Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 28 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:28

قُلْ أَرَءَيْتُمْ إِنْ أَهْلَكَنِىَ ٱللَّهُ وَمَن مَّعِىَ أَوْ رَحِمَنَا فَمَن يُجِيرُ ٱلْكَـٰفِرِينَ مِنْ عَذَابٍ أَلِيمٍ

“Say, [O Muḥammad], "Have you considered:[1722] whether Allāh should cause my death and those with me or have mercy upon us, who can protect the disbelievers from a painful punishment?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

He puts his own destruction first in the sentence, then asks who would pitch the deniers inside a protection of their own.

A reflection

Both halves of the sentence are His

Notice who is named first. Not the opponents. Me, and those with me.

And notice that the two branches of the condition are both in one hand. Destruction, or mercy. The commentaries read them as death now, or life extended; or as punishment, or forgiveness. On every reading the pair is complete and the choosing is not ours. There is no third branch where the outcome is settled by the man speaking.

The word for destruction has a picture under it. The lexicons say the root is breaking and falling. A sandgrouse fleeing a falcon would hurl itself down into a ravine, and the drop between two mountains took a word from this root. A desert where travellers died carried it, and so did land killed by drought, and a man who spent his wealth down to nothing.

So the alternatives are a ravine or mercy, and both doors are held by the same hand.

A lacemaker in a parish is the only person who still has a particular pattern, and it exists nowhere except in her hands. Everybody assumes, in a vague way, that the pattern goes when she goes. One winter she teaches it to two girls at her kitchen table, and it outlives her by a hundred years. She was never the thing holding it up. She was where it happened to be for a while.

The ego cannot hear that comfortably, because it runs on a quiet assumption of being load-bearing. My family needs me. The work would fall apart. Nobody else knows how. Some of that is even true in the short term. None of it touches who decides the ravine and who decides the mercy.

What is strange and freeing is that the man reciting this is the one being spoken about. If he is not exempt, nobody needs to carry the burden of being essential.

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.