Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 11 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:11

ذَرْنِى وَمَنْ خَلَقْتُ وَحِيدًا

“Leave Me with the one I created alone[1791]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Leave this one to Me: he came from nothing, and nothing about what he became since has changed that fact.

A reflection

His own favourite word, handed back to him

The commentaries preserve a detail about the man this ayah turns toward that sharpens its sting considerably. He was known among his people by a title he clearly enjoyed: al-waḥid, the unique one, unmatched, with no equal among the Arabs and no equal to his father before him. It was a boast about standing, wealth and lineage, worn the way a title is worn by someone who has made sure everyone around him uses it.

This ayah takes that exact word and returns it to him, completely unchanged in sound and completely reversed in meaning. Waḥidan here does not mean unmatched in glory. It means alone in the most basic, least flattering sense available: alone in his mother's womb, with no wealth yet to his name and no son yet at his side, exactly like every other human being who has ever been born with nothing. The word he had turned into a badge of superiority is handed back as a plain statement of fact about where every person, including him, actually starts.

There is a particular kind of irony here worth sitting with. A title built to separate him from everyone else turns out, in its true sense, to be the one thing he shares completely with everyone else. The boast and its quiet correction share a single word, which makes the correction almost impossible to miss once it is pointed out.

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.