Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 79 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:79

وَٱلَّذِى هُوَ يُطْعِمُنِى وَيَسْقِينِ

“And it is He who feeds me and gives me drink.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He alone feeds me and gives me drink: not a distant Lord of harvests only, but the One who lifts the cup to my lips.

A reflection

The hand under the cup

Wa-lladhī huwa yuṭʿimunī wa yasqīn: and the One who, He, feeds me and gives me drink. Notice the extra word huwa, 'He'. The line would be grammatical without it.

One commentator explains its force with an everyday example. When you say 'Zayd is the one who did it', you mean nobody else did. Another explains why it appears here and not in 'who created me'. Nobody claims to have created himself. But feeding and giving drink are constantly credited to others: to parents, employers, farmers, shops, and ourselves.

Picture a two-year-old at the kitchen table who has just learned to say 'I do it'. He grips his cup with both hands and refuses help. His mother lets him. She also keeps two fingers lightly under the base, unseen, taking most of the weight. He drinks, bangs the cup down and beams. He did it himself.

That is how we eat our bread. We earned the salary, chose the shop, cooked the meal. All true, at the level of the child's hands. Underneath, one commentator traces the chain. Allah drove the clouds and sent down the water. He revived the earth by it and brought out every kind of fruit as provision for His servants. Not one link in that chain answers to us.

This is where the ego shrinks. The proud claim 'I feed myself' cannot survive a single failed harvest. Yet Allah does not hold this over us. He feeds and is not fed (6:14). He wants no provision from us, and no food (51:57). Like the mother's hidden fingers, His care asks nothing back. The huwa is not there to belittle you. It is there so you know whose hand is under the cup.

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.