Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 64 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:64

ءَأَنتُمْ تَزْرَعُونَهُۥٓ أَمْ نَحْنُ ٱلزَّٰرِعُونَ

“Is it you who makes it grow, or are We the grower?”

Saheeh International

Essence

One lexicon says plainly that this growing belongs to divine acts and not to human ones, which is the whole of the question.

A reflection

The one act nobody has ever performed

A seed opens underground, where nobody has ever watched it happen. You can dig one up at the right hour and look at the split coat and the white root. You will have seen the result. The swelling itself takes place out of sight, in the dark, in a thing that was dry and inert in your hand a fortnight ago.

The lexicons are unusually firm about this word. One gives the root as making a thing grow, and reports that some narrowed it to casting seed in the ground. Another will not have the narrowing: this growing, it says, belongs to divine acts and not to human ones.

So the question in this ayah has only one answer, and the lexicons give it before the commentaries do.

One commentary spells out the reply the ayah expects. Are you the ones who make that seed grow, or are We? And the answer: rather You, our Lord, You are the One who grows it and brings it out, until it becomes a crop. It then reaches for another ayah to close the matter: indeed Allah is the Splitter of the grain and the date-stone (6:95). Nobody, it says, can split this grain until it becomes a plant, nor this stone until it becomes a palm, except Allah.

And now the thing this ayah does to a working man's pride, which is specific and permanent once seen.

You say my crop, my company, my results, my figures. Every one of those sentences is doing the grammar of this ayah backwards. The arrogance is not in working hard, and the Quran never criticises the work. It is in the pronoun.

The lexicons keep one sour cousin in this family of words, and it is worth having. A zarrāʿ is a talebearer, the man who sows grudges in the hearts of friends. That, it turns out, is the one sowing a human being can do entirely by himself.

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.