Al-Furqan · Makki · ayah 53 of 77

Al-Furqan 25:53

۞ وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى مَرَجَ ٱلْبَحْرَيْنِ هَـٰذَا عَذْبٌ فُرَاتٌ وَهَـٰذَا مِلْحٌ أُجَاجٌ وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَهُمَا بَرْزَخًا وَحِجْرًا مَّحْجُورًا

“And it is He who has released [simultaneously] the two seas [i.e., bodies of water], one fresh and sweet and one salty and bitter, and He placed between them a barrier and prohibiting partition.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He lets sweet water and bitter water run side by side, and by His command neither spoils the other.

A reflection

The well beside the tide

On a rocky coast, a fishing family draws drinking water from an old well. It sits a short walk from the high-tide line. Beyond it lies more water than anyone could measure, all of it undrinkable. The well has stayed sweet for as long as the grandmother can remember. No one in the family thinks about it, until a dry summer when a neighbour's well turns brackish.

The ayah opens with a pronoun of emphasis: wa huwa, and He it is. Not nature, not chance. He is the One who let the two waters run.

One early commentator explains where the wonder lies. Allah mixes the sweet water with the salt, he says. Then He stops the salt from changing the sweet and spoiling it, by His decree and His power. Why? So that those who travel the salt sea are not left without water when they need it. A Companion's explanation is recorded beside it. Each is barred from the other by His command and His decree.

Now measure our own power against that. Human beings have built extraordinary machines to pull salt out of seawater. They are expensive, hungry for energy, and they break. Meanwhile rivers that have run for thousands of years still pour sweet into the sea. And the sea still does not climb back up and poison them. Nobody maintains that barrier. Nobody invoices for it.

This is where the ego needs to sit down. We speak proudly of 'our' water supply, 'our' engineering, 'our' resources. Pride assumes we are the ones holding things in place. The ayah quietly points to the most basic thing we need, a cup of sweet water. It is kept for us by a barrier we did not build and cannot see.

The humble response is not to stop building. It is to drink, and know who kept it sweet.

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.