An-Najm · Makki · ayah 22 of 62

An-Najm 53:22

تِلْكَ إِذًا قِسْمَةٌ ضِيزَىٰٓ

“That, then, is an unjust division.[1570]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Keep the best for yourself and hand God the part you would never accept, and the Quran names it in four words: a crooked share.

A reflection

A share docked at the dividing

Three flatmates order one large pizza on a Friday night. The one holding the knife cuts it. Somehow his three slices are wide at the crust, and the other six are thin wedges. Nobody says anything. Everybody notices.

That silent noticing is exactly what the word ḍīzā carries. The lexicons give its root a picture from the moment of dividing. Ḍāzahu ḥaqqahu: he docked someone's due. He shaved their portion and kept back the rest. An old Arabic verse warns a man who stays away from the camp: if you are absent, your share of the spoils will be docked, and your nose rubbed in the dust. A pre-Islamic poet complained that a tribe had judged crookedly, 'making the head like the tail'.

The commentaries collect the senses gathered in this one rare word. A division that is unjust. One that is short and incomplete. One that is crooked, bent out of true. One that is lopsided, not level. Every one of them is a picture of a hand on a knife.

Now notice what the ayah places on the dividing table. The idol-worshippers claimed that the angels, and the goddesses al-Lāt, al-ʿUzzā and Manāt, were daughters of God. Yet they themselves prized sons and grieved at the birth of daughters. So the previous ayah asks: is the male for you and the female for Him? And this ayah gives the verdict on that arrangement. It is a qisma, a share-out. It is ḍīzā, docked.

The first hearers knew a qisma from the spoils, the water ration, the inheritance. They knew the feeling of being the one whose share was shaved. Here the Quran turns that feeling round. You would never stand for this if the knife were in someone else's hand. And this is the share you have cut for your Lord.

The picture is small and domestic on purpose. Injustice rarely looks like a crime. It looks like a slightly wider slice.

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.