Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 77 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:77

فَإِنَّهُمْ عَدُوٌّ لِّىٓ إِلَّا رَبَّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ

“Indeed, they are enemies to me, except the Lord of the worlds,[1052]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Ibrahim calls everything his people worship an enemy, then names one exception that was never on the list: the Lord of all the worlds.

A reflection

Not first on the list, but off the list altogether

Illā rabba al-ʿālamīn: except the Lord of the worlds. The grammarians paused over this small word illā. Most of them read it as a broken exception.

An ordinary exception lifts one item out of a group: everyone came except Zayd. A broken exception names something that was never in the group at all. On this reading, Ibrahim is not calling Allah the one good item on a shelf of bad ones. He is saying: all of those are enemies to me, but the Lord of the worlds is something else entirely. One commentary completes the thought. He is the protector of whoever worships Him, in this world and the next, and never stops giving.

Picture a consultant's office. On the wall hang a framed degree, a golf trophy and a photograph shaking hands with a famous footballer. Between them, in gold calligraphy, hangs a framed ayah. It is sincerely meant. It is also one more item in a display of what he has collected.

That is where the ego quietly lives. We rarely deny Allah. We rank Him. We put Him at number one, and we remain the one holding the pen. Ibrahim's sentence takes the pen away. The Lord of all the worlds, of every kind of being that exists, is not the best of our options. He is the One every option comes from.

Does Allah need to be set apart like this, as a king insists on his own chair? No. In a hadith Muslim records, Allah says that if every heart were as devout as the most devout, it would add nothing to His kingdom. The setting apart is for us. A heart that keeps Him on a shelf will spend its life rearranging the shelf.

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.