Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 35 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:35

إِنَّآ أَنشَأْنَـٰهُنَّ إِنشَآءً

“Indeed, We have produced them [i.e., the women of Paradise] in a [new] creation”

Saheeh International

Essence

One verb is used twice over, so that nobody mistakes this for a repair job: a making, and truly a making.

A reflection

The one verb we have never once performed

Salt pans are the humblest industry in the world. A man opens a sluice and lets seawater onto a clay pan a few inches deep. Then he waits. Weeks later he walks out and rakes up a white crust, and the ledger calls him a salt producer. He produced nothing. He arranged a shallow puddle where the sun could do something he cannot do at all.

That is the whole of human making, and this ayah is built to say so. The verb comes first, then its own verbal noun behind it: We brought them into being, a bringing into being. Arabic uses that doubling to shut off every weaker reading. Not assembled. Not improved. Made.

Look at where the root lives in the language and the scale becomes clear. One lexicon puts the whole of it under rising. Cloud nashaʾa: it came up over the horizon and showed itself, and the first sight of it was said to look like spread cloth. Allah anshaʾa that cloud, which is to say He raised it. The young are the nashʾ, the ones coming up. Ships with their sails hauled up are munshaʾāt. To begin building a house is to anshaʾa it.

Now set your own achievements beside the word. Every one is a rearrangement of material you did not make. You used a mind you did not build, in a body you were handed. We cut and fit and polish. Not one person has ever brought a single thing up out of nothing.

The ego survives on a confusion between arranging and originating. Reading this ayah honestly dissolves it, and the dissolving is a relief. You are not responsible for existence. You were never even the salt-maker. You opened a sluice.

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.