Nuh · Makki · ayah 14 of 28

Nuh 71:14

وَقَدْ خَلَقَكُمْ أَطْوَارًا

“While He has created you in stages?[1762]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Nuh points his people to the one fact none of them can argue with: every single one of them was made, stage by stage, by Someone other than themselves.

A reflection

Forty days before you had a say in anything

A hadith the sources record, narrated by Ibn Masʿūd and collected in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, describes the stages this ayah points to in exact terms: forty days gathered as a drop, then forty more as a clinging form, then forty more as a lump of flesh, before an angel is sent to breathe in the soul and write four matters, provision, lifespan, deeds and whether the life ahead will be one of ease or hardship.

Notice what every stage in that account has in common. None of it happened with your knowledge, your consent, or your help. The drop that became you, the clinging form, the lump of flesh, all of it proceeded while the person it was becoming had no say in any of it, no vote, no awareness even that anything was happening at all.

This is a strange thing to forget, given how completely it describes everyone alive. A person can build an entire identity around self-made achievement, their career, their fitness, their opinions, while the actual foundation of their existence, every single stage of it, was authored by Someone else entirely, on a timeline that had nothing to do with their own choices.

A sceptic might ask why Allah would want this remembered at all, if He stands to gain nothing from anyone's humility. He gains nothing, and needs nothing (35:15). The remembering is not for Him. It is the one fact capable of returning a person, gently but completely, to an accurate sense of their own actual size, before the ego has had the chance to forget where it came from and insist it built itself.

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.