Al-An'am · Makki · ayah 132 of 165

Al-An'am 6:132

وَلِكُلٍّ دَرَجَـٰتٌ مِّمَّا عَمِلُوا۟ ۚ وَمَا رَبُّكَ بِغَـٰفِلٍ عَمَّا يَعْمَلُونَ

“And for all are degrees [i.e., positions resulting] from what they have done. And your Lord is not unaware of what they do.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every deed sets a person on a step of their own, up or down, and not one of those steps goes unseen by your Lord.

A reflection

Ten thousand boxes, and not one without a number

At a large container port, the stacks rise five boxes high and run for a mile. A crane driver sits in her cab above them. Ask her for one particular box among ten thousand. She types a number and swings straight to it. Every box carries its own code.

The ayah closes: your Lord is not ghāfil of what they do. The lexicons give the root a desert picture. Open land with no waymarks was ghufl. So was a camel bearing no brand on its hide. Ghafla is the state of leaving something unmarked, as though nobody had noticed it. One classical commentary defines it as a thing slipping from you because you were busy with something else.

That is exactly how our own attention works. We notice one thing because we have stopped noticing another. A parent watching the toddler misses the pan boiling over. The ayah removes that limit from your Lord entirely. No deed of yours is an unbranded camel wandering the desert of His notice.

Here the ego needs to shrink. Pride enjoys anonymity when it does wrong and resents it when it does good. It whispers that nobody saw the shortcut. It sulks that nobody saw the kindness. Both whispers assume a watcher who can be busy elsewhere. There is no such gap with Him.

A fair question follows. Why would the Lord of everything attend to each small act? Does that suggest He needs our obedience, or our praise? The next ayah answers at once: your Lord is al-Ghanī, free of all need. He notices not because He gains, but because justice to every person depends on it. A record kept by One who needs nothing cannot be bribed or bent.

The crane driver can only find what someone labelled. Your Lord labels as He watches. Nothing you do today goes uncoded.

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.