Maryam مريم

Makki · 98 ayat · 98 with pondering

• Ayah 1Five letters no one has fully explained open the surah a Christian king wept to hear, and that a Companion counted among his oldest treasures.
• Ayah 2Before Zakariya says a word, the surah writes the heading over his whole story: a record of your Lord's mercy to His servant.
• Ayah 3Zakariya called out to his Lord with everything he had, in a place where no one but his Lord could hear.
• Ayah 4An old man lays his failing body before his Lord as evidence, then rests his request on one fact: You have never let me down.
• Ayah 5Zakariya feared for the faith after him, named his barren wife without blame, and asked his Lord for someone near enough to carry it.
• Ayah 6Zakariya asked for an heir to what no will can pass on, and ended by asking that the child be pleasing to his Lord.
• Ayah 7Zakariya kept saying my Lord; the answer begins with his own name, and gives his son a name no one had carried before.
• Ayah 8Promised the son he had asked for, Zakariya asks how, describing himself as a branch dried out by the years.
• Ayah 9Allah agrees with every obstacle Zakariya named, calls the whole thing light, and reminds him that he himself was once nothing at all.
• Ayah 10Zakariya asked for a sign and was given a silence: three nights unable to speak to anyone, though nothing at all was wrong with him.
• Ayah 11Unable to speak, holding the best news of his life, Zakariya came out to the waiting people and signalled one thing: glorify Him.
• Ayah 12The promised child is addressed directly, told to take hold of the Book with strength, and given sound judgement while still a boy.
• Ayah 13The boy told to hold the Book with strength was also given yearning tenderness from Allah's presence, a purity that grows, and a guarded heart.
• Ayah 14The boy born to two very old parents was wide in his goodness to them, never overbearing, never holding out against a call.
• Ayah 15Yaḥyā's story closes with Allah's own greeting of peace on him at the three loneliest moments any creature ever faces: birth, death and rising again.
• Ayah 16Maryam's story opens not with crowds or an angel, but with a young woman stepping a little apart from her family, towards the east.
• Ayah 17Behind her screen, Allah sent Maryam the one He calls Our spirit, shaped as a well-formed man she could bear to hear.
• Ayah 18Alone with a stranger, Maryam's first words reach for the Most Merciful and appeal to the stranger's own conscience: if you fear Allah, keep away.
• Ayah 19The stranger answers her fear first: I am only a messenger of the very Lord you ran to, sent to give you a pure boy.
• Ayah 20Maryam asks Zakariya's very question, but her obstacles are not age and barrenness: no man has touched her, and she has never been unchaste.
• Ayah 21Maryam receives Zakariya's answer almost word for word, with a different ending: her child will be a sign for people and a mercy, already decreed.
• Ayah 22In five words the surah passes over months: she conceived him, and carried him to a far place where no one would see her.
• Ayah 23Driven by labour to a dead palm trunk, the holiest of women asked to be forgotten, and Allah kept her cry and answered it.
• Ayah 24Her darkest sentence was answered at once with tenderness: do not grieve, your Lord has placed a stream beneath you.
• Ayah 25Allah could have bent the trunk to her, but He told a weak, exhausted mother to shake it, and fresh dates fell.
• Ayah 26She is told to eat, drink and let her eye grow cool before anything else; only then is explaining taken off her hands.
• Ayah 27She walked back into her town carrying the very thing that accused her, and her people named it with a word that cuts both ways.
• Ayah 28Her people build their rebuke out of her own family, and every word of it is truer than they know.
• Ayah 29Her whole defence is one gesture towards a newborn, and her people's reply is the most reasonable question in the room.
• Ayah 30Asked to defend his mother, the newborn's first words defend his Lord instead, and in doing so clear her completely.
• Ayah 31A newborn describes a blessing that kneels wherever he does, and a charge of prayer and giving that will not end before his life does.
• Ayah 32In front of the people who accused her, a newborn names his mother, and only his mother, as the one he will honour.
• Ayah 33The newborn ends his speech by naming his own death, and asking for peace at the three doorways every human must pass through.
