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Name 48 of 99
المجيد

The Glorious

Al-Majīd

The great house — glory measured by what leaves it.

Meaning

Ibn Fāris, read in his own text: m-j-d is a sound root meaning the reaching of the utmost, and it occurs only in what is praised. From it majd is the reaching of the utmost in generosity — and Allah, he says, is al-Mājid and al-Majīd, no generosity above His. Ar-Rāghib gives the root as amplitude in generosity and in majesty, and traces it to a herd that has come upon pasture much and wide. Ibn al-Athīr, quoted in Majmaʻ Biḥār: faʻīl is more emphatic than fāʻil, so majīd gathers the sense of al-Jalīl, al-Wahhāb and al-Karīm. Among people, Ibn as-Sikkīt says, majd comes by the forefathers, where ḥasab and karam may be a man’s own; so of the human glories this is the inherited one, and of the Names it is the one inherited from no one.

Root m-j-d — majd — the reaching of the utmost, in what is praised

Computed from the Tanzil text, m-j-d gives four words in the whole Qurʼan once thirty-two look-alikes are set aside — twenty-eight from s-j-d, the masjid and the masājid, and four from j-h-d, the mujāhidūn. The root’s four are 11:73, ḥamīdun majīd, the one predication of Allah nothing turns on; 85:15, dhū l-ʻarshi l-majīd, where the vowel decides whether the word is said of Him or of the Throne; and 50:1 and 85:21, both of the Qurʼan — so half of the root’s occurrences describe the Book, and the definite form is said of it at 50:1. The root has no other face: Ibn Fāris says in his own words that it occurs only in what is praised, and the count bears him out, since all four words fall on Allah, on His Throne or on His Book. On the divided reading: al-Farrāʼ, as the Lisān and Tāj al-ʻArūs report him, says Yaḥyā and his companions read it in the genitive; az-Zajjāj, that on the genitive it describes the Throne and on the nominative it describes dhū; Ibn al-Aʻrābī glosses majīd as ar-rafīʻ, the exalted, and ar-Rāghib reads the kasrah as said for the Throne’s majesty and the greatness of its rank. And 85:21 is divided the other way: the Lisān records qurʼānu majīdin read for qurʼānun majīd, which would make the word an attribute of a Lord and not of a recitation, and states that the received reading is the nominative. Aṭ-Ṭabarī on 50:1: al-majīd here is al-karīm, and he gives Saʻīd ibn Jubayr for it; Ibn Kathīr on 85:21: great and noble. On the tablet: kept in the highest assembly from addition, loss, alteration and exchange. Ar-Rāghib divides the verbal noun: tamjīd from the servant to Allah is by speech and by naming the beautiful attributes, and from Allah to the servant it is by giving him bounty — which is the Duʻāʼ page and the Ḥadīth page in one sentence. The Lisān and an-Nihāya, through Majmaʻ Biḥār, report ʻĀʼishah saying hand me al-Majīd, meaning the muṣḥaf, on the strength of 85:21. The definite Name-form comes through the enumeration at at-Tirmidhī 3507, which is ḍaʻīf by al-Albānī, Aḥmad Shākir and Darussalam; Ibn Mājah 3861’s enumeration carries it too. Name 65, Al-Mājid, is the participle of this same root, and Ibn Fāris names both together.

Story

The house of Ibn Sadiq had stood above the town for four generations, and its glory was a matter of record: the marble, the horses, the famous painted ceiling. When old Sadiq died and his son Yahya took possession, the town assumed the usual — that a young heir would spend a fortune proving he had one.

Yahya sold the horses in his first year. He kept the house, and put the town’s grain reserve in its cellars. The famous ceiling stayed, but the hall beneath it filled every week with people who had never been let past the gate: he heard petitions there, and settled disputes, and fed whoever had come. He gave away a great deal and mentioned it never, and when a visiting noble complimented him on his charity he changed the subject so smoothly that the man did not notice he had been refused.

A cousin accused him of squandering the family’s greatness. Yahya took him out to the gallery where the portraits hung. “Four generations,” he said. “Tell me what any of them did.” The cousin could not, for any of the first three; the town remembered only the fourth, and it remembered him for the grain. “They were rich,” Yahya said. “Rich is a fact about a man’s cellar. It is not a fact about the man.”

