Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 14 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:14

أَلَا يَعْلَمُ مَنْ خَلَقَ وَهُوَ ٱللَّطِيفُ ٱلْخَبِيرُ

“Does He who created not know,[1716] while He is the Subtle, the Aware?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The whole argument is four words long and takes the form of a question nobody can answer in their own favour.

A reflection

Does the maker not know?

Hand a violin maker an instrument he built forty years ago, in a room with eleven others on the bench. He will not look for the label. He turns it over, taps the back twice, and tells you what he left the thickness at. Then where he went too thin near the bass bar, and that somebody else reset the neck.

He is not remembering. He is the one who put his thumb on the inside of it.

That is the shape of this ayah, and the argument is complete in four words. Does He not know, who created?

One commentary spells out what is being answered. Allah created the secret itself, so how should the secret be hidden from Him? He has Him say it plainly. I made the secret in the heart, shall I then not know what is in the hearts of My servants? And the grammarians add that the Creator must be knowing of what He created and of what He creates, since the two cannot come apart.

Now set that against how everyone actually lives, including people who would never say any of this out loud.

We behave as though the maker could be unaware of the made. Not by deciding it, but by never finishing the thought. The capacity to want a thing badly. The knack of self-justification. The weakness you have carried since you were nineteen. Every one of those was issued. You did not design the mechanism you are quietly using against Him.

Someone will ask whether a God who knows everything is not simply vain, or anxious, or watching for a slip. The ayah closes that from the inside. He is not inspecting a stranger's cabinet. He is turning over His own work, and the two names that follow say how He does it: finely, and from within.

Pride needs a place where the maker is absent. There has never been one.

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.