Al-Buruj · Makki · ayah 20 of 22

Al-Buruj 85:20

وَٱللَّهُ مِن وَرَآئِهِم مُّحِيطٌۢ

“While Allāh encompasses them from behind.[1899]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The persecutors sat facing the fire with Allah out of mind behind them, and He was there, encompassing them like a wall with no gap.

A reflection

Behind the ones who sat facing the fire

Picture the men at the trench once more. They sat on its rim, facing the fire, their eyes on the believers below. Everything they cared about was in front of them. Now the ayah turns the camera round. And Allah, from behind them, encompasses.

Muḥīṭ comes from a root the first hearers could see. The ḥāʾiṭ was the wall built all the way round a date grove. Horsemen closing on a man from every side were said to 'go round' him. Nothing inside the ring gets out. The active participle describes a lasting state: He is encompassing, always, not only now and then.

One classical commentator explains the picture. They are in His grip, like a man surrounded from behind, whose road is blocked so that he finds no way out. Another calls it a likeness: they cannot slip away from Him, any more than a thing can escape what surrounds it. A third sees the strangest thing in the world here. What could be more astonishing than a person who makes an enemy of the One who surrounds him and holds him by the forelock?

The ego keeps imagining an outside. A man who has cheated a dozen customers moves to another city. He changes his number and his email, and feels that it is all behind him. In a sense he is right. It is behind him, and so is his Lord. Distance is not escape when there is no edge to the ring.

Is it arrogant for Allah to say that He surrounds everyone? Only if He needed us penned in for His own sake. He does not; He needs nothing from any of us. The encircling describes reality, and it serves the ones who were wronged. The men on the rim thought the ring was theirs: soldiers around the trench, fire within it. The ayah shows a larger ring, around them.

We are all somewhere inside that ring. The question is only whether we know it. Knowing it is humbling. It is also the end of a certain kind of loneliness.

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.