It was not a popular course locally, whatever the town said afterward. Two of the older families stopped receiving him, and a marriage that had been half arranged quietly came apart, on grounds nobody stated. Yahya married later and less advantageously and by all accounts happily. He was aware of what it had cost and thought the price about right, which is not the same as not noticing it.

He died in the house in his sixty-third year, with the grain reserve full and the hall swept clean for the morning. He was buried without special ceremony, by his own instruction. The town came anyway, in numbers that surprised the family, though it should not have.

Poem

A river at full flood is the most dangerous version of itself —
fields underwater, roads gone, whole villages
rebuilding the memory of where the bank used to be.

And it is also, every single time, the reason
those same fields will outproduce any field
a gentler river ever touched.

The flood carries the mountain down with it —
centuries of rock, ground fine, suspended in the racing water —
and leaves the richest part behind
exactly where the water finally slows.

The most overwhelming version of the river
is also its most generous.
Not despite the power. Because of it.
A smaller river could never carry enough
to leave a gift like that behind.

Al-Majīd is majesty of this kind —
grandeur that does not simply awe and then recede,
but leaves something behind it every time it rises,
richer for having been enormous,
generous
in exact proportion
to how much
it could have simply
destroyed.

Reflection

The Bestowing

Al-Majīd joins two things that, in a human court, rarely survive together: majesty and generosity. A king’s glory is usually measured by what he keeps — the size of the treasury behind the throne, the inventory of everything that can be counted without being spent. The heir in the story learns something truer when he turns an inheritance into a granary the whole town can draw on: that glory measured by what stays is a small and brittle thing, and glory measured by what is given away is the kind that does not diminish under use. This is the barest human sketch of a majesty that belongs, completely and without strain, to Allah alone.

His throne is majestic and His mercy is majestic in the very same breath, because with Him grandeur was never in competition with giving the way it is for a king who fears that generosity will make him look smaller. He has nothing to protect by withholding. Scripture names Him, in a single verse, Praiseworthy, Glorious (11:73) — not glorious and therefore distant, but glorious and, for that very reason, abundantly giving.

This should correct a common instinct: to imagine majesty as something that must guard itself, keep its distance, measure out its favor carefully lest it be diminished. Al-Majīd’s majesty works the opposite way. Nothing given away from an infinite store was ever missed from it. His glory does not shrink each time He gives; if anything — as the river in the poem does, leaving its richest silt exactly where it looked most destructive — His giving is itself part of what His majesty looks like from where we stand.

To remember Al-Majīd is to stop mistaking wealth, position, or inherited standing for the thing itself. When the heir in the story is charged with wasting what his family had built, the charge confuses two different things: what a family owned, and what it is remembered for. What is majestic about a life is never what it manages to keep. What is majestic about Allah is that He keeps nothing back, and loses nothing by it.

His glory is not diminished by what leaves it; it is not the kind that can be.

Qurʼan

قَالُوا أَتَعْجَبِينَ مِنْ أَمْرِ اللَّهِ ۖ رَحْمَتُ اللَّهِ وَبَرَكَاتُهُ عَلَيْكُمْ أَهْلَ الْبَيْتِ ۚ إِنَّهُ حَمِيدٌ مَّجِيدٌ

They said: Do you marvel at the decree of Allah? The mercy of Allah and His blessings be upon you, people of this house. Truly He is Praiseworthy, Glorious.

11:73 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The angels’ reply to Ibrāhīm’s wife at the news of a child in old age, and the one occurrence of the root on which nothing turns: it is said of Allah, and no reading moves it. Ibn Fāris glosses the root as the reaching of the utmost, and says of this pair of Names that Allah is al-Mājid and al-Majīd, with no generosity above His. The verse is shared with Name 56, which reads it for ḥamīd, and with Name 65, which takes the participle of this root. The pairing ḥamīd and majīd returns in the salawāt on the Duʻāʼ page.

ذُو الْعَرْشِ الْمَجِيدُ

Possessor of the Throne, the Glorious.

