Ya-Sin · Makki · ayah 72 of 83

Ya-Sin 36:72

وَذَلَّلْنَـٰهَا لَهُمْ فَمِنْهَا رَكُوبُهُمْ وَمِنْهَا يَأْكُلُونَ

“And We have tamed them for them, so some of them they ride, and some of them they eat.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The animal kneels to be loaded, and even to the knife, because a softness was put into it that no human trainer created.

A reflection

The softness was put there

Modern people like to speak of humanity's conquest of nature. We tamed the wild beasts, the story goes. We bred them, trained them and harnessed them to our will. It is told as a triumph of human cleverness.

This ayah tells the same story with a different subject. And We subdued them for them. Not they tamed them. We did.

The verb is dhallalnā, from a root whose first picture is soft ground. One lexicon explains that the Arabs paired it with ʿizz, might, whose root is hard, firm earth. Dhull is its yielding opposite. A riding animal was dhalūl when it had been broken in. A path trodden smooth by many feet was dhull. And the same root names fruit hanging low within reach.

One commentator spells out how far the yielding goes. We made them easy, he says, not resisting their owners in anything they want of them, even slaughter. Another adds that without this subjection, riding would not exist at all. Meat would come only through the labour and chance of hunting.

Put that beside the boast of conquest. People have certainly trained animals. But they did not put into the camel, the cow or the sheep the disposition to be trained. They found it there. Every herder and breeder in history has worked with a softness that was placed in these creatures before anyone arrived.

That is a gentle blow to human pride. We did not subdue nature. We were handed the parts of it that had been made willing. The proper response to that is not a trophy. It is a bowed head.

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.