What the Qur'an means when it calls a person successful
Success is one of the Qur'an's most repeated promises, and one of the words it chooses most often is falāḥ. The same root gives Arabic its word for a farmer, the one who breaks open hard ground and then waits on it. Muslims hear it five times a day in the call to prayer, ḥayya ʿalā l-falāḥ, come to success, placed right after the call to come to prayer.
Surah al-Mu'minun opens with the verdict and then shows its working: "The believers have truly succeeded:" The sentence runs straight on into a description of the people it means. They are humble in prayer, they turn away from idle talk, they give, they guard their chastity, and they are "faithful to their trusts and their covenants". Nothing on the list is a possession or a rank. The success it describes is a way of spending ordinary days and keeping one's word.
Two short surahs locate it further inside. Al-Shams swears by the sun and the moon and finally by the soul, then says "Successful is the one who purifies it", and al-A'la puts it almost the same way: "Truly successful are those who purify themselves". The farmer's word fits here. The self is the field, and tending it is daily work. Surah al-Taghabun names one of the weeds: "Whoever is guarded against the greed of their own self, those are the ones who succeed." The same verse sets the pace, asking for mindfulness of God "as much as you are able", a measure a tired person can meet.
Effort is expected, and the outcome is held somewhere else. Shu'ayb, pleading with a town that cheated on its weights and measures, tells them he wants only to set things right as far as he is able, and then adds "My success rests with God alone — in him I trust, and to him I turn." The word there is tawfīq, the fit between what a person does and what comes of it, and he names its source plainly. It is a line for anyone who has worked hard at something and watched it go its own way. The verses on trust in God stay with that feeling longer.
Worldly success has its place in this. One of the prayers the Qur'an records asks for "good in this world and good in the hereafter" in the same breath, and it comes directly after people who asked for this world alone. The final measure is taken at the end: "Those whose scales are heavy — they are the ones who succeed." What goes on the scale is what a person did, which includes how they earned and what they did with it. The verses about business take up the earning half of that.
For someone who feels far behind, the Qur'an keeps the door open. Right after a scene of people left without an answer on the last day, Surah al-Qasas turns to "whoever repents, believes, and does good" and says "such a one may well be among those who prosper". Success in these verses is a direction a person can start facing on any ordinary day, and the call to prayer invites them back to it five times between dawn and night.