85:15 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The vowel decides the referent. Ibn ʻĀshūr gives the nominative, of Him, as the reading of the majority, and the genitive, of the Throne, as that of Ḥamzah, al-Kisāʼī and Khalaf; al-Baghawī names Ḥamzah and al-Kisāʼī for the genitive, and aṭ-Ṭabarī the generality of the readers of Kūfah, holding both readings sound. Al-Farrāʼ, as the Lisān and Tāj al-ʻArūs report him, says Yaḥyā and his companions read it in the genitive; az-Zajjāj says that on the genitive the word describes the Throne and on the nominative it describes dhū; Ibn al-Aʻrābī glosses majīd as the exalted, and ar-Rāghib reads the nominative as said for the breadth of His overflowing and the abundance of His giving, and the genitive as said for the Throne’s majesty and the greatness of its rank. The Arabic printed is the Ḥafṣ text, in the nominative. 11:73 is the reading-proof occurrence; 85:21, six verses on, is divided the other way.

وَالْقُرْآنِ الْمَجِيدِ

By the Glorious Qurʼan.

50:1 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The definite Name-form in an oath, said of the Book and not of Allah — the shape Name 46 carries with a different word. Aṭ-Ṭabarī reads it plainly: by the noble Qurʼan, and he gives Saʻīd ibn Jubayr for the gloss, al-karīm. Ar-Rāghib says the Qurʼan is described so for the abundance of what it contains of the noble things of this world and the next, and sets beside it the Book’s being called karīm elsewhere. Aṭ-Ṭabarī records the commentators dividing over the letter qāf that opens the sūrah — a name of Allah sworn by, a name of the Qurʼan, or the mountain said to encircle the earth — and refers back to his treatment of the opening letters rather than settling it here. The portion printed is the āyah after its opening letter.

بَلْ هُوَ قُرْآنٌ مَّجِيدٌ

Rather, it is a glorious Qurʼan.

85:21 (Qurʼan, opens quran.com)

The fourth and last occurrence, six verses after 85:15 and in the same sūrah. Ibn Kathīr: great and noble — and the clause that follows, in a guarded tablet, he reads as its being kept in the highest assembly from addition, from loss, from alteration and from exchange. Here the division of reading runs the other way from 85:15: the Lisān records qurʼānu majīdin read for qurʼānun majīd, which would make the word an attribute of a Lord rather than of a recitation, and states that the received reading is the nominative. Al-Qurṭubī names its readers, Ibn as-Samayfaʻ and Abū Ḥaywah, and glosses it a Qurʼan of a glorious Lord. It is this verse that ʻĀʼishah is reported to have leaned on when she said hand me al-Majīd, meaning the copy of the Qurʼan.

Dua

اللَّهُمَّ صَلِّ عَلَىٰ مُحَمَّدٍ وَعَلَىٰ آلِ مُحَمَّدٍ كَمَا صَلَّيْتَ عَلَىٰ إِبْرَاهِيمَ وَعَلَىٰ آلِ إِبْرَاهِيمَ إِنَّكَ حَمِيدٌ مَّجِيدٌ

O Allah, send blessings upon Muḥammad and upon the family of Muḥammad, as You sent blessings upon Ibrāhīm and the family of Ibrāhīm — truly You are Praiseworthy, Majīd.

al-Bukhārī 3370 · ṣaḥīḥ (muttafaq ʻalayh)

The taught form of the salawāt, given in answer to the Companions’ question of how to send blessings on the Prophet ﷺ. From Kaʻb ibn ʻUjrah, through ʻAbd ar-Raḥmān ibn Abī Laylā. The source names the one telling of Kaʻb’s report in the six that carries the printed wording: Muslim 406a has the same report from the same Companion through the same Ibn Abī Laylā but reads kamā ṣallayta ʻalā āli Ibrāhīm, without the preceding ʻalā Ibrāhīma wa-. It closes on the same two Names as 11:73 — ḥamīdun majīd. Ar-Rāghib’s division fits it exactly: tamjīd from the servant to Allah is by speech, and by naming the beautiful attributes.

