The Maker

Meaning

From b-r-ʼ, to bring into being. The same letters carry a second root, to be clear of a thing, whence barāʼah, acquittal, and burʼ, recovery; the Name belongs to the first. Al-Bāriʼ brings creatures forth into existence, each distinct from every other. In the triad of making it is read three ways: as bringing forth what has been measured, between the measuring of Al-Khāliq and the form given by Al-Muṣawwir; as distinguishing created things one from another; or as bringing them forth free of disparity. It is also the Name a people who had worshipped a calf were told to turn to in repentance: the One who created them, when they had worshipped another. It asks the servant to bow to nothing he has made, and to turn back to the One who made him.

Root b-r-ʼ — to create, to bring forth into being

Qurʼan 59:24, al-Khāliqu l-Bāriʼu l-Muṣawwir, is the definite Name; the participle bāriʼ stands twice more, both at 2:54 (ilā bāriʼikum, ʻinda bāriʼikum), and the verb has Allah as its subject at 57:22, min qabli an nabraʼahā. Computed from the Tanzil text, b-r-ʼ gives twenty-nine words, or thirty-one counting al-bariyyah at 98:6 and 98:7, which Nāfiʻ and Ibn Dhakwān read al-barīʼah, with hamza, from baraʼa llāhu l-khalq (al-Qurṭubī; Ibn ʻĀshūr). Ibn Fāris gives two roots: creation (baraʼa llāhu l-khalq; al-Bāriʼ is Allah, citing 2:54), and distance from a thing and parting from it, whence burʼ, recovery from illness. Al-Qurṭubī on 59:24: al-munshiʼ al-mukhtariʻ, the bringing-forth that stands between measuring and form. Al-Baghawī: the one who brings individual things from nonexistence into existence. Ibn Kathīr: barʼ is farī, carrying out and bringing into existence what He has measured. Al-Ghazālī, as quoted by Ibn ʻĀshūr: the originator who brings into being. Al-Bayḍāwī: the one who brings things into being free of disparity. Az-Zamakhsharī, whose reading Ibn ʻĀshūr prefers: the one who distinguishes what He brings into being, one part from another, by differing shapes. Ibn ʻĀshūr also reports Ibn al-ʻArabī deriving the Name from barā, earth, and so particular to the creation of humans, and Ibn ʻAṭiyyah and al-Qāmūs taking it in the sense of al-Khāliq. On 2:54, Abū l-ʻĀliyah, Saʻīd ibn Jubayr and ar-Rabīʻ ibn Anas gloss bāriʼikum as your Creator, and Ibn Kathīr sees in the choice of Name a reminder of the enormity of the crime: turn to the One who created you, when you worshipped another with Him. Muslim 78 carries ʻAlī’s oath by the One who split the seed and baraʼa n-nasamah. No transmitted supplication calls on the Name itself.

Story

In the square of a busy town stood a great clock, and beneath it worked the man who kept it — a clockmaker named Ansel, whose smaller clocks were prized across the region for a single reason: they kept true time, year upon year, because every part within them was made without flaw and fitted without gap.

He had not always been so exacting. As a young man he let a spring pass that he knew was a little wrong, and the clock he put it in stopped in its fourth month, in a house where a man was waiting on the hour to go and say goodbye to his mother. Ansel never spoke about it afterward. He threw out a great many springs.

He could not abide a hidden fault. A wheel that was almost round, a spring that was nearly right — he threw them in the scrap tin and began again. “A clock is only as true as its worst part,” he would say. His mechanisms ran because nothing false was ever buried in them.

One evening a young apprentice, proud of a clock she had rushed to finish, asked why he bothered so over pieces no one would ever see. Ansel did not answer her in words. He opened the back of an old clock on his own bench, one he had made in the year after that fourth month and never sold, and showed her the inside of it — the wheels, the escapement, parts no one but him had looked at since the day he closed the case — made as carefully as the face anyone would see. Then he closed it again and went back to his own work without saying anything at all.

She went back and took her clock apart that same night. He had not asked her to. He heard her working through the wall until about three.

Poem

Split a stone and the inside is no counterfeit.
It does not turn out to be a painted shell,
or packed with something cheaper than the face,
or finished only on the side that faced the light.

Break open a seed, a green stem, the long bone of a bird —
the interior is held to the same standard as the surface,
all the way down,
in places nothing was ever going to look.

This is not the stone’s doing, and not the seed’s.
Nothing made has ever chosen
to be true in the parts no one inspects.

It was brought out that way,
or it was not brought out at all.

Al-Bāriʼ is not a maker who hides his joins well.
His is the bringing-out itself —
a thing released into its own existence
with nothing sealed inside it
that the opening could embarrass:
sound at the face,
and sound
at the root.

Reflection

The Maker You Are Sent Back To

Every life makes something to bow to. It is rarely gold and rarely called a god: a reputation kept polished, an account of yourself told so often it has set hard, a standing in someone’s eyes you would give a great deal not to lose. You made it, piece by piece, out of what you had — which is exactly why it holds you. People are loyal to their own work.

Al-Bāriʼ is the Name for the One who brought you into being. On the reading that divides the three Names of making, it is not the measuring out, which belongs to the Name before it, nor the shaping, which belongs to the Name after it, but the bringing of you forth into your own separate existence, distinct from everything else that is. The same letters carry a second sense, to be clear of a thing, which gives the words for acquittal and for recovering from illness; the lexicographers count it a separate root, and it is not what the Name means. But the two stand close enough to be heard together: the One who brought you out of nothing is also the One to whom you turn to be brought clear of what you have since made.

There is a verse in which a people who had just taken a calf to worship are told, not return to your Judge, but turn in repentance to your Bāriʼ — to your Maker. The choice of Name is the message. They had bowed to a thing they made; they are sent back to the One who made them. The verse is not gentle — what it demanded of them was a severe repentance — but even a command that hard was routed to their Maker, and He relented toward them.

It is worth saying plainly what this Name does not have. There is no transmitted supplication that calls on Al-Bāriʼ. You can ask by the Merciful, by the Provider, by the Forgiver, and the Sunnah will hand you the words; ask for a formula that calls on the Maker by this Name and there is none to hand; the nearest is a refuge that names His act, from the evil of what He created and brought into being. That is not a gap in the Sunnah. It is a fact about where the Name lives: in two verses, one of which uses it twice in one sentence. What the Sunnah does hand you for the turning that verse commands is plain — my Lord, forgive me and turn to me; You are the One who accepts repentance, the Merciful — and Ibn ʻUmar said they would count the Prophet ﷺ saying it a hundred times in a single sitting.

That count is not a sign that the first turning failed. It is what turning looks like when it is aimed at the right address. You will go on making things; people do, and nothing in this Name asks you to stop. It asks that each time you find yourself bowed over your own work, you remember who made the maker, and go back to Him.

Bow to nothing you made. Turn back to the One who made you.

Qurʼan

Dua

Hadith

Study Notes