Al-Muddaththir · Makki · ayah 25 of 56

Al-Muddaththir 74:25

إِنْ هَـٰذَآ إِلَّا قَوْلُ ٱلْبَشَرِ

“This is not but the word of a human being."”

Saheeh International

Essence

From magic to merely human words in one breath, because any label would do as long as it was not the true one.

A reflection

The most generic word available for a person

Bashar names a human being by the most visible, surface-level feature shared by every single person alive: the outer skin, bashara, the layer anyone can see at a glance, with nothing distinguishing about it from one person to the next. It is the lowest common denominator of human description, a word that erases rank, gift, character and circumstance in favour of the one feature every human shares without exception. Choosing this word to describe the source of what he had heard was choosing the flattest, least remarkable category available in the entire language.

This matters because of what had come immediately before it. A moment earlier, in the previous ayah, he had reached for magic, a category that at least concedes something extraordinary is happening, power beyond ordinary human capacity. Here, within the same breath, he drops to the opposite extreme: not extraordinary at all, merely the generic, skin-level fact of being human, the most unremarkable explanation imaginable for something he had privately called unlike anything he knew.

The collapse from one extreme to the other within two consecutive ayat is itself revealing. A settled, honestly reasoned position does not usually need two mutually exclusive explanations offered back to back. Reaching first for the extraordinary and then for the utterly ordinary, in successive breaths, looks less like a reasoned verdict and more like a man grabbing at whatever label was nearest, with no real commitment to either one beyond its usefulness in the moment.

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.