Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 69 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:69

ءَأَنتُمْ أَنزَلْتُمُوهُ مِنَ ٱلْمُزْنِ أَمْ نَحْنُ ٱلْمُنزِلُونَ

“Is it you who brought it down from the clouds, or is it We who bring it down?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The cloud is named by the word the Arabs used for an open-handed man, and whose child they called the new moon.

A reflection

They had made that cloud their own boast

A brewery puts its name on the water. The label says the spring, the hill, the depth of the borehole. All of it is true and none of it is theirs. They drilled down to something that was already arriving.

The ayah does something sharper than pointing that out. It uses the word the Arabs had turned into their own compliment.

The cloud here is not called by the ordinary word for cloud. It is called the muzn. The lexicons record that from this word they built a verb meaning to give freely, that is, to behave like that cloud. One commentary quotes a line of their poetry. We are like the water of the muzn. No dullard in our stock, and no miser among us.

So they boasted of being like the rain. That was the highest thing they could say about a family.

And then the ayah takes the word out of their mouths and asks: did you bring it down.

There is no way to answer that and keep the boast. The whole value of the comparison was that the cloud is extravagant and asks for nothing. If the generous man is like the cloud, and the cloud is not his, the boast collapses. He was proudest of borrowed language about somebody else's act.

Pride is almost always like this. It is not usually invention. It is attribution. A man does genuinely give, and genuinely well, and the giving is real. What is false is the small internal movement that makes him the origin of it.

And the correction is not to stop giving, or to give sourly. It is to keep the sentence honest. The water came through me. The label is mine. The spring is not.

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.