Al-Mu'minun · Makki · ayah 22 of 118

Al-Mu'minun 23:22

وَعَلَيْهَا وَعَلَى ٱلْفُلْكِ تُحْمَلُونَ

“And upon them and on ships you are carried.”

Saheeh International

Essence

On camels across the land and ships across the sea, you are carried: every journey begins with being held up by something you did not make.

A reflection

Asleep at thirty-seven thousand feet

The ayah ends on a passive verb: tuḥmalūn, you are carried. Not you travel, not you ride, not you sail. You are carried. The grammar quietly removes the traveller from the driver's seat.

The root ḥ-m-l is described in the lexicons as lifting a thing off the ground. A ḥiml is a load on the back. A ḥaml is a load carried inside: a child in the womb, water in a cloud, fruit on a tree. The camels built for carrying were the ḥamūla. In this ayah, the load is the human being.

Picture a senior executive on a night flight across the Atlantic. All day he has been in charge: meetings, decisions, a team waiting on his word. Now he is asleep in a reclined seat, mouth slightly open, a blanket over his knees, thirty-seven thousand feet above a dark ocean. Hundreds of tonnes of metal, fuel and people are being held up by air. He is doing nothing at all. He is being carried.

That is every human being, much more often than they admit. Carried by animals, by ships, by vehicles and machines whose physics they barely understand, over ground and water they could never cross alone. Pride imagines itself the mover. The ayah describes it, accurately, as the moved.

One commentator notes that the animals and the ships are mentioned together to stress how much they can bear. Both are made capable of lifting far more than any human. The capacity is not ours, and neither is the sea that holds the ship up. The right response to being carried is the one a sleeping child gives the parent who lifts it: trust, and on waking, thanks.

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.