Thunder (Al-Ra‘d)
Verses 15-16 GROUP_491 13.15-16
15
وَلِلّهِ يَسْجُدُ مَن فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالأَرْضِ طَوْعًا وَكَرْهًا وَظِلالُهُم بِالْغُدُوِّ وَالآصَالِ
All who dwell in heavens and on the earth submit to God alone, willingly or unwillingly, as do their shadows in the mornings and in the evenings.
16
قُلْ مَن رَّبُّ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالأَرْضِ قُلِ اللّهُ قُلْ أَفَاتَّخَذْتُم مِّن دُونِهِ أَوْلِيَاء لاَ يَمْلِكُونَ لِأَنفُسِهِمْ نَفْعًا وَلاَ ضَرًّا قُلْ هَلْ يَسْتَوِي الأَعْمَى وَالْبَصِيرُ أَمْ هَلْ تَسْتَوِي الظُّلُمَاتُ وَالنُّورُ أَمْ جَعَلُواْ لِلّهِ شُرَكَاء خَلَقُواْ كَخَلْقِهِ فَتَشَابَهَ الْخَلْقُ عَلَيْهِمْ قُلِ اللّهُ خَالِقُ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ وَهُوَ الْوَاحِدُ الْقَهَّارُ
Say, ‘Who is Lord of the heavens and the earth?’ Say, ‘God.’ Say, ‘Why do you take protectors other than Him, who can neither benefit nor harm even themselves?’ Say, ‘Are the blind and the seeing equal? Is darkness equal to the light? Or have they assigned partners to God who create as He creates, so that both creations appear to them alike?’ Say, ‘God is the Creator of all things. He is the One, the Almighty.’
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Commentary
( a) If you spread your hands and call upon the ocean, it will never happen that it responds to your call and its waters come out of the depths to quench the thirst of your fields and gardens. But, by the laws of nature, the waters of that same ocean rise into air in the form of water vapour, leaving behind the salt. Then under the influence of heat, gravitational pull and the force of the winds, it spreads over town and country and pours down in the shape of fresh, sweet water and irrigates the land. This shows that the ocean, in spite of being gigantic, is really helpless. It has no innate power either to act on its own, or to respond to another’s call. This is the condition of all the things of this world. As such, the wise person is one who worships the Creator and not the creations—one who concentrates on the Lord of the things and not on the things themselves. (a) God expects man to bow down before Him. This ‘bowing down’, is the religion of the whole universe. Everything in this world is totally subject to God’s command. A physical sign of this subjection is the casting of shadows towards the west in the morning and towards the east in the evening. This daily happening is the material symbolising of that self-prostration which man is expected consciously to perform. A study of the universe in all its vastness reveals that all of it is bound by one universal law. This proves the fact that its Creator and Lord is one and only one. Rational and intellectual studies do not in any way prove that more than one power is active in this universe. In view of this, the notion of an additional god other than the one and only God is an absolutely baseless presumption. Observation with the help of the ‘eye’ indicates the existence of one and only one God. So, those who believe in the existence of more than one God, only prove their ‘blindness’, that they have assumed the existence of many gods due to their blindness and not on the basis of knowledge and observation in the real sense.