An-Naml · Makki · ayah 64 of 93

An-Naml 27:64

أَمَّن يَبْدَؤُا۟ ٱلْخَلْقَ ثُمَّ يُعِيدُهُۥ وَمَن يَرْزُقُكُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ وَٱلْأَرْضِ ۗ أَءِلَـٰهٌ مَّعَ ٱللَّهِ ۚ قُلْ هَاتُوا۟ بُرْهَـٰنَكُمْ إِن كُنتُمْ صَـٰدِقِينَ

“Is He [not best] who begins creation and then repeats it and who provides for you from the heaven and earth? Is there a deity with Allāh? Say, "Produce your proof, if you should be truthful."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The last of the five questions ends with a challenge, not a verdict: whoever stands beside Allah, lay your proof on the table.

A reflection

Nobody here has ever begun anything

At a copyright hearing, two musicologists sit with headphones and score sheets. A chart-topping song is on trial. Its writer swears the melody came to her in the shower. The expert for the other side plays four older songs, one after another. The same rising phrase turns up in each, a little altered.

Nobody in the room is lying. Every tune is built from tunes that came before it. That is the ceiling of human making. We combine, arrange and refine. We do not begin.

The ayah opens on the one thing no musician, engineer or poet has ever done: yabdaʾu al-khalq, He begins creation. A major commentary explains it as bringing creation into being with no prior source, originating it without a pattern.

The lexicons keep a picture for this root. A well dug fresh in untouched ground, where no one had ever dug, was a badīʾ. Every other well had an earlier digger. This one had none.

Here the ego gets its true measure, which is not nothing. Our proudest originality is a rearrangement of what was given. Even the mind that rearranges was not self-made. The ayah does not insult human craft. It sets it beside the only real beginning and lets us see the scale.

Then comes something stranger. A Lord who began everything might be expected to demand applause. This ayah ends instead by handing over the floor. Qul hātū burhānakum: say, bring your proof. One who needed praise would silence his rivals. This one invites them to the table and asks them to lay down their evidence.

That is not the conduct of vanity. Vanity cannot bear examination. The One who began creation asks to be examined, because the examining is for the examiner's sake. He loses nothing if no one ever looks.

So the songwriter may keep her credit for the arrangement. Arranging is a gift too. But the first beginning of anything was never hers, nor anyone's but His.

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.