Ar-Rum · Makki · ayah 23 of 60

Ar-Rum 30:23

وَمِنْ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ مَنَامُكُم بِٱلَّيْلِ وَٱلنَّهَارِ وَٱبْتِغَآؤُكُم مِّن فَضْلِهِۦٓ ۚ إِنَّ فِى ذَٰلِكَ لَـَٔايَـٰتٍ لِّقَوْمٍ يَسْمَعُونَ

“And of His signs is your sleep by night and day and your seeking of His bounty. Indeed in that are signs for a people who listen.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every night the whole world goes still and every morning it goes seeking, and both, says Allah, are signs for anyone willing to listen.

A reflection

The only One who never goes still

The Arabic root of manām, sleep, means stillness: movement that has stopped. Sleep is its first picture, but the Arabs used it widely. The wind 'slept' when it dropped. The sea 'slept' when it calmed. A market 'slept' when trade went slack, and an anklet 'slept' when it fell silent.

Read the ayah with that picture. Every night, across a whole hemisphere, things go still. Shops close their shutters. Ports quieten. Billions of people who spent the day arguing, deciding and insisting lie down and stop. The strongest person on earth goes as limp as a child.

Picture a hotel night porter at four in the morning. He sits at the front desk of a building full of sleeping guests, the only one awake. He feels, half-seriously, that he is guarding all of them. Then his chin drops, and for ten minutes the guardian is asleep too. Nobody noticed. The building did not fall.

That is the quiet humiliation the ayah offers the ego, every night, without fail. However important you are by day, you cannot delegate your sleep. You cannot keep watch over your own breathing. For several hours, you are kept, not keeping.

Then set beside it the description of Allah in Ayat al-Kursi: 'Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him' (2:255). Everything in the root of manām stops eventually: wind, sea, market, anklet, person. One alone does not. The night your sleep comes, His watching does not pause for a second.

Why point this out at all? Not because Allah needs our awe. A sign is a kindness to the one who reads it. The person who knows they are kept each night lies down differently. They lie down without the arrogance of thinking the world depends on them, and without the fear that nobody is watching.

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.