Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 85 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:85

وَنَحْنُ أَقْرَبُ إِلَيْهِ مِنكُمْ وَلَـٰكِن لَّا تُبْصِرُونَ

“And We [i.e., Our angels] are nearer to him than you, but you do not see -”

Saheeh International

Essence

The nearest person in the room is told he is not the nearest, and the word for nearness is also the word for kinship.

A reflection

You are the nearest in the room and you are not

A shareholder who has held the stock for thirty years can discover something in one letter. The register is kept somewhere he has never been, by people he has never met. His relationship to the thing he owns has always run through them. Nothing about his holding was false. His sense of proximity was.

This ayah does that to the one relationship nobody questions.

In the previous ayah there is a room full of people looking. In this one they are told, in the middle of their looking, that somebody else is closer.

And the sentence is comparative. Not: We are near. Nearer to him than you.

There is nowhere for human self-importance to stand after that line, and it is worth being specific about which self-importance. Not wealth, not status. The pride of relation. The wife of forty years, the son who flew in, the friend who knew him before anyone. Every one of them has a claim, and every claim is real, and the sentence is addressed to exactly them.

The commentaries divide on what the nearness means, and the division is itself instructive. Some read it as nearness in knowledge, power and sight. You know nothing of his state but what you can see of its hardness. You do not reach its reality or its causes, and you cannot lift any of it. Others read it as the messengers who take his soul being nearer to him than you are.

The ayah states the nearness and does not explain it, and that is where we leave it too.

What it plainly takes away is the one thing the people in the chair were holding on to. They were not the closest thing to him in the world.

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.