Al-Hajj · Madani · ayah 75 of 78

Al-Hajj 22:75

ٱللَّهُ يَصْطَفِى مِنَ ٱلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ رُسُلًا وَمِنَ ٱلنَّاسِ ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ سَمِيعٌۢ بَصِيرٌ

“Allāh chooses from the angels messengers and from the people. Indeed, Allāh is Hearing and Seeing.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Even the angels people worshipped are chosen messengers, sent; the One who chooses sees who fits and hears every word said about His choice.

A reflection

The ones they worshipped are couriers

The ayah begins with Allah's name, placed first: Allāhu yaṣṭafī, Allah, He chooses. The sentence could have opened with the verb. Instead it puts the Chooser at the front, before anyone chosen.

Then it names the highest beings people have ever imagined: angels. Some Arabs of the time called the angels daughters of Allah, and worshipped them. One classical commentator reads this ayah as the second blow in a pair. The ayah before it dismantled the worship of idols. This one dismantles the worship of angels. Their rank, he says, is real, but it does not come from being gods. It comes from Allah choosing them, because of their worship of Him.

So the beings that people knelt to are revealed as couriers. Honoured, trusted, powerful, and sent.

Picture a mountain village in the last weeks of a long war. The postman cycles up the valley with the letter announcing the armistice. Decades later, the village still keeps his bicycle in the church porch, polished, with flowers beside it. Nobody remembers who signed the letter. The carrier has quietly taken the place of the sender.

That confusion is very human, and it sits at the root of much idolatry. People see the one who brought the gift and forget the One who gave it.

The ayah corrects this for the greatest carriers of all, and the correction reaches down to us. If Jibril himself is chosen and sent, then no creature stands on its own rank. The doctor who healed you, the teacher who guided you, the parent who sacrificed for you: each was chosen and sent. That does not diminish them. It places them.

It also shrinks the ego exactly where it is most tempted. Any gift we carry to others, whether knowledge, wealth or skill, came to us chosen and sent as well. Pride in it is the postman admiring his own bicycle.

Why does Allah insist that the choosing is His? Not because He needs deference. He needs nothing from angels or people. The insistence protects the one who receives. A person who knows where gifts come from will not kneel to the courier, and will not collapse when a courier fails.

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.