Al-Qasas · Makki · ayah 40 of 88

Al-Qasas 28:40

فَأَخَذْنَـٰهُ وَجُنُودَهُۥ فَنَبَذْنَـٰهُمْ فِى ٱلْيَمِّ ۖ فَٱنظُرْ كَيْفَ كَانَ عَـٰقِبَةُ ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ

“So We took him and his soldiers and threw them into the sea.[1104] So see how was the end of the wrongdoers.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Allah seized Pharaoh and his army and tossed them into the sea, then tells the reader to look closely at how wrongdoers end.

A reflection

An army held in one palm

Fa-akhadhnāhu wa-junūdahu fa-nabadhnāhum fī al-yamm: so We seized him and his soldiers, and tossed them into the sea.

Several commentaries pause on how small this sentence makes them. Pharaoh's army was vast. Yet the wording, one says, likens them to a few pebbles. Someone scoops them up in a palm and throws them into the water. Another describes it as Allah taking them, for all their numbers, in one hand and casting them away.

They set it beside other ayat with the same effect. The earth and the mountains lifted and crushed with a single blow (69:14). The whole earth in His grip on the Day of Resurrection, the heavens rolled up in His right hand (39:67). The point of such images, one commentary says, is that anything within His power, however huge, is small beside His power.

A boy stands at the waterline and scoops up a fistful of shingle. He flings it into the waves without watching where it lands. To him it is nothing. To an ant on that beach, it was a landslide.

That is the scale the ayah asks us to feel. The tower, the soldiers, the decades of fear in Egypt: one handful.

Is it arrogance for Allah to describe His power like this? Arrogance is a creature claiming a size it does not have. Allah describes the size He has, so that creatures stop inflating their own. He gains nothing from our hearing it. We gain proportion.

The ego that reads this sentence honestly shrinks, and finds relief in shrinking. Whatever towers over you today, however powerful, is still inside that palm.

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.