Maryam · Makki · ayah 67 of 98

Maryam 19:67

أَوَلَا يَذْكُرُ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ أَنَّا خَلَقْنَـٰهُ مِن قَبْلُ وَلَمْ يَكُ شَيْـًٔا

“Does man not remember that We created him before, while he was nothing?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The scoffer is answered as Zakariyya was: you were once not even a thing, and the One who made you then can make you again.

A reflection

Not even a thing

Wa-lam yaku shayʾan: and he was not anything. The ayah ends with a phrase that is almost unbearable to the ego when it is taken seriously.

Not he was small. Not he was weak. Not he was a seed, though elsewhere the Qur'an traces the stages of the womb. Here the claim goes behind all stages. Before Allah created him, the human being was not a thing at all. No name, no body, no thought, no place in the world for anyone to miss.

One classical account of the word shayʾ makes the point sharper. A thing, in Arabic, began as what is willed. So to say he was not a thing is to say that before Allah willed him, there was simply nothing there to point to.

Every confident sentence a person speaks is spoken by someone who a few decades ago did not exist. That includes the sceptic's sneer in the ayah before. The voice that asks will I really live again? was itself brought out of nothing. We created him: the verb belongs to Allah, and the human being contributed nothing to his own first arrival.

Some hear this as a put-down, as though God reminds us of our nothingness to make Himself look larger. It is the reverse. The reminder is in the service of the human being's hope. The ayah tells the doubter: you fear that death will return you to nothing, but you have been there before, and He brought you out. A being who needed our smallness to feel great would not use it to promise us life.

The ego is cured here not by insult but by gratitude. You were not owed existence. You were given it. And the One who gave it once has not lost the power to give it again.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.