Nuh · Makki · ayah 13 of 28

Nuh 71:13

مَّا لَكُمْ لَا تَرْجُونَ لِلَّهِ وَقَارًا

“What is [the matter] with you that you do not attribute to Allāh [due] grandeur”

Saheeh International

Essence

After every incentive named, Nuh stops and asks his people the real question: why will you not give Allah the weight He is due?

A reflection

A weight the ego refuses to carry

Having offered forgiveness, rain, wealth and children, Nuh finally asks the question underneath all his people's refusals: why will you not give Allah His due weight? Not His due fear alone, and not His due thanks alone, but waqār, the full, settled gravity owed to something genuinely greater than yourself.

The ego resists exactly this kind of weight. It can tolerate a vague, distant respect for something abstract called 'God', filed safely away from daily decisions. It resists a greatness so real it would actually have to reorganise a life around it, the way a person reorganises their whole week around one truly urgent piece of news rather than letting it sit, politely acknowledged, in a corner of the mind that changes nothing.

A sceptic might ask here the same question this surah has already raised about majesty elsewhere: why does Allah keep asking to be held in this kind of regard? Doesn't it sound like insecurity, a ruler demanding tribute from subjects who would otherwise simply forget him? The answer sits in what is actually being asked for. Allah loses nothing from being forgotten and gains nothing from being remembered; He is free of all need (35:15). The question Nuh asks is not for Allah's benefit. It is aimed at an ego that has shrunk its own sense of scale so far that it can no longer feel the weight of anything beyond its own immediate wants.

Arrogance, read this way, is not loud boasting alone. It is the quieter failure to let anything, however genuinely vast, actually weigh on you. Nuh's question names that failure directly, in his people and in anyone since who has let the same ego grow large enough, year after year, to crowd out any real sense of something greater pressing in on it.

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.