Al-Buruj · Makki · ayah 12 of 22

Al-Buruj 85:12

إِنَّ بَطْشَ رَبِّكَ لَشَدِيدٌ

“Indeed, the assault [i.e., vengeance] of your Lord is severe.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The sky, the promised Day and every witness were called to vouch for one sentence: your Lord's grip, on those who crush others, is severe.

A reflection

What all the oaths were sworn for

The surah opened with three oaths. By the sky with its towers. By the promised Day. By a witness and what is witnessed. An oath in Arabic waits for its answer: the statement it was sworn to establish. Some of the early scholars heard that answer here. On their reading, everything in between, the trench included, is a long parenthesis. The sky, the Day and the witnesses were called to vouch for one sentence: your Lord's grip is severe.

The sentence is built to carry that weight. It opens with inna, truly, and ends with la-shadīd, the extra la- adding a second 'truly'. Baṭsh is seizing with force: a hand that shoots out and closes and cannot be shaken off. Shadīd comes from a root whose first picture is a knot pulled hard. Two classical commentators note that once baṭsh is called severe, it is doubled and compounded.

Put that beside the king in the story. He believed his grip was final. He had the soldiers, the boats and the pits at the street corners. He could send a boy up a mountain or out to sea. He found that his hands could not close on one boy until the boy himself allowed it.

We are smaller kings. A man holds the only login to the family's savings, and his grown sisters must ask him for every withdrawal. He tells himself it is responsibility. Underneath, it is the pleasure of the closed fist. The ego loves to feel something held in its hand.

This ayah quietly opens our fingers. There is one grip in existence that never tires, never slips and never needs to prove itself. It is not ours, and every grip we have is on loan from it.

Is it arrogant for Allah to announce His own severity? Only if He needed us to be afraid for His sake. He does not: 'Allah is free of need of all the worlds' (29:6). The classical commentators are specific about where this grip falls: on tyrants and wrongdoers. For anyone held down by another's hand, this is not a threat. It is the news that a stronger hand exists, and that it is not on the oppressor's side.

The full entry has 4 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.