Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 24 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:24

قُلْ هُوَ ٱلَّذِى ذَرَأَكُمْ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَإِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ

“Say, "It is He who has multiplied you throughout the earth, and to Him you will be gathered."”

Saheeh International

Essence

You were put here with the word for scattering seed, and you are collected with the word for a drought that drives everything in.

A reflection

Broadcast by hand across bare ground

Before drills, seed went on by hand. A man walked a measured line across bare ground with a seed-lip at his hip, throwing with a swing of the arm. The whole art was in the evenness. No two grains landed in the same place. None of them chose where it went. A fortnight later the field carried a green haze where there had been nothing standing at all.

That is the picture in the verb, and the lexicons are explicit about it. One gives the root two branches, and the second branch is seed. We sowed the land, they say, and the first crop up has its own name from this root. Another joins the branches under showing: He brought the creation out of nothing into plain sight. A third sense is a whiteness, the hoariness that shows first at the front of the head.

So you were sown. Not placed. Scattered, over the whole surface, by a hand that was working to a pattern you were never shown.

One commentary calls this the third proof in this stretch of the surah. The first was taken from the other creatures, the bird held in the air. The second from a man's faculties, hearing and sight and heart. This one is taken from the plain fact that you came into existence.

And that is where the ego runs out of material. Pride needs a position that was earned, and the position in question is where and when and as whom you exist. The country, the century, the family, the language your thoughts happen in. Every one of those is where the seed landed. A grain that came up well does not get to be proud of the throw.

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.