Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 65 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:65

لَوْ نَشَآءُ لَجَعَلْنَـٰهُ حُطَـٰمًا فَظَلْتُمْ تَفَكَّهُونَ

“If We willed, We could make it [dry] debris, and you would remain in wonder,[1615]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The threat is not a failed sowing but a ripe crop crumbled, and what it produces in these men is a day of talk.

A reflection

Two words standing between you and the harvest

An oast house dries a crop of hops over a slow fire for a night and a day. The kiln has one damper. If it sticks shut while the men sleep, the heat climbs. In the morning the whole floor is a brown dust that will not make a bale. Nothing has been stolen. Nothing has been attacked. A single small thing was simply not held open.

The ayah does not say: if We willed, nothing would come up. It says: if We willed, We would make it crumbs. One commentary is precise about where in the season that falls. We grew it by Our kindness and left it standing for you by Our mercy. And if We willed, We would have dried it before it levelled and before it was fit to cut.

So the power named here is not the power to withhold. It is the power to let a thing come all the way up. Fill the ear, lean in the wind, be counted and promised and sold forward. And then be dust.

That is the sentence that shrinks a man. Pride lives on the stretch between the work and the yield. That is where it can plant a flag. I prepared this ground, I chose this seed, I was up at four. All of that is true, and none of it reaches the week before harvest. In that week every grower in the world is a spectator.

Stand at a field gate in late summer, unable to do one useful thing, and you have met this ayah. Nobody who has felt it calls it a lesson about farming. It is a lesson about the two words at the front: if We willed.

The mercy is in what the words quietly report. The crop is standing. The damper has been held open for you every night of your life, and you did not know it was there.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.