Al-Anbya · Makki · ayah 25 of 112

Al-Anbya 21:25

وَمَآ أَرْسَلْنَا مِن قَبْلِكَ مِن رَّسُولٍ إِلَّا نُوحِىٓ إِلَيْهِ أَنَّهُۥ لَآ إِلَـٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنَا۠ فَٱعْبُدُونِ

“And We sent not before you any messenger except We revealed to him that, "There is no deity except Me, so worship Me."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every messenger ever sent carried the same sentence, spoken by Allah in the first person: there is no god but Me, so worship Me.

A reflection

From "We" to "I"

Listen to the pronouns. Wa mā arsalnā: We did not send. Illā nūḥī ilayhi: except that We reveal to him. One classical commentator notes that this "We" is the plural of majesty, the way a king speaks for the whole weight of his rule. Then, at the heart of the message, the pronoun narrows to one. Lā ilāha illā anā: there is no god but I. Fa-ʿbudūn: so worship Me.

The grandeur can say "We". The godhood will only say "I". When it comes to who deserves worship, the ayah allows nothing that could sound like more than One.

Now look at who received this sentence. Every messenger before the Prophet ﷺ, without exception. Men who split seas and survived fire and spoke to kings. Not one was sent with a message about himself. Each was handed the same sentence, and in it the "I" belongs to Allah, not to the messenger.

Set that beside our own small towers. A man donates a bench to his local park, with a brass plaque bearing his name. Some weeks later he walks past it, slowly, to see whether anyone sitting there has noticed. Nobody has. He feels a sting of wounded pride that surprises him.

The ayah quietly rebukes that sting. The greatest people who ever lived were messengers whose whole job was to say "not me". If they carried no message about their own greatness, our need for recognition shrinks to its true size. It looks less like dignity and more like vanity in its work clothes.

A sceptic asks a fair question here. Is a God who commands worship not a kind of cosmic ego? But the commentaries define the sentence carefully: there is none worshipped by right except Him. Worship is His due because it is true, not because He is short of it. Another ayah says that people are the ones in need of Allah, and He is the Free of need, the Praised (35:15). An ego demands praise to fill a hole. He has no hole to fill.

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.