Al-Isra · Makki · ayah 56 of 111

Al-Isra 17:56

قُلِ ٱدْعُوا۟ ٱلَّذِينَ زَعَمْتُم مِّن دُونِهِۦ فَلَا يَمْلِكُونَ كَشْفَ ٱلضُّرِّ عَنكُمْ وَلَا تَحْوِيلًا

“Say, "Invoke those you have claimed [as gods] besides Him, for they do not possess the [ability for] removal of adversity from you or [for its] transfer [to someone else]."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Call on anything besides Him in your hardship: not one of them can lift the harm from you, or even move it somewhere else.

A reflection

Who can draw back the cloth?

The ayah opens with a challenge. Quli dʿū: say, call them. Call those you claimed besides Him, and see. They cannot lift the harm from you, kashf al-ḍurr. Nor can they move it, taḥwīl.

Kashf is a vivid word. The lexicons picture a cloth drawn back from a face: what lay over it is lifted, and what lay under it is seen. When lightning lit up a cloud, a poet saw a cloth pulled away. Grief, too, could be kashafa, lifted off its bearer like a covering. The ayah says none of the others can draw that cloth back.

Every family has a fixer. Picture the uncle who is a solicitor. Over twenty years he has sorted out visas, a tenancy dispute and three nephews' parking appeals. People ring him first, and he likes being rung. Then one winter his own teenage daughter stops eating and stops talking. He has a letter template for everything, and nothing for this. At two in the morning his hands, for once, have nothing to hold but each other, raised.

That moment is not a defeat. It is the ego learning its true size. One classical commentator states what the ayah implies. The One able to lift harm is Allah alone, to whom belong creation and command.

Is the challenge a kind of divine boasting? A challenge to rivals can sound like a contest for status. But a contest needs two contenders, and here there is only One. The challenge is not for His sake; He gains nothing by winning it. It is for the person still pressing his hope onto something that cannot carry it. He is being shown, in the plainest terms, where to take the weight.

So the challenge, read rightly, is an invitation. Try the others if you must. Then come to the One who can lift the cloth.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.