Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 20 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:20

أَمَّنْ هَـٰذَا ٱلَّذِى هُوَ جُندٌ لَّكُمْ يَنصُرُكُم مِّن دُونِ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ۚ إِنِ ٱلْكَـٰفِرُونَ إِلَّا فِى غُرُورٍ

“Or who is it that could be an army for you to aid you other than the Most Merciful? The disbelievers are not but in delusion.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Point at the force that would defend you if the Merciful did not; the word for what you are living in means a mirage.

A reflection

Two hundred thousand and not one of them yours

A beekeeper with thirty hives will say my bees. There are perhaps two hundred thousand of them. He has built every box they live in, fed them through two bad springs, read their mood from the hum before he lifts a lid. He cannot make a single one of them fly. He cannot order one out of the hive in the rain. The whole apparent force is on loan, hourly, from something he does not operate.

That is what the word in this question means. One lexicon makes the root gathering and backing: a man's jund are his helpers, massed behind him. One explanation links it to stony, broken ground, for the hardness of a body of troops. Every kind of creature can be a jund of its own.

And the question is not whether you have one. The question is to point at it. Who is this, that is a force for you, that will help you apart from the Merciful.

What the ego does with numbers is quietly remarkable. It converts the size of what is around us into a statement about ourselves. The team, the following, the family name, the money that stands between us and a bad year. None of it is imaginary. All of it is on loan hourly from something we do not operate, and pride consists almost entirely in forgetting the word hourly.

The Name used here is the Merciful, which makes the question gentler than it first sounds. He is not daring you to find a rival. He is pointing out that the help you already have is coming from mercy rather than from your arrangements. The beekeeper's bees fly because of something no beekeeper supplies. Noticing that is not a humiliation. It is the end of a very tiring piece of bookkeeping.

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.