Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 23 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:23

قُلْ هُوَ ٱلَّذِىٓ أَنشَأَكُمْ وَجَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمْعَ وَٱلْأَبْصَـٰرَ وَٱلْأَفْـِٔدَةَ ۖ قَلِيلًا مَّا تَشْكُرُونَ

“Say, "It is He who has produced you and made for you hearing and vision and hearts [i.e., intellect]; little are you grateful."”

Saheeh International

Essence

He raised you out of nothing and issued three instruments, and the closing phrase says, in Arabic idiom, that none was used on Him.

A reflection

Cast with a voice you did not choose

A bell is made in loam. The mould is built up by hand, the cope lowered over the core, the bronze poured in one go. Everything about the sound it will make for three hundred years is decided in that pour. The strike note, the hum, the tierce, before any human being has heard it. Afterwards the founder has one crude remedy: he can cut metal away. He cannot add any.

Something of that is in the verb that opens this line. The lexicons put its whole root under rising. Cloud does this when it comes up over the horizon and shows itself. The first sight of it was said to look like spread cloth. The young are called by a word from this root, and a boy who has come up to a man's height. To raise a house is to begin its building. The verb is not simply making. It is bringing something up, stage by stage, by one hand.

So you were brought up, like weather coming over a hill, and in the same act you were issued with three instruments. Hearing. Sight. Hearts.

The ego's position here is almost comic once it is stated plainly. We take enormous pride in our judgement, and judgement is entirely a matter of what these three instruments deliver. A person is vain about his taste. That is an eye he did not design, reporting to a mind he did not build, on signals from an ear he never specified. Every opinion he has ever been proud of came in through equipment issued before he could ask for anything.

There is no humiliation in that, only accuracy. One commentary calls this the second proof in the passage of His complete power. The first was a bird held in the air. The second is you, reading this, with three instruments running.

The full entry has 7 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.