Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 21 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:21

أَمَّنْ هَـٰذَا ٱلَّذِى يَرْزُقُكُمْ إِنْ أَمْسَكَ رِزْقَهُۥ ۚ بَل لَّجُّوا۟ فِى عُتُوٍّ وَنُفُورٍ

“Or who is it that could provide for you if He withheld His provision? But they have persisted in insolence and aversion.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The second unanswerable question asks who would feed you if He stopped, and the sentence leaves the answer blank on purpose.

A reflection

The miller owns everything except the water

A watermill is a serious piece of property. The wheel, the pit, the shaft, the gearing, the stones dressed by hand every few weeks, the sack hoist, the bins, the bolter. A miller can spend his life on it and leave it to his son, and he owns every part of it. He does not own one drop of the water.

In a dry August the river drops and the wheel turns slowly and then stops. Nothing has broken. Everything he built is exactly as he left it. The mill is simply an expensive building full of stationary iron. Nothing in it, or in him, can produce a river.

That is the position the question puts you in, and the word it uses for provision has a precise picture under it. The first hearers knew it from the army. A commander provided his troops by handing out rations, month by month, on the day. A bird provides for its chick by dropping food into its mouth. One such payment was a single issue of the ration. So provision is not a possession. It is an allowance, released on a schedule by somebody else.

The ego has a specific way of mishandling this, and it is almost never arrogance in the loud sense. It is the quiet conversion of a wage into an achievement. My income. My clients. My harvest. All of that may be true as a description of who did the work. None of it touches the question of who is releasing the ration. The miller dressed the stones. The river is not in the deeds.

And the Name governing the whole passage is the Merciful. The river has not stopped. You have had this month's issue and are holding it as though it were capital.

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.