Al-Muzzammil · Makki · ayah 9 of 20

Al-Muzzammil 73:9

رَّبُّ ٱلْمَشْرِقِ وَٱلْمَغْرِبِ لَآ إِلَـٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ فَٱتَّخِذْهُ وَكِيلًا

“[He is] the Lord of the East and the West; there is no deity except Him, so take Him as Disposer of [your] affairs.[1782]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Every sunrise and sunset belongs to Him alone, so hand Him your affairs the way you would hand them to no one else.

A reflection

You do not even own the view

Rabbu al-mashriqi wa al-maghrib. Lord of the East and the West.

An estate agent will charge more for a flat because it faces south, as though a sliver of afternoon light were a thing a person could own. People pay for the view, the aspect, the direction their windows happen to face. It is a strange little vanity, and almost everyone has it.

This ayah quietly dismantles it. Not just your east-facing window, but the entire East. Not just the strip of sky over your garden at dusk, but the entire West. One classical commentator noted that the Arabic can be read with the plural, 'Lord of the risings and the settings', a reading attributed to a Companion. The sun does not rise from one fixed point all year; its rising point drifts along the horizon with the seasons, a different mashriq each week. Every one of those points, every single degree the sun has ever touched on its way up or down, belongs to Him alone.

Set your own holdings beside that. The deed to a house. The square footage of a garden. The direction your best room happens to face. All of it sits somewhere within a thin band of one planet's horizon, a sliver inside a sliver of what this ayah names.

The ego measures itself by what it owns, what it can point to and say: mine. This ayah does not scold that instinct; it simply shows it something too large to compete with. Once you have pictured the real scale of 'Lord of the East and the West', the extra value on the south-facing flat stops being a boast and starts being almost funny.

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.