Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 98 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:98

إِذْ نُسَوِّيكُم بِرَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ

“When we equated you with the Lord of the worlds.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The worshippers name their error exactly: they had set created things level with the Lord of all the worlds, in love, reverence and obedience.

A reflection

A grey speck that wanted to be called sir

Hold the two halves of this ayah apart for a moment. On one side, "you": idols of stone and wood, or the people and spirits behind them. On the other, Rabb al-ʿālamīn, the Lord of the worlds. That title takes in every realm and every kind of being, all owned, all sustained, all brought to their full growth by Him. The confession is that someone once set these two on the same level.

Said aloud in the Fire, it sounds absurd. One classical writer asks how dust can be levelled with the Lord of lords. How can the one who is poor in his very being be set beside the One whose richness belongs to Him by nature?

Yet the ego performs this levelling daily, with itself as the idol. Picture a regional manager who insists his staff call him "sir" and sulks when a junior forgets. One evening his daughter shows him a satellite map. She zooms out from their street. His business park becomes a grey speck, then vanishes into a county, a coastline, a curve of the earth. And the earth is a speck in one of the worlds.

Nothing about that map is insulting. It is simply true. The pride that needs to be called "sir" survives only at street level, where the speck looks like a world.

The Quran's phrase works like that zoom. "Lord of the worlds" is not said to flatter Allah. He needs no flattery. It is said so that whatever we have quietly raised to His level, including our own will, can be seen at its real size. The reader is invited to zoom out now, voluntarily. The people in this ayah were zoomed out by force.

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.