Hadith

مَن لَّمْ يَشْكُرِ النَّاسَ لَمْ يَشْكُرِ اللَّهَ

Whoever does not thank people has not thanked Allah.

at-Tirmidhī 1955 · ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ (at-Tirmidhī’s own verdict); ṣaḥīḥ (al-Albānī; Darussalam); ṣaḥīḥ li-ghayrihi (Aḥmad Shākir)

Narrated by Abū Saʻīd al-Khudrī. Given for its pairing of thanks owed to Allah with thanks owed to people, rather than as a direct use of the term. The hadith makes thanks owed to Allah inseparable from thanks owed to His creatures, which is one way majesty and generosity turn out, in practice, not to be two different things. The same theme is carried at at-Tirmidhī 1954 and Abū Dāwūd 4811, both from Abū Hurayrah and graded ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ and ṣaḥīḥ respectively. Abū Dāwūd 4811 reverses the clause order — lā yashkuru llāha man lā yashkuru n-nās, he does not thank Allah who does not thank people — while at-Tirmidhī 1954 keeps this entry’s clause order with lā in place of lam, man lā yashkuri n-nās lā yashkuri llāh; this entry’s own wording, with lam, belongs to the Abū Saʻīd report alone.

وَإِذَا قَالَ مَالِكِ يَوْمِ الدِّينِ قَالَ مَجَّدَنِي عَبْدِي

And when he says: Owner of the Day of Judgment — He says: My servant has glorified Me.

Muslim 395a · ṣaḥīḥ (ḥadīth qudsī)

The verb of this Name’s root, and the only place in the six editions where it is said by Allah of a servant. From the ḥadīth qudsī dividing al-Fātiḥah between Allah and the one praying, verse by verse: this portion is carried identically at Name 65, and another portion of the same report at Name 56, where the answer to Praise be to Allah, Lord of the worlds, is ḥamidanī ʻabdī. So the two words that stand together at 11:73 and in the salawāt, ḥamīd and majīd, are given back as two answers from the sūrah said in every unit of every prayer, with athnā ʻalayya ʻabdī answering ar-Raḥmān ar-Raḥīm between them. The Lisān glosses the clause: he has ennobled Me and magnified Me. Ar-Rāghib’s other half is the servant’s: tamjīd from Allah to the servant is by giving him bounty, and the next thing said in the report is that what the servant asked for is his.

فَيَسْأَلُهُمْ رَبُّهُمْ وَهْوَ أَعْلَمُ مِنْهُمْ مَا يَقُولُ عِبَادِي قَالُوا يَقُولُونَ يُسَبِّحُونَكَ وَيُكَبِّرُونَكَ وَيَحْمَدُونَكَ وَيُمَجِّدُونَكَ قَالَ فَيَقُولُ هَلْ رَأَوْنِي قَالَ فَيَقُولُونَ لاَ وَاللَّهِ مَا رَأَوْكَ قَالَ فَيَقُولُ وَكَيْفَ لَوْ رَأَوْنِي قَالَ يَقُولُونَ لَوْ رَأَوْكَ كَانُوا أَشَدَّ لَكَ عِبَادَةً وَأَشَدَّ لَكَ تَمْجِيدًا وَأَكْثَرَ لَكَ تَسْبِيحًا

Their Lord asks them, though He knows better than they: What are My servants saying? They say: They are exalting You, magnifying You, praising You and glorifying You. He says: Have they seen Me? They say: No, by Allah, they have not seen You. He says: And how would it be if they saw Me? They say: If they saw You, they would be more intense in worshipping You, more intense in glorifying You, and more abundant in exalting You.

al-Bukhārī 6408 · ṣaḥīḥ

From Abū Hurayrah. The report opens with angels who go about the roads seeking the people of remembrance and enfold them with their wings; that opening is left out here. The servants’ glorifying is this Name’s root, yumajjidūnaka, with its verbal noun, tamjīdan, and at-Tirmidhī gives a parallel telling.

Study Notes

Verified — directly attested

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CARRIED ON THIS PAGE: 11:73, ḥamīdun majīd, shared with Name 56 and Name 65; 85:15, dhū l-ʻarshi l-majīd, shared with Name 65; and two appended in this pass — 50:1, the definite Name-form said of the Qurʼan in an oath, and 85:21, the indefinite said of the Qurʼan six verses after 85:15. With those two the page carries every occurrence of its own root in the Book. Neither was then carried at any other Name (both are carried at Name 65 since its own pass, each linked exactly: corrected in build 171), so no reciprocal quran links were needed, and the distinct verse count in Notes on This Edition moves from 431 to 433.

