spoken from two sides: mercy for faith, and no increase for wrongdoing except ruin.
Remember also who is speaking, and when. This is not the prayer of a man at the beginning of his mission, impatient with rejection. It comes at the end of centuries of invitation. The dua against the wrongdoers is the last word of a prophet who had exhausted every door of calling — and even then, it is phrased as a dua, handed over to Allah, not as a curse he carries out himself. He leaves the matter, like everything else in these two prayers, entirely in his Lord’s hands.
4. The Earlier Prayer: Refuge From Asking Without Knowledge
The second prayer takes us to Surah Hud, and to a very different moment. Nuh had made a request of Allah concerning a matter he did not truly know — and when his Lord made that plain to him, Nuh’s response was not argument, not embarrassment, and not silence. It was a dua, and one of the most humble in the entire Quran:
قَالَ رَبِّ إِنِّىٓ أَعُوذُ بِكَ أَنْ أَسْـَٔلَكَ مَا لَيْسَ لِى بِهِۦ عِلْمٌ ۖ وَإِلَّا تَغْفِرْ لِى وَتَرْحَمْنِىٓ أَكُن مِّنَ ٱلْخَـٰسِرِينَ
“My Lord, I seek refuge with You that I should ask You something of which I have no knowledge. If You do not forgive me and do not show mercy to me, I shall be among the losers.” (Quran 11:47)
Every phrase here is doing work. He begins with refuge — and refuge is something a person seeks from a danger. What is the danger Nuh fears? Not an enemy, not the flood, not his people’s mockery. The danger is his own tongue: “that I should ask You something of which I have no knowledge.” A prophet treats an uninformed request as something to flee from, the way one flees from a sin.
Look, too, at where he seeks the refuge: “I seek refuge with You.” He runs to Allah from a fault committed before Allah. There is nowhere else in his words to run. The same Lord he had asked wrongly is the Lord he asks to protect him from asking wrongly again. And the request he makes for the future is not “give me knowledge of everything” — it is the narrower, more urgent ask: protect me from asking about what I do not know. Reverence, in this verse, is restraint.
5. “I Shall Be Among the Losers”: A Prophet’s Fear for Himself
The second half of the verse is, if anything, even more striking:
“If You do not forgive me and do not show mercy to me, I shall be among the losers” (Quran 11:47)
This is Nuh — a prophet, a messenger, one of the firmest of resolve among all who were sent — speaking about himself in the conditional. If You do not forgive me. If You do not show mercy to me. He does not say: I have served for centuries, so I am safe. He names two things and rests everything on them: Allah’s forgiveness and Allah’s mercy. Without both, he counts himself — himself, not his enemies — among the losers.
Set this beside the first prayer and the portrait sharpens. In Surah Nuh, he asks pardon for the whole believing world with total confidence in asking. In Surah Hud, he asks for himself with total fear of presuming. The two are not in tension; they are the two hands of one faith. Generosity in asking for others, trembling in asking for oneself. If these verses stir in you a wish to return and seek that same forgiveness and mercy, the Dua for Forgiveness gathers the Quranic prayers of istighfar, and the reminder that the Door of Repentance stands open is the natural next step from Nuh’s fear — because the One he feared to be without is the One who invites us back.
6. Praying With Nuh’s Words Today
These two verses are not only reports of what Nuh said; they are words a believer can take onto his own tongue. A few ways to do that, drawn from the verses themselves:
Take 71:28 as your family’s dua. Its rings already match the people you love: yourself, your parents, your household, and the believers at large. Reciting it as it stands asks for them all in a prophet’s own words, in a prophet’s own order. When you reach “everyone who enters my home as a believer,” let it widen your sense of who your home is for.
Take 11:47 as your correction. Every believer has asked Allah for things in ignorance — insisted on outcomes, demanded answers, prayed as if we could see what we cannot see. Nuh’s verse gives us the words for the moment we realise it: refuge first, then forgiveness and mercy. It can be said after any dua we suspect was more demand than submission.
Keep the two together. Pray 71:28 and you are trained in breadth — your dua escapes the prison of your own needs. Pray 11:47 and you are trained in humility — your dua remembers Who is being asked, and who is doing the asking. A prayer life shaped by both will neither shrink to a shopping list nor swell into presumption.
Notice how both begin. Each prayer opens with the same address: “My Lord.” Before the pardon for the world, before the refuge from his own asking — My Lord. The relationship comes before the request. That, perhaps, is the quietest lesson in both verses: Nuh’s asks are enormous and his fears are deep, but his first word is always belonging.
7. Two Prayers, One Portrait
One prayer stands at the end of Surah Nuh; the other in the middle of Surah Hud. One looks outward across the whole earth and every generation of believers; the other looks inward at a single request made in ignorance. One asks pardon for people the prophet never met; the other fears for a soul the prophet knew best — his own.
Together they mark out the territory of a believer’s dua. Ask widely: no believer is too distant, too unknown, or too unborn to be inside your prayer. Ask humbly: no asker, not even a prophet of centuries, stands above the need for forgiveness and mercy. Nuh closed his mission asking pardon for everyone, and guarded his own soul by seeking refuge from his own asking. To learn his two prayers is to learn both movements at once — and to find, in the oldest recorded supplications of the Quran, a pattern still large enough and still lowly enough for every one of us who prays.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the dua of Nuh for forgiveness? A: It is the closing verse of Surah Nuh, in which Nuh asks Allah to pardon himself, his parents, everyone who enters his home as a believer, and all believing men and women:
“My Lord, grant pardon to me, and to my parents, and to everyone who enters my home as a believer, and to all the believing men and believing women” (Quran 71:28)
Q: What did Nuh seek refuge from in Quran 11:47? A: He sought refuge in Allah from asking Him about anything he had no knowledge of:
“My Lord, I seek refuge with You that I should ask You something of which I have no knowledge” (Quran 11:47)
Q: Why does Nuh’s dua begin with himself and his parents? A: Because that is the order of the verse itself: pardon is asked first for the one praying — “grant pardon to me” — then immediately for his parents, before the circle widens to his household and to all believers:
“My Lord, grant pardon to me, and to my parents” (Quran 71:28)
Q: Why does the dua of 71:28 end with words against the wrongdoers? A: The verse divides its ending by description, not by person: pardon is asked for everyone under the description of believing, while for those under the description of wrongdoing it asks that they be increased only in ruin:
“and do not increase the wrongdoers but in ruin” (Quran 71:28)
Q: What does Nuh mean by “I shall be among the losers”? A: He makes his own safety depend entirely on two things — Allah’s forgiveness and Allah’s mercy. If either is withheld, he counts even himself among the losers:
“If You do not forgive me and do not show mercy to me, I shall be among the losers” (Quran 11:47)