Nuh · Makki · ayah 22 of 28

Nuh 71:22

وَمَكَرُوا۟ مَكْرًا كُبَّارًا

“And they conspired an immense conspiracy”

Saheeh International

Essence

The leaders' plan against Nuh was not a single loud act; it was patient, hidden, and built to look nothing like a scheme at all.

A reflection

A word invented for the size of this one plan

Kubbār is a strange word, and the commentators treat it as strange on purpose. The ordinary word for 'great' is kabīr. Arabic does have an intensifying pattern that doubles a middle letter for emphasis — the grammarians list a handful of matching pairs: 'ajīb and the rarer, heavier 'ujjāb, ḥasan and ḥassān, jamīl and jammāl. Kubbār belongs to that small family of intensified forms, and here it sits beside a plan so significant that ordinary 'great' apparently was not going to carry enough weight.

This is the only place in the entire Quran this particular form appears. A word that heavy, used exactly once, for exactly this scheme, is not decorative. It is the text itself insisting that what the leaders built here was not an ordinary act of stubbornness or a single lie told once. It was something layered, sustained, and large enough to require language most sentences never need to reach for.

The next two verses will specify what the scheme actually was: the slow transformation of memory for righteous men into the worship of carved images (71:23). Kubbār is placed here, one verse early, as the ayah's own warning label — before the details arrive, the reader is already told how seriously to take what is coming.

There is something fitting in a rare word being reserved for a scheme that worked precisely because it was patient rather than loud. An ordinary act of defiance might only need an ordinary word; something built carefully enough to outlast its own architects, inherited by people who never chose it and in the end could not even see it as a scheme at all, earned a form of 'great' the rest of the Quran apparently never needed again.

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.