Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 13 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:13

وَأَسِرُّوا۟ قَوْلَكُمْ أَوِ ٱجْهَرُوا۟ بِهِۦٓ ۖ إِنَّهُۥ عَلِيمٌۢ بِذَاتِ ٱلصُّدُورِ

“And conceal your speech or publicize it; indeed, He is Knowing of that within the breasts.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He knows what the chest is carrying before any tongue has translated it, so whispering and shouting are the same transaction.

A reflection

What your chest is carrying

The Arabic here is stranger than any translation can be. It does not say He knows what is in the breasts. It says He is Knowing of dhāt al-ṣudūr, the owner of the breasts, the thing the chest has.

One commentary explains the idiom exactly. It is the same construction, he says, by which a woman's unborn child is called dhā baṭnihā, the one of her belly. So the phrase treats your inner life as something you are carrying, the way a body carries what has not yet been born.

A shepherd handling a ewe in February will tell you how many lambs she has in her and roughly when they are due. He does not open her. He has his hands on the flank and forty winters of hands before that.

And this is where the ayah refuses to be polite. Another commentary puts it as knowledge of what is in the breasts before the tongues translate it. The tongue is described as a translator, and a translator always arrives after the original.

Sit with how much of a life is built on that gap. Most self-respect is privately subsidised. We are decent in what we say, and we keep an unaudited room where the real opinions live. The resentment of a brother, the small pleasure at someone's failure, the story in which we behaved well. Pride cannot survive without that room. It is where the flattering account is kept.

Someone will ask why God would need to know any of it, and whether this is not simply surveillance. Read the next ayah before answering. He is not inspecting a stranger's house. He made the chest, and He made the capacity for secrecy that is in it. One commentator has Him say it plainly. I created the secret in the heart, so shall I not know what is in the hearts of My servants?

Nothing is added to Him by knowing. What is taken from you is a hiding place you never actually had.

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.