Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 175 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:175

وَإِنَّ رَبَّكَ لَهُوَ ٱلْعَزِيزُ ٱلرَّحِيمُ

“And indeed, your Lord - He is the Exalted in Might, the Merciful.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The refrain of 26:9 follows one of the harshest endings in the surah, and still its last word is the Merciful.

A reflection

Mighty over a town, merciful to a house

This exact line was first met at 26:9, and its full treatment lives there. Here it lands straight after a town has been overturned and rained on with stones.

Look at the two names against Lut's story. Al-ʿAzīz, the Mighty: a whole town that threatened its prophet with exile could not resist for a moment. Al-Raḥīm, the Merciful: a single household, a father and two daughters, walked out alive. A narration-based commentary glosses the second name simply: Merciful to whoever believed in Him.

The town's pride had rested on numbers and ownership. Your town, they said. This line reduces all that to nothing. The might in the story was never theirs, and the mercy in it was never earned by size. That is humbling for any ego that measures its safety by how many stand with it.

Does Allah need this repeated after every story, as though He wanted applause? He does not. His might and mercy were whole before the town was built. The line is for the listener, so that he neither trusts the crowd nor despairs of being few.

The full entry has 2 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.