Ali 'Imran · Madani · ayah 163 of 200

Ali 'Imran 3:163

هُمْ دَرَجَـٰتٌ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ ۗ وَٱللَّهُ بَصِيرٌۢ بِمَا يَعْمَلُونَ

“They are [varying] degrees in the sight of Allāh, and Allāh is Seeing of whatever they do.”

Saheeh International

Essence

They are degrees with Allah, and Allah sees through and through what they do.

A reflection

The order nobody wrote down

In one office nothing is written down, and everybody knows the order. Who is asked first. Who gets interrupted. Whose idea comes back a week later in somebody else's mouth.

A pecking order is the one thing people build without being asked to.

This ayah agrees that the sorting is real, and then moves where it is kept. They are degrees — with Allah. One commentary glosses that phrase as meaning in His knowledge and in His judgement. Not in the room. Not on a wall. Not in anybody's estimate, including your own.

And then the sentence names the One doing the grading, with a word that is worth slowing down for.

The lexicons give its root as a thing becoming clear. The Arabs said a puppy baṣṣara when it first opened its eyes. A baṣīra was a spot of blood on the ground, which a hunter read to find where his wounded quarry had gone. That is established. So the grading is not done from a report. It is done by sight, and by the kind of sight that reads a trace and knows the whole animal from it.

Here is where the ego loses something, and it is not the top place.

Most of us are not trying to be first. We are trying to know where we stand, and to find ourselves respectably placed. That is the quiet pride, and it is more durable than vanity, because it survives failure. A man can be humble about his achievements and still keep a private league table. In it he is comfortably mid-table, and definitely above three named people.

This ayah does not adjust his position. It removes the table from his keeping.

So does a Lord who sorts people into degrees and then announces that He is watching want a hierarchy with Himself at the summit? Look at who the degrees run between. Not between Him and them. Among themselves, according to what they did. And the seeing was not acquired. He was baṣīr before anybody acted, so nothing in the record is news to Him.

A man who needs an order acknowledged announces it to people who can confirm it. This was said to people whose dead had only just been buried, who were working out among themselves who had stood and who had run.

So write down your own private table, honestly, with the names. Then notice that you are not its keeper, and never were.

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.