Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 26 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:26

قُلْ إِنَّمَا ٱلْعِلْمُ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ وَإِنَّمَآ أَنَا۠ نَذِيرٌ مُّبِينٌ

“Say, "The knowledge is only with Allāh, and I am only a clear warner."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Two restrictions in one short line: the knowledge is with Him alone, and the man carrying the message is nothing more than a plain warner.

A reflection

Everything about the bird except the one thing

A falconer can tell you the weight of his bird to the gram, and what she ate yesterday. He knows how her mood runs in a south wind, and which thermal she will take. He has spent a year on her. He still cannot tell you whether she will come back to the fist this afternoon. That is the whole structure of the craft: total preparation, built around one fact that is not available to him.

This line puts a word in front of the knowledge that shuts the door. The commentaries read it as a restriction. Knowledge of when it will happen is with Allah, and nobody else gains access to it. Three of them cross-refer to the same construction elsewhere in the Quran: its knowledge is only with my Lord.

The word for knowledge itself has a suggestive derivation, and it is offered as one classical view rather than a settled fact. The root is linked to the waymarks of a road. A tall mountain took a word from it, and so did the signs that guide a traveller by day, with stars for the night. Knowing, on that reading, is named after what points.

We do not experience prediction as a spiritual matter, which is exactly why this one is hard. Forecasting is how a modern person achieves dignity. The analyst who called the downturn, the doctor with the prognosis, the parent who knew how it would turn out. Being the one who saw it coming is among the purest forms of status there is. The ego feeds on it more quietly than on money.

And what is being withheld here is not a detail. It is the date. Not of the world only, but of each person's own small version of it. That one arrives without notice, and has never once been scheduled by its subject.

There is nothing bleak in that, unless you had been hoping to be the one holding the diary. The falconer is not demeaned by not knowing. He is correctly positioned. Everything he can do, he does; the one thing he cannot do he waits for, from a sky he does not run.

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.