Sad · Makki · ayah 5 of 88

Sad 38:5

أَجَعَلَ ٱلْـَٔالِهَةَ إِلَـٰهًا وَٰحِدًا ۖ إِنَّ هَـٰذَا لَشَىْءٌ عُجَابٌ

“Has he made the gods [only] one God? Indeed, this is a curious thing."”

Saheeh International

Essence

To men who had shared their needs out among many gods, one God for everything sounded absurd; the absurdity lay in how they measured Him.

A reflection

Can one God hear us all at once?

The chiefs' objection was not only about tradition. One early commentator records their exact puzzle: can one god hear all our needs at once? Another reports it as: how can one god be enough for the whole of creation?

It sounds like an honest question, and it lives on. We picture God like the busiest person we know. Think of a much-loved teacher at the school gate at quarter to nine. Forty parents want a word with her: a reading book, a lost coat, a worry about a friendship. She manages six before the bell rings. The rest go home unheard. However good she is, she has to choose.

One classical commentator diagnoses the mistake. These men measured the unseen by the seen. They had noticed that one worker cannot manage a great estate alone. So they assumed the world must need many gods, each guarding his own corner. Their gods were cut down to the size of their own limits.

That is the ego's oldest habit: making God in its own shape. Pride assumes that what is hard for me must be hard for Him.

Sahih Muslim reports a hadith qudsi that breaks the picture. Allah says: suppose the first of you and the last of you, humans and jinn, stood together on one plain. Suppose each asked of Me, and I gave every one of them what he asked. It would reduce what I have no more than a needle reduces the sea when dipped into it.

Is it vain, then, for Him to demand that He alone be worshipped? The same hadith answers that too. In it Allah tells His servants that they will never reach the point of harming Him, nor of benefiting Him. His oneness is not jealousy over something He needs. It is the plain fact that there is no one else to ask.

The humbling part is this. He hears every caller at once, and the one He is hearing now is you.

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.