Al-Qasas · Makki · ayah 5 of 88

Al-Qasas 28:5

وَنُرِيدُ أَن نَّمُنَّ عَلَى ٱلَّذِينَ ٱسْتُضْعِفُوا۟ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَنَجْعَلَهُمْ أَئِمَّةً وَنَجْعَلَهُمُ ٱلْوَٰرِثِينَ

“And We wanted to confer favor upon those who were oppressed in the land and make them leaders and make them inheritors”

Saheeh International

Essence

While Pharaoh crushed them, Allah was already willing to favour the weakened, and to make them leaders and heirs of all he held.

A reflection

His plans fill an ayah; His will fills one word

Read ayah 4 and ayah 5 together. Ayah 4 is full of Pharaoh. He exalted himself. He divided. He crushed. He killed. He kept alive. Every verb is his, and the sentence feels like a wall.

Then ayah 5 opens with two words: wa nurīdu, 'and We wish'. The subject changes, and everything Pharaoh built becomes the background.

The commentaries notice something in the grammar. The verb is in the present tense, though the events were long past. One reading takes it as a past scene painted as present. Another reading is more startling. It takes the clause as describing the same moment as ayah 4. Pharaoh is weakening them, and at that very time, We are willing to favour them.

One commentator raises the obvious objection. If Allah wills a thing, it happens; how can His will to rescue them sit alongside years of oppression? His answer is that the rescue was near, so the will is spoken as if it came with the oppression. A later commentator refines it. The will was present then; its fulfilment lay ahead.

Either way, the picture is humbling for every kind of pride. Pharaoh had an army, a priesthood and a nation's labour. He planned against one unborn child. And the whole of that apparatus is answered by a single verb of divine will.

Our own plans are smaller, but our arrogance about them is often the same. We think the outcome sits in our grip. This ayah loosens the fingers.

It also does something tender for the weakened. On the worst day in Egypt, a mother hid a newborn and a father was driven at the lowliest work. Even then, the decision for their rescue already existed. They could not see it. It was there.

A thoughtful reader might still ask whether announcing 'We wish to favour them' is a kind of self-advertisement. Rulers publicise their generosity because they need gratitude. Allah does not. He is the One free of all need, and it is people who are poor before Him (35:15).

Picture a father standing below his frightened daughter on a climbing wall. He calls up, 'I have got the rope.' He is not boasting. She needs to know whose hands hold it, so that she stops clinging to the rock. The announcement is for her sake, not his.

So it is here. The weakened needed to know whose will stood behind their rescue. Otherwise they might credit Pharaoh's change of mood, or their own cleverness, and miss the One who rescued them.

Whoever you are, and whatever is crushing you or tempting you to crush, remember the two words. And We wish.

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.