Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 14 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:14

وَمَن فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ جَمِيعًا ثُمَّ يُنجِيهِ

“And whoever is on earth entirely [so] then it could save him.”

Saheeh International

Essence

He would hand over every single person on earth, all of them together, just to be pulled out safely himself.

A reflection

The word that means pulled clear

The verb used for being saved here comes from a root with a vivid double sense in the lexicons: to strip something bare, the way a hide is stripped clean off an animal, and separately, to escape, to come through danger entirely unscathed. Deliverance, in this picture, is not a gentle rescue but something closer to being yanked clear of danger with nothing left clinging to you, stripped of every last trace of the threat that was closing in.

That image fits the desperation of this entire list precisely. The man is not picturing a modest improvement in his situation; he is picturing total extraction, himself alone pulled completely free while everyone and everything else, every person he has named across four verses now, including the whole of humanity, stays behind to absorb whatever he has escaped.

There is something worth sitting with in how total this fantasy of deliverance actually is. Real escape, in the sense this root pictures, leaves nothing of the danger still attached. The man is not bargaining for a lighter sentence or a delay; he is bargaining for the complete, total erasure of his own exposure, at a cost that, by this point in the list, has become literally everyone else who has ever lived.

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.