As-Saaffaat (Those drawn up in Ranks)

149. “Then ask them whether your Lord has daughters and they have sons.”

Asking from conscience is the key to contemplation and warning of people.

A group of the polytheists theists of Arab, because of the lack of knowledge and degradation of thought, compared Allah with their selves, and considered child, and sometimes wife, for Him.

Among them there were mainly the tribes of Jahinah, Salim, Khuza‘ah, and Bani Malih who believed that the angels were Allah’s daughters, and also a great deal of Arab polytheists imagined jinn as His offspring, or some of them believed that Allah had a wife from jinn.

These baseless and superstitious imaginations had completely deviated them from the path of truth in a manner that the signs of Monotheism and Oneness of Allah had disappeared from among them.

It is said in a tradition that an ant thinks that its Lord has two small feelers, like an ant.¹

Yes the low thought drives man into gossip. The comparison of the Creator with the creature is the worst factor of aberration in recognizing Allah. However, at first the Qur’an refers to those who considered the angels as the daughters of Allah and answers them in three various ways: experimental, intellectual, and traditional.

It says:

“Then ask them whether your Lord has daughters and they have sons.”

The Qur’anic phrase /’istaftihim/ is derived from /’istifta’/ which is taken from /fatwa/ which is in the sense of ‘the answer to difficult problems.’

However, it implicitly asks them how they consider for Allah that which they do not desire for themselves.

This statement is according to their wrong belief who severely hated daughters and were seriously interested in sons, since sons had a very effective function in their lives, their fights, and their robberies while daughters could not help them in these affairs.

No doubt, from the point of value and being a ‘human’, a daughter and a son are the same with Allah and the criterion of both of them is piety, but the reasoning the Qur’an here, in terminology, is for mentioning the certain issues of the enemy in which the subjects of the opposite party is taken and they are returned to him again.

The like of this meaning has been mentioned in some other Suras of the Qur’an: such as Surah An-Najm, No. 53, verses 22-23 where it says:

“What! For you the male sex and for Him the female?” “Behold, such would be indeed a division most unfair.”