Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 41 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:41

عَلَىٰٓ أَن نُّبَدِّلَ خَيْرًا مِّنْهُمْ وَمَا نَحْنُ بِمَسْبُوقِينَ

“To replace them with better than them; and We are not to be outdone.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Allah declares He can replace the mockers entirely with something better, and nothing in creation could ever outrun that decree.

A reflection

A race with no other runner in it

The word used here for being outrun grows from a root pictured through horses let loose together, each rider straining with everything he has to cross the line first and claim the stake. Being outrun means someone else got there before you, beat you to a result you were also racing toward.

The ayah denies this entirely, and the denial carries real weight once the image is held in mind. Being outrun requires a race, which requires another competitor genuinely running toward the same finish line. There is no other rider on this track at all. Nothing in creation, no human scheme, no scattered mocking crowd rushing about in its small hostile circles, was ever actually in competition with the One making this decree. The very idea of outrunning Him treats as a contest something that was never a contest to begin with.

This should dissolve rather than merely humble the particular confidence the mocking crowd displayed. Their rushing toward the Prophet, their scattered scheming, their entitled assumptions, all of it assumed a race worth running, a contest where enough effort or cleverness might change the outcome. There was no such race. The only runner on that track, from the very beginning, was the One who had already decided how it would end.

There is a strange freedom hiding inside this image for anyone exhausted by genuine competition elsewhere in life. Most races worth running really do have other riders in them, genuine uncertainty about who crosses first. This is not one of them. A person can stop treating Allah's decree as a contest to be anxiously managed or outmanoeuvred, since it was never that kind of race to begin with, and redirect the energy that anxious managing usually consumes toward something that could actually be changed.

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.