• Ayah 34The story stops and a verdict begins: this, and nothing more or less, is Isa son of Maryam, the word of truth they still dispute.
• Ayah 35A son is what the needy want; the One who makes anything by saying 'Be' needs nothing, and is far above taking one.
• Ayah 36The straight path is one sentence long: the same Lord for the child in the cradle and the men around him, so worship Him.
• Ayah 37The clearest sentence about Isa split people into factions, and the ayah sends their dispute forward to a Day when every witness will be present.
• Ayah 38On the Day they meet Him, the deniers will hear and see perfectly; today, when hearing and seeing could still help, they are lost.
• Ayah 39The Prophet is told to warn of the Day of Regret, when everything is settled for ever, while people today drift on, unmarked and unaware.
• Ayah 40Everyone who owns anything on earth will leave it, and the One who remains inherits the whole of it, and them.
• Ayah 41The surah remembers Ibrahim through a conversation with his father, and first names him a man whose truth would not bend.
• Ayah 42Ibrahim opens with 'O my father' and a question: why worship what cannot hear you, see you, or help you at all?
• Ayah 43A son tells his father that some knowledge has reached him, and offers to walk him, like a fellow traveller, along a level path.
• Ayah 44Ibrahim names the master behind the statue: to obey the one who rebelled against the Merciful is to worship him, whatever the shrine looks like.
• Ayah 45Ibrahim's last appeal confesses fear, not of his father but for him, in the gentlest words a warning can carry.
• Ayah 46Four times the son said 'O my father'; the father answers once, with a bare name, a threat of stones and an order to leave.
• Ayah 47Threatened with stones, Ibrahim promises his father safety from himself and a prayer to his Lord, the One who has always seen to his lodging.
• Ayah 48Ibrahim steps away from his people and their idols, unarmed, and turns to his Lord, hoping his calling will not go unanswered.
• Ayah 49The man who walked out of his father's house alone is given a son and grandson, both prophets: no one ever lost by Allah.
• Ayah 50The man first called the one of truth is given a lofty tongue of truth: praise from every faith, and his name in every prayer.
• Ayah 51Of everything that could be said first about Musa, the staff, the sea, the tyrant, this surah chooses one word: drawn out and made pure.
• Ayah 52He went towards a fire to fetch a burning stick for his family, and was called by name and drawn near to confide.
• Ayah 53Musa already had a brother, and what mercy gave him was that brother at his shoulder, because he admitted he could not do it alone.
• Ayah 54Ismaʿil is named for a virtue we usually call small manners: he was always where he said he would be.
• Ayah 55Ismaʿil's work began inside his own tent, kept on without end, and was judged by one approval only: his Lord's, not his family's.
• Ayah 56The roll-call ends with its oldest name, a prophet whose story is never told, keeping only what outlasted everything else: he was true.
• Ayah 57Smoke rises above the fire that made it, so height proves nothing; the only elevation worth having is the one Allah gives.
• Ayah 58Every honour in history is gathered into one sentence, and its subjects fall weeping at the Merciful's words, like palms bent by their own fruit.
• Ayah 59The heirs of the prophets did not tear the prayer down; they stopped tending it, and an untended field goes to waste on its own.
• Ayah 60The threat before was told to wait, but this welcome is not, and whoever turns round on the road is spoken of like the prophets.
• Ayah 61To people whose gardens withered and whose camps moved with the rain, the Merciful promises gardens of staying, unseen, and stakes His record on it.
• Ayah 62The Garden is first described by what you will not hear: no chatter that counts for nothing, only peace, and meals on time.
• Ayah 63The Garden is not paid out like wages but handed down as an inheritance, which can never be revoked, to whoever walked with care.
• Ayah 64The Prophet asked Jibril why he did not visit more, and the reply reaches every waiting heart: your Lord forgets nothing.
• Ayah 65The Lord who holds the heavens cannot forget you, so worship Him, and hold your ground in it as a fighter holds against an opponent.
• Ayah 66This sentence belongs to man, in the present tense, because every age crumbles its own dry bone and asks: really, after this?
