Az-Zukhruf · Makki · ayah 14 of 89

Az-Zukhruf 43:14

وَإِنَّآ إِلَىٰ رَبِّنَا لَمُنقَلِبُونَ

“And indeed we, to our Lord, will [surely] return."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every journey ends with the same sentence: we are turning back to our Lord, so the small trip is a rehearsal for the great one.

A reflection

The magicians' sentence in a traveller's mouth

These words have been spoken before, in a far more dramatic place. When Pharaoh's magicians saw the truth and believed, he threatened to cut off their hands and feet and crucify them. Their answer was almost exactly this sentence. We are returning to our Lord (7:125). In another surah: no harm; we are returning to our Lord (26:50).

Those were the words of people facing death for their faith, minutes after they had found it. They held nothing back. Their whole life had just been turned over, and their answer to the threat was: then we go home sooner.

Now the same words are taught here for something ordinary. Climbing onto a camel. Stepping onto a boat. The phrase of martyrs becomes the phrase of every traveller.

That is a striking choice. It means the ordinary journey is meant to carry a trace of the extraordinary one. Every time you set out, you say what the magicians said with Pharaoh's executioners in front of them. You are not facing a tyrant. But you are facing the same truth: wherever this road goes, its last stop is with Him.

There is courage folded into that. The magicians could face Pharaoh because they had settled where they were going. The traveller who says these words every day is practising the same settledness, in small doses, so that it is there when it is needed.

Most of us will never stand before a Pharaoh. But all of us will one day face something we cannot steer. It helps to have said the sentence a thousand times before then, on buses and motorways and station platforms. By then it will not be a new thought. It will be home.

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.