Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 4 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:4

ثُمَّ ٱرْجِعِ ٱلْبَصَرَ كَرَّتَيْنِ يَنقَلِبْ إِلَيْكَ ٱلْبَصَرُ خَاسِئًا وَهُوَ حَسِيرٌ

“Then return [your] vision twice again.[1713] [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Go back and look as often as you like; your own eyesight will come home driven off and worn out, with nothing to report.

A reflection

Your eye comes back like a shooed dog

A fleece grader can condemn a fleece in two seconds. He lifts it, opens the staple, rolls the fibre between finger and thumb, and tells you where the break is and which season caused it. His whole living is his eye. Finding the fault is not a hobby; it is the trade.

That is the kind of person this ayah is aimed at, and it is the kind of person all of us secretly are. We cannot make a heaven. What we can do is spot what is wrong with things, and the ego has quietly moved its whole estate into that one room. If I cannot build it, I can at least be the one who notices the crack.

The ayah takes the room away, and the word it uses to do it is almost rude. Your sight will come back to you khāsiʾan. The sources give the plain origin: khasaʾtu al-kalb is what you say when you have driven a dog off and kept it at a distance. One grammarian defines khāsiʾ as the one driven away and made small. Another early reading is gentler and sadder: the one who did not see what he was hoping for.

So picture it exactly. You send your eye out on an errand. It is a professional, and it has never come back empty. It returns shooed, smaller than when it left, with nothing in its mouth.

Someone may object that this is a strange way for God to behave. Why set a person up to fail, unless He enjoys being the one who cannot be caught out? Read the result again and the charge does not stick. Nothing is taken from you except a pretension. Pride is an expensive thing to carry, and most of the weight is in the pretence of being able to judge everything. Putting it down is not a defeat. It is an unloading, done kindly, by the only maker whose work can survive the inspection.

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.