Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 40 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:40

فَلَآ أُقْسِمُ بِرَبِّ ٱلْمَشَـٰرِقِ وَٱلْمَغَـٰرِبِ إِنَّا لَقَـٰدِرُونَ

“So I swear by the Lord of [all] risings and settings[1758] that indeed We are able”

Saheeh International

Essence

Allah swears by the Lord of every single rising and setting point the sun has ever touched, that He is genuinely able to do what the mockers flatly denied.

A reflection

Every sunrise this year has had its own address

The oath is sworn not by a single east and a single west but by their plurals, mashāriq and maghārib, the risings and the settings. The sun does not climb the horizon from the same point each morning; across a year it drifts, day by day, through a whole arc of different rising and setting places, never repeating the exact same spot two mornings running. Every one of those countless points, this oath says, has the same Lord governing it.

Set beside the mocking crowd's arrogant confidence, this scale is deliberately humbling. People who imagine their own status entitles them to paradise, and who doubt that any power could remake them after death, are being shown a single ordinary fact: the sun they watch rise every morning has never once, across every single one of its countless shifting positions all year, needed to be reminded where to appear. Human vanity struggles to manage one commitment honestly. The One being sworn by here keeps an entire year's worth of changing horizons in perfect order without a single morning's lapse.

This is not a boast made for its own sake. It is evidence offered before a claim the mockers found hardest to believe: that the same precision governing every sunrise could just as easily govern their own return to life.

There is a further detail worth noticing in how the oath frames this precision. It does not ask anyone to take the claim on faith alone, disconnected from anything observable. It points to a system already running in full view, year after year, with no maintenance crew and no visible mechanism anyone has ever had to repair. The same quiet, unforced reliability is exactly what the claim about resurrection is asking its audience to extend trust toward, not a leap into the unknown but a continuation of a pattern already proven at a scale nobody could reasonably dismiss.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.