As-Saffat · Makki · ayah 125 of 182

As-Saffat 37:125

أَتَدْعُونَ بَعْلًا وَتَذَرُونَ أَحْسَنَ ٱلْخَـٰلِقِينَ

“Do you call upon Baʿl[1300] and leave the best of creators -”

Saheeh International

Essence

Ilyas sets side by side a made thing his people call 'lord' and the Best of all makers, whom they toss aside like a scrap.

A reflection

The best of all who make

Aḥsan al-khāliqīn, the Best of Creators. A narration-based commentary explains it as the best of anyone who is called a maker. A legal and linguistic commentary sharpens the point. It may mean the best of craftsmen, it says, because people craft but they do not create.

The contrast with Baal could hardly be stronger. The commentaries relay a description of the idol, introduced with it is said: a figure of gold, enormous, with four faces. Whatever its size, it was something people had made. Ilyas's people were bowing to a product of their own craft. They were leaving the One who made the craftsmen, the gold and the hands that shaped it.

The root kh-l-q has an established picture. A leatherworker spreads a hide and measures it before a single cut: this much for a water-skin, this much for a boot. That measuring is khalq. Humans do measure and cut. But they measure what they did not bring into being, with hands they did not design.

Picture a furniture designer at a trade fair. He tells a journalist that his new chair will change how people live. Behind him, a carpenter is planing a board of oak. The tree grew for eighty years in a forest neither of them planted. The designer's pride is not wrong because the chair is bad. It is wrong because it forgets where the oak came from.

The ego loves what it makes, and quietly begins to worship it: our buildings, our systems, our cleverness. This ayah sets every human making beside the One who makes from nothing, and the pride shrinks to its proper size.

Allah does not call Himself the best to win our applause; He needs nothing from us. He says it so we stop bowing to lesser makers, including ourselves.

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.