• Ayah 67The scoffer is answered as Zakariyya was: you were once not even a thing, and the One who made you then can make you again.
• Ayah 68The man who crumbled a bone in the square is gathered with the voices that misled him, and set on his knees at the edge.
• Ayah 69Every following is kindling round a great log, and at the edge the log is pulled out first: the one most hardened against the Merciful.
• Ayah 70The sorting at the edge belongs to Allah, who knows exactly who drew nearest to the fire; no one else's list is consulted.
• Ayah 71Everyone goes down to it, as a caravan goes down to water; the turning back decides each fate, and is being built now.
• Ayah 72At the dark edge, the mindful are lifted to high ground with their deeds lighting the way; the wrongdoers are left where they knelt.
• Ayah 73Clear verses are recited, and the reply compares houses and gatherings: the oldest dodge of a truth is asking who looks more successful.
• Ayah 74Generations finer in furnishings and looks than any boaster were brought to nothing, so appearance proves nothing about who stands well with Allah.
• Ayah 75The Most Merciful pays out rope to the misguided until they see what was promised, and learn whose place was worse.
• Ayah 76Answering a boast about whose gathering looked finer, the ayah names two things that keep growing: guidance itself, and the deeds still standing afterwards.
• Ayah 77A poor blacksmith asked for his wages and was told to wait for the Resurrection, and Allah answered the joke with an ayah.
• Ayah 78Every confident claim about the next life needs a warrant: either you climbed up and saw it, or the Most Merciful promised it.
• Ayah 79The first No in the Qur'an answers a man's oath about his future, and promises that his own words will be kept and read back.
• Ayah 80The wealth and children he boasted of pass to their true Heir, and the man who expected everything to come to him comes alone.
• Ayah 81People did not take other gods out of stupidity but out of hunger for strength, and the ayah names that hunger precisely.
• Ayah 82Whatever was taken as a god for strength will not stay neutral: it will deny the worship and stand against the worshipper.
• Ayah 83Behind the restless drive towards wrong is a fire laid under a pot, and the devils who stoke it are sent, not sovereign.
• Ayah 84Do not rush the end of those who do wrong: their time is already being counted, breath by breath, by the One who misses nothing.
• Ayah 85On the Day of gathering, the God-conscious do not shuffle to judgement: they ride in as an honoured delegation to the Most Merciful.
• Ayah 86While the God-conscious ride in as guests, the criminals are driven from behind like a thirsty herd to a watering place that holds only fire.
• Ayah 87No one owns intercession on that Day; someone will stand beside you only if you took a covenant with the Most Merciful while you could.
• Ayah 88The surah named after Maryam reaches its gravest moment by quoting, in four words, the claim her son's story was made to carry.
• Ayah 89Turning from speaking about them to speaking to them, the Qur'an names the claim for what it is: a monstrous thing, heavy enough to groan.
• Ayah 90At the claim that the Most Merciful has a son, creation itself almost tears: heavens splitting, earth cracking, mountains falling with a crash.
• Ayah 91Five words give the cause of creation's near collapse: that people called a child into the lineage of the Most Merciful.
• Ayah 92After the heavens strain, the verdict is quiet: a son is simply not fitting for the Most Merciful, who seeks nothing because He lacks nothing.
• Ayah 93Every being in the heavens and the earth, angel, prophet or king, comes to the Most Merciful in one capacity only: as His servant.
• Ayah 94The One to whom every creature comes as a servant has counted each of them, one by one, as a shepherd counts with pebbles.
• Ayah 95Every creature will arrive before Him on the Day of Resurrection alone, without retinue or wealth, and with no interpreter between them and their Lord.
• Ayah 96For those who believe and do good, the Most Merciful Himself will plant love in hearts: love they did not court and could never buy.
• Ayah 97The surah names its own purpose: a revelation made easy in the Prophet's tongue, to bring good news to the God-conscious and warn the stiff-necked.
• Ayah 98The surah that began with an old man's whisper heard by his Lord ends by listening for whole generations, and hearing not even a whisper.