Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 184 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:184

وَٱتَّقُوا۟ ٱلَّذِى خَلَقَكُمْ وَٱلْجِبِلَّةَ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ

“And fear He who created you and the former creation."[1059]”

Saheeh International

Essence

After the scales, Shu'ayb names the One behind every customer: the Creator of you and of the vast, mountain-like multitudes who came before.

A reflection

One crowd among countless crowds

Shu'ayb could have said simply, "Fear Allah." Instead he describes Him: the One who created you, and the jibilla of the first ones. The word means a created people, a whole generation. Some early authorities gave it the sense of a vast multitude, likened to a great mass of mountain.

Picture a stadium at the final whistle. Sixty thousand people pour down the stairways and out into the streets. For ten minutes the city is a river of scarves and voices. Each person in it thinks mainly of his own bus, his own phone, his own evening.

Now widen the frame. Every one of those sixty thousand was created. So was every crowd that filled that stadium in the decades before. So was every market crowd in Madyan, every caravan, every generation that bargained, cheated, laughed and was buried. The ayah gathers them all under one verb: He created you, and them.

Here is where the ego shrinks. The trader with the shaved measure feels like the centre of his small world. His margins, his cleverness, his reputation. Shu'ayb sets him inside a crowd so large it cannot be counted, made by One who made all of it. His pride in a few extra grams looks like a single fan boasting that the stadium is his.

Someone may object. Why does Allah remind people that He created them? Does He need acknowledgment, like an artist fishing for compliments? The ayah answers by its context. The reminder is not for His benefit. It is attached to a command about how these people treat each other. The point is that the customer you cheat was also made by Him, and so was his grandfather. A Creator who needed praise would not care about a stranger's grain. One who cares about the stranger's grain is protecting His creatures, not His vanity.

The humility that follows is not humiliation. It is relief at being the right size.

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.