Maryam · Makki · ayah 9 of 98

Maryam 19:9

قَالَ كَذَٰلِكَ قَالَ رَبُّكَ هُوَ عَلَىَّ هَيِّنٌ وَقَدْ خَلَقْتُكَ مِن قَبْلُ وَلَمْ تَكُ شَيْـًٔا

“[An angel] said, "Thus [it will be]; your Lord says, 'It is easy for Me, for I created you before, while you were nothing.'"”

Saheeh International

Essence

Allah agrees with every obstacle Zakariya named, calls the whole thing light, and reminds him that he himself was once nothing at all.

A reflection

Before you, there was no you

Zakariya has just described the impossibility in front of him: an old man and a barren wife. The answer does not argue with his description. It points somewhere he had not looked. I created you before, when you were not anything.

One commentator says Allah reminded him of something more wondrous than what he had asked about. Another lays out the reasoning. Bringing a person out of sheer non-existence, essence and qualities together, is a greater act than restoring a capacity to two people who already exist. If He did the first, the second is nothing to wonder at.

The ego does not like this sentence. Most of us carry an unspoken sense that we have always been here. That the world was, in some way, arranged around our arrival. That our self is the fixed point and everything else moves around it.

The ayah removes the fixed point. There was a time, as another surah puts it, when man was not a thing worth mentioning (76:1). Not small. Not unimportant. Not anything. Every opinion you hold of yourself, every ambition, every grievance, every pride in what you have built, sits on top of that fact.

That is humbling in the best sense. It shrinks the inflated self to its true size without crushing it. You are not nothing now. But you were, and the One who brought you out of it is the One you are speaking to.

Zakariya asked how an old body could give life. He was answered by being shown that his own life was the larger miracle. He had been carrying it around for decades without noticing.

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.