Ad-Dukhan · Makki · ayah 31 of 59

Ad-Dukhan 44:31

مِن فِرْعَوْنَ ۚ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ عَالِيًا مِّنَ ٱلْمُسْرِفِينَ

“From Pharaoh. Indeed, he was a haughty one among the transgressors.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The humiliating torment the Israelites were saved from had a name, Pharaoh, a man who climbed over people and poured himself past every limit.

A reflection

High, but in the wrong direction

Innahu kāna ʿāliyan: indeed, he was high.

The root ʿ-l-w has one picture, and the lexicons say nothing in it strays from that picture. Height. The top of a mountain is al-ʿalyāʾ. The upper part of a spear is its ʿāliya. Even the everyday word for come, taʿāla, first meant come up to me.

So why is height a charge against Pharaoh? The commentaries answer with care. One says plainly that this is not the height of praise. It is height in excess, the same height named in another surah: Pharaoh rose high in the land (28:4). Another gloss adds a sharper reading. His height was lifting himself above the worship of Allah.

There is rising, and there is rising over. A mountain rises and shelters the valley from the wind. A tyrant rises by standing on the valley.

A new head of department arrives at an open-plan office. In his first week he has his desk moved onto a low platform at the front. Nobody asked for it. Everyone sees it. From then on, every conversation with him begins by looking up.

That platform is small, a few inches of plywood. Pharaoh's was a kingdom, an army and the claim, in another surah, to be their lord most high (79:24). But the movement is the same. Height pursued for its own sake needs somebody underneath it.

The ayah does not say he was tall, or rich, or gifted. It says he was ʿāliyan, and then at once, mina al-musrifīn: one of those who go past the limit. Height and excess are spoken in one breath. The lesson for us is not that rising is wrong. It is that rising which needs others to be lower is already a kind of overflowing.

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.