Ar-Room (The Romans)

46. “And among His signs is that He sends forth the winds bearing good tidings (of rain), and that He may make you taste of His mercy, and that the ships may run by His command, and that you may seek (sustenance) of His grace, and that you may be grateful.”

Nothing happens accidentally, even the winds blow with the will of Allah, the Wise, too. Whatever we receive from the blessings of the winds is a part of His signs and graces. Again, the movement of a ship on the sea is in the hand of Allah, not in the hand of its captain.

The previous verse was about faith and righteous deed and in this verse Monotheism and its evidences are referred to.

It says:

“And among His signs is that He sends forth the winds bearing good tidings (of rain)…”

The winds come before rainfall. They take the scattered pieces of cloud with them and join them together and send them toward the dry and thirst lands. They cover some parts of the sky and, by altering the heat of atmosphere, they cause the cloud to be prepared for raining.

The importance of the arrival of these harbingers of rain may not be so clear to those citizens who enjoy the comforts of life, but those thirsty people who are in need of some drops of water in the desert, when the winds come and move the pieces of cloud with them, and they smell the special odour of rain which has come down on the plants somewhere else, the light of hope appears in their hearts.

Though the verses of the Holy Qur’an have emphasized on wind as a harbinger of the descent of rain, the Qur’anic term /mubašširat/ (bearing good tidings of rain) cannot be confined in it, because winds have many other good tidings with them, too.

Winds adjust the heat and cold of the weather.

Winds can amortize affections on vast atmosphere and purify the air.

Winds decrease the pressure of sun’s heat on leaves and plants, and work as a barrier against sunburn.

Winds bring the oxygen produced by the leaves of the trees for men, and take the carbonic gas produced by men’s breath as a present for plants.

Winds inoculate a lot of plants and join the male and female seeds to each other in the world of plants.

Winds are a means for mills to move, as well as a factor for filtering the heaps of corn.

Winds often carry the seeds of some plants from the places where there are a great deal of them and, like a compassionate gardener, scatter them throughout the desert.

Winds take sailors and ships with passengers and much heavy loads to different parts of the world, and even today, when machinery has substituted the wind force, the winds are still very effective in the work of ships to be slow or fast.

Yes, they are givers of glad tidings in different ways.

Thus, in the continuation of the verse, we recite as follows:

“…and that He may make you taste of His mercy, and that the ships may run by His command, and that you may seek (sustenance) of His grace, and that you may be grateful.”

Yes, winds are both a means of creating abundant bounties in the fields of agriculture and breeding livestock, and a means of carrying kinds of loads, and a cause of lustre in commerce.

The Qur’anic sentence:

“…that He may make you taste of His mercy…”

refers to the first blessing, and the sentence:

“…that the ships may run by His command…”

points to the second one and the sentence:

“…that you may seek (sustenance) of His grace…”

refers to the third one. It is interesting that all these bounties are the results of ‘movement’, a movement in the atoms existed in the air near the earth.

But the magnitude of no bounty is recognized until it is taken from man. In the same way, man does not understand what calamity has come to him unless these winds and breezes stop.

The stop of winds makes life, even in the best gardens, like life in the dark holes of a prison; and if a breeze blows in the cells of solitary prisons it makes it like an open place and, in principle, one of the factors of torture in prisons is the stop of weather therein.

Even on the surface of oceans, if wind stops and waves do not exist, the life of the living creatures therein will be in danger as the result of the scarcity of oxygen of the air, and the sea will be altered into a terrible fetid marsh.

Fakhr-i-Razi says:

“Regarding to the fact that ‘to taste’ is used for a scanty thing’, the sentence: “…and that He may make you taste of His mercy…” points to this meaning that the whole world and the bounty of the world is not more than a little mercy, and the vast mercy of Allah belongs to the next world.”