NAMED HERE BUT NOT CARRIED ON THIS PAGE: nothing. Every verse this entry names is on the page.

CORRECTED ON THE RECORD, THE COUNT: the root gives four words in the whole Qurʼan. The house window on all three radicals, at most two letters in each gap, returns thirty-six (the first and third alone return 416: corrected in build 171), and thirty-two of them are look-alikes: twenty-eight are the masjid and the masājid, from s-j-d, and four are the mujāhidūn, from j-h-d. Of the four real words, one is of Allah past dispute, one is of Allah or of His Throne by the vowel, and two are of the Qurʼan; the entry named all four and the page carried two. The root has no second face at all, which is the rarer finding: Ibn Fāris states in his own words that it occurs only in what is praised, and the count agrees, every one of the four falling on Allah, on His Throne or on His Book. FOUND / CORRECTED / REMOVED, AS UNVERIFIED: the desc glossed majd as glory at once elevated and abundant, and said the Arabs used it of pasture both high and rich. The height is not in the lexicons read here. Ibn Fāris gives the root as the reaching of the utmost; ar-Rāghib as amplitude in generosity and majesty, tracing it to a herd coming upon pasture much and wide, and Ibn Fāris prefers the reading of the same idiom as feeding the beast what sufficed it, saying that is closer to the analogy of the chapter. The page named Ḥamzah, al-Kisāʼī and Khalaf as the readers of the genitive at 85:15; nothing read this pass names them, so the attribution is struck at Name 48 and at Name 65 together, and what was verified is put in its place. It is struck as unchecked rather than as false, and can be restored by anyone who reads a book of the readings (named again in build 171 as Ibn ʻĀshūr, al-Baghawī and aṭ-Ṭabarī report them in the pinned tafsīr; a book of the readings is still unread). The ref carried a citation against house form, Jāmiʻ at-Tirmidhī 3507, and did not say that the enumeration it rests on is graded ḍaʻīf. The Duʻāʼ page had no grade at all, and paired two editions in one source field although its own note said their wordings differ.

READ: Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs al-Lugha, in his own text at the entry مَجَدَ; ar-Rāghib’s Mufradāt, Ibn al-Athīr through Majmaʻ Biḥār, al-Jawharī, Ibn Sīda, al-Fayyūmī, az-Zamakhsharī, Abū Ḥayyān, Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī, Lane, Tāj al-ʻArūs and Lisān al-ʻArab, all in their own texts at the entry مجد; aṭ-Ṭabarī at 50:1 and Ibn Kathīr at 85:21; the six Arabic ḥadīth editions for every printed string on this page.

NOT READ: any book of the qirāʼāt, which is why the named readers were struck; and al-Ghazālī’s al-Maqṣad al-Asnā, still not reached in his own text.

OPEN: the report of ʻĀʼishah, hand me al-Majīd, meaning the muṣḥaf, is carried by the Lisān, by an-Nihāya and by Abū Mūsā al-Madīnī, and is not in the six editions; it is named here as what the lexicons report and is not cited as a ḥadīth. Saʻd ibn ʻUbādah’s prayer, that the Lisān records — O Allah, grant me praise and glory, for there is no glory but by deeds and no deeds but by wealth — is an athar and is likewise not cited. And Name 65 then said the distinction between the two Names is grammatical rather than scriptural (closed below: corrected in build 171); Ibn Fāris names both of Allah in one sentence, so that page should be raised when its own pass comes.

COHERENCE: 11:73 keeps its links to Names 56 and 65 and 85:15 its link to Name 65, and the struck attribution is struck at both pages in the same edit so that they do not disagree. SHARED_LOCI gains a reciprocal ḥadīth link between Names 48 and 56, of the another-portion kind: this page prints the answer to the fourth verse of al-Fātiḥah and Name 56 prints the answer to the second, out of one report. The salawāt on this page closes on the two Names that 11:73 closes on, which are this Name and Name 56. Al-Bukhārī 3370 is also printed on Name 56’s Duʻāʼ page with the same source and grade, and the two are linked in SHARED_LOCI; its note here no longer says it is the most often recited text or that it is said in every prayer, neither of which the six editions state.

