Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 22 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:22

أَفَمَن يَمْشِى مُكِبًّا عَلَىٰ وَجْهِهِۦٓ أَهْدَىٰٓ أَمَّن يَمْشِى سَوِيًّا عَلَىٰ صِرَٰطٍ مُّسْتَقِيمٍ

“Then is one who walks fallen on his face better guided or one who walks erect on a straight path?”

Saheeh International

Essence

One man walks head down, stumbling on ground that does not deserve the name of a road; the other walks upright on one that does.

A reflection

Who decided you walk upright

A watchmaker spends forty years with his hands inside things the width of a hair. Then at sixty, over about eight months, a tremor arrives. Nothing happened. He did not drop anything or injure himself. One morning the tweezers will not go where he puts them. He understands, too late to use it, that four decades of steadiness had never been a possession. It was a condition he was kept in.

That is the thing this ayah is standing on, and a hadith in both Sahihs makes it explicit. A man asked how a denier could be gathered walking on his face. The answer was a question. Is not the One who made him walk on two legs in this world able to make him walk on his face. The transmitter of that report could not keep quiet. He added, by the might of our Lord, yes.

What the answer does is refuse the premise. The man was treating walking upright as the normal state of affairs and being face-down as the strange thing requiring explanation. The Prophet turned it over. Both are postures He assigns.

Human pride lives almost entirely in the vertical. We say someone stands tall, holds his head up, looks people in the eye. It is our oldest metaphor for dignity, and we have quietly taken the credit for it. Nobody has ever decided to be upright. You were put at that angle and you have been held there, hour after hour, through every year you spent assuming it was you.

So the ayah is not insulting one group and flattering another. It points out that one of the two postures is on loan to everybody in the room. Then it asks which one you are using the loan for.

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.