As-Saffat · Makki · ayah 158 of 182

As-Saffat 37:158

وَجَعَلُوا۟ بَيْنَهُۥ وَبَيْنَ ٱلْجِنَّةِ نَسَبًا ۚ وَلَقَدْ عَلِمَتِ ٱلْجِنَّةُ إِنَّهُمْ لَمُحْضَرُونَ

“And they have made [i.e., claimed] between Him and the jinn a lineage, but the jinn have already known that they [who made such claims] will be brought [to punishment].”

Saheeh International

Essence

They drew a family line between Allah and the hidden beings, yet those very beings know the claimants will be brought to account.

A reflection

A claim of kinship is a claim of kind

The first hearers knew nasab well. It was the line that tied a man to his father and grandfather, and sideways to his cousins. The lexicons say the root means one thing joined to another. They give it a small, exact picture: the naysab, a straight track, or a line of ants following one another without a break. Each one touches the one in front. That is a lineage. These senses are established in the classical dictionaries.

One lexicon adds a detail that matters here. Nisba, from the same root, is also used of two quantities of the same kind, each matched to the other. You cannot set a length in proportion to a smell. Things must be alike before they can be related.

So the claim in this ayah was larger than it sounded. They have made between Him and the jinna a kinship. One linguistic commentary spells it out. By calling the angels His daughters, they gave Allah and the angels a shared kind, a family resemblance. They put the Creator in the same line of ants as His creatures, only further up the track.

Picture a tour of a stately home. A visitor stops in front of the portraits and laughs. He shares the family's surname, he tells the guide. Is he related? She is kind about it. A name on a doorbell, she says, is not a place on the chart. The line runs through particular people, one after another, and his name is not on it.

The Quran's answer goes further than the guide's. It is not that the idolaters had the wrong branch. It is that there is no chart. Allah is not the first ant on the track. There is nothing like Him (42:11). Every creature, angels included, stands on the other side of a gap that no lineage crosses.

This is why the very next ayah is a glorification. Before any argument is needed, the claim has already confused the Maker with the made.

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.