Al-Furqan · Makki · ayah 45 of 77

Al-Furqan 25:45

أَلَمْ تَرَ إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ كَيْفَ مَدَّ ٱلظِّلَّ وَلَوْ شَآءَ لَجَعَلَهُۥ سَاكِنًا ثُمَّ جَعَلْنَا ٱلشَّمْسَ عَلَيْهِ دَلِيلًا

“Have you not considered your Lord - how He extends the shadow, and if He willed, He could have made it stationary? Then We made the sun for it an indication.[1028]”

Saheeh International

Essence

After people who would not see, a call to look: your Lord stretching the shade He could have frozen, the sun its guide.

A reflection

Shade nobody thinks to thank

Picture a man who fits shade sails for a living. He is measuring a family's garden on a hot June morning. 'I'll have you in shade by July,' he says, and means it. He will choose the fabric, angle the posts and calculate where the shadow falls at four o'clock. He is good at his job, and he is proud of it.

This ayah quietly rearranges that pride. No one has ever made shade. We only stand things in the way of light. Whether a shadow exists at all, how far it stretches, and that it moves, none of that is ours.

The root of ẓill, shade, means one thing screening another. When the Arabs said a man aẓalla you, they meant he covered you with his protection. Every patch of cool ground is that kind of covering.

Then comes the clause that humbles. Wa-law shāʾa la-jaʿalahu sākinā: had He willed, He would have made it still. One commentator describes what that would mean. The shade would cling to the foot of every mountain, wall and tree, never spreading out. Nobody could sit in it. Another sets beside it the ayat asking: what if Allah made the night endless until the Day of Resurrection, or the day? (28:71-72).

Our ego likes to think the comfortable world is simply how things are. The ayah says it is how He chose them to be, and could have chosen otherwise.

That is not a demand for praise. Allah needs nothing from us. It is a hand turning our face to a gift we sit in every summer and never thank anyone for. The shade-sail fitter is still welcome to be proud of his posts. The shade belongs to Someone else.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.