Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 19 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:19

أَوَلَمْ يَرَوْا۟ إِلَى ٱلطَّيْرِ فَوْقَهُمْ صَـٰٓفَّـٰتٍ وَيَقْبِضْنَ ۚ مَا يُمْسِكُهُنَّ إِلَّا ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنُ ۚ إِنَّهُۥ بِكُلِّ شَىْءٍۭ بَصِيرٌ

“Do they not see the birds above them with wings outspread and [sometimes] folded in? None holds them [aloft] except the Most Merciful. Indeed He is, of all things, Seeing.”

Saheeh International

Essence

A bird with its wings open over your head is standing on nothing, and the Name given for what holds it there is the Merciful.

A reflection

Standing on nothing at all

When a stone arch is built, it is built on timber. A carpenter makes the curved frame first and the masons lay the stones over it. The whole thing is held by wood until the last stone goes in. Then comes the day they strike the centring. The timber is knocked out from underneath, and for a moment nobody speaks. The arch is now standing on nothing except the relationship between its own stones.

That is as close as building gets to what is happening over your head all day.

A heavy body is in the air with no prop under it, no cable above it, and nothing underneath but distance. The commentaries put it plainly. In the open air, what holds them is nothing but the Merciful, by what He has subjected to them of the air. The bird is not resting on anything. It is being held.

We think of support as something beneath us, because everything we have ever built needs a footing. Our whole sense of security is architectural: savings beneath the spending, a contract beneath the work, a reputation beneath the name. The ego is the part of us that keeps score of how much of that footing it laid. It survives on the belief that being held up is the same as having built a base.

A bird has no base. It is the most ordinary thing in the sky. It is permanently in the condition we spend our lives avoiding, and it is not frightened, and it does not fall.

Which means the thing we are proud of arranging was never the thing keeping us up. Everything you have under you is itself in the air. The arch is standing, and the centring was struck away long before you arrived.

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.