HYGIENE AFTER NAME 61: the Qurʼan note on 85:21 narrated the page’s own editing — six verses after 85:15 and in the same sūrah, and the page had named it without carrying it — and the clause is removed with the fact it carried kept. AFTER THE CHAT-END AUDIT OF 81–85: the grade field of at-Tirmidhī 1955 now gives every grader in the dataset’s rows, each attributed to its record (the grade survey). AFTER THE CHAT-END AUDIT OF 1–99: the capitalised runs in the desc and the ref are set in lower case, the words unchanged. the item left for Name 65 is closed: its desc now grounds the Name in Ibn Fāris, who names Allah al-Mājid and al-Majīd in one sentence. ON THE AUTHOR’S LIST, THE KIND ON 11:73: the item in the author’s list said that SHARED_LOCI gives 11:73 the exact kind at Names 48, 56 and 65 though Name 48 prints the whole āyah and the other two a portion. The map was read again for this and no longer says that, if it ever did after Name 65’s pass: Names 56 and 65 are e to each other, which is right, since they print the same portion with the same English, and each is x to Name 48, which is right too, since Name 48 prints the whole verse, whose close is their English word for word (not a different English: corrected in build 171). Nothing was decided and nothing changed; the item is closed as already answered.

IN BUILD 171, FROM THE PHASE 2 READING: the note on Muslim 395a names Name 65, which carries this portion identically, gives the verse Name 56’s portion answers in the book’s English rather than by number, and has athnā ʻalayya ʻabdī answer ar-Raḥmān ar-Raḥīm between the two answers; the note on at-Tirmidhī 1955 reads the report as thanks, which is what its three records say; the ref names Ibn Mājah 3861’s enumeration beside at-Tirmidhī 3507 (its rows: al-Albānī and ʻAbd al-Bāqī ṣaḥīḥ, al-Arnaʼūṭ ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ, Darussalam ḍaʻīf), no longer narrates the page, sets Ibn Kathīr’s gloss of the tablet as its own sentence, and gives an-Nihāya through Majmaʻ Biḥār, as the desc and the senseNote now give Ibn al-Athīr; the 85:15 note names the readers of each vowel from Ibn ʻĀshūr, with al-Baghawī and aṭ-Ṭabarī, at the pinned tafsīr, as Name 65’s now does; the 85:21 note gives al-Qurṭubī’s readers of the construct reading, Ibn as-Samayfaʻ and Abū Ḥaywah; the note on al-Bukhārī 3370 names the one telling of Kaʻb’s report in the six that carries the printed wording, which Ibn Mājah 906 carries too as Ibn Masʻūd’s own teaching, ḍaʻīf; and the carriage of 50:1 and 85:21, the sweep, the readers struck, the item on Name 65 and the English of 11:73 are corrected in place above.

BY THE AUTHOR’S DECISIONS OF 2026-09-25, IN BUILD 182: the English title is The Glorious in all seven arrays and the meditation’s title fields, the ids and slugs unchanged (A53); 11:73 closes Truly He is Praiseworthy, Glorious, here and at Names 56 and 65, and MEDS 48 quotes it so (A58); al-Bukhārī 6408 is carried on the Ḥadīth page in his English, the servants glorifying Him in the angels’ report, its opening left out and at-Tirmidhī 3600 named as the parallel; at-Tirmidhī 1955 stays, its note corrected in build 171 (A59).

IN BUILD 206, FROM THE BACKLOG READING OF THE GRADES: the rows the record of build 171 above gives the list are the dataset’s; the grades of Ibn Mājah’s list are read in the editions’ text at Shamela through its page reader, not in print: al-Albānī grades the report ṣaḥīḥ without the enumeration of the Names; Shuʻayb al-Arnaʼūṭ gives its isnād as ḍaʻīf with the Names, their naming an insertion by some narrators, the report without them standing in al-Bukhārī; Muḥammad Fuʼād ʻAbd al-Bāqī’s edition gives no verdict of its own and quotes az-Zawāʼid, that Ibn Mājah’s route is ḍaʻīf; Name 12 gives the editions’ verdicts.

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