Al-Anbya · Makki · ayah 11 of 112

Al-Anbya 21:11

وَكَمْ قَصَمْنَا مِن قَرْيَةٍ كَانَتْ ظَالِمَةً وَأَنشَأْنَا بَعْدَهَا قَوْمًا ءَاخَرِينَ

“And how many a city which was unjust[876] have We shattered and produced after it another people.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Town after town that lived by wrong was snapped like a back, and others were raised in its place.

A reflection

"How many", left uncounted

The ayah opens with wa kam: and how many. A commentator notes that it is a word of multitude. It does not give a figure, because the figure is not the point. The towns are too many to list, and most of their names are already lost.

Then the verb: qaṣamnā. The first hearers felt its violence. The lexicons trace the root to breaking, specifically a break that separates the pieces. Ruin was called qāṣimat al-ẓahr, the back-breaker. Two commentators add that qaṣm is the most terrible kind of breaking. It is the break that scatters what had held together, and one of them says the word announces intense anger.

That is where human pride should go quiet. Every one of those towns believed it would last. Each had its walls, its markets, its families of standing, its poets praising its founders. Picture a former mill town in the north. In a supermarket car park stands a bronze statue of the man who built the mills. One hand rests on a cane; he gazes at the trolley bay. The plaque calls him a benefactor whose works will endure. The mills closed seventy years ago. Most shoppers have never read the plaque.

One commentator says the deniers' objections in the earlier ayat had nothing to do with evidence. They came from love of this world and love of leadership in it. This ayah answers that love by showing where it ends.

A sceptic may ask whether this is God boasting of destruction. The wording answers it. The towns are called ẓālima, doing wrong; the next ayat show them admitting it themselves. And the ayah's second half is not about ruin at all. It says We raised after it another people. The One who breaks is the same One who keeps raising new generations, giving each its chance. A tyrant destroys to be feared. This ayah destroys wrong, and keeps building.

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.