The Compassionate

Meaning

From r-ʼ-f. Ibn Fāris: one word, pointing to tenderness and mercy, raʼfah. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: raʼfah is the tenderness of mercy, and at 2:143 its highest sense, reaching all creation in this world. The root stands 13 times: raʼūf 11, of Allah 10 and once of the Messenger ﷺ (9:128); raʼfah twice, placed by Allah in the hearts of those who followed ʻĪsā (57:27) and forbidden to those carrying out a punishment (24:2). Raʼūf stands beside raḥīm 9 times, first each time, and twice with bi-l-ʻibād (2:207, 3:30). The believers call on the Name at 59:10: Our Lord, truly You are Compassionate, Merciful.

Root r-ʼ-f — tenderness and mercy

Counted on the Tanzil text with the hamzah kept, every word read in its verse: r-ʼ-f 13 words, 50 look-alikes excluded (maʻrūf, rafaʻa, isrāf, aʻrāf, marāfiq, aṭrāf). Raʼūf 11: of Allah 10 (2:143, 2:207, 3:30, 9:117, 16:7, 16:47, 22:65, 24:20, 57:9, 59:10), of the Messenger ﷺ 1 (9:128); with raḥīm 9 times, first each time; with bi-l-ʻibād at 2:207 and 3:30; said to Allah at 59:10. Raʼfah 2: placed in the hearts of those who followed ʻĪsā, before raḥmah (57:27); forbidden in carrying out the punishment (24:2). Ibn Fāris, Maqāyīs (Hārūn 2/471): one word, tenderness and mercy; 24:2 read raʼāfah too. Aṭ-Ṭabarī: raʼfah the highest sense of mercy, general to all creation in this world, where raḥīm is mercy for the believers in both worlds (2:143); the tenderness of mercy (2:207, 24:2); raʼūf at 9:128 is rafīq, gentle; al-Ḥasan at 3:30, of His raʼfah He warned them of Himself; at 16:47 His not hastening the punishment, at 22:65 His holding back the sky. Shahīd, witness, is also said of the Messenger ﷺ, at 2:143, 4:41, 16:89 and 22:78. The six ḥadīth editions: ar-raʼūf in the lists at at-Tirmidhī 3507 and Ibn Mājah 3861; 2:143 sent down about those who died before the qiblah was turned (al-Bukhārī 4486); Allah named him raʼūfan raḥīmā (Muslim 2354b); the Anṣār said raʼfah for his kin had taken him (Muslim 1780a, 1780c); 9:128 in at-Tirmidhī 3103. Duʻāʼ: Qurʼan 59:10; Qurʼan 2:286. Reports: Muslim 2751a; al-Bukhārī 710; al-Bukhārī 6025; al-Bukhārī 4486; Muslim 2354b; Muslim 1780a.

Story

The old shepherd Hilal was famous for one small thing: he did not lose weak lambs.

Other men lost them as a matter of course — the late-born, the second twin, the one the ewe would not take. It was accepted. It was arithmetic. Hilal found it unacceptable and had spent fifty years being unreasonable about it.

His method was not skill so much as a quality of attention. He carried the weak ones inside his coat. He fed them at hours that ruined his sleep. He knew, from long practice, exactly how much pressure a newborn animal can bear, and worked always well below it. “You cannot handle a weak lamb the way you handle a strong one and simply be gentler,” he told his grandson. “You have to be a different man.”

There was a lamb one March, the second of twins, that he kept alive eight days and lost on the twelfth. He did not speak for two days.

The boy, who had assumed a man of seventy would be used to it by now, asked him eventually what the eight days had been for, since the lamb had died anyway.

“You’re asking whether it was wasted.” Hilal pulled his coat straight. “It wasn’t. Eight days is eight days. He does not throw away what was done for something too small to thank you for it.” He went back out then, because it was March and there were others.

He was like that with people too, which the village thought comical in a man of his roughness. Blunt with the capable. Endlessly, absurdly patient with the frightened — the stammering child, the widow who could not manage her affairs, the boy everyone else had written off. He changed register the way he changed his hands, and it did not appear to him to be a virtue, only a matter of reading correctly what was standing in front of him.

His grandson could not have put any of it into words for another twenty-three years. What he kept in the meantime was the two days of silence: that a man of seventy had not got used to it, and had not wanted to.

Poem

He was standing in prayer, and he had meant to make it long.
There was no shortage of what he might have recited;
the whole of it was in him.
Then, somewhere near,
a child began to cry.

He cut it short.
And when he explained it afterward
he did not say the noise had broken his concentration.
He said: from what I know of the intensity of his mother’s feeling at his crying.
Not the child’s distress. The mother’s.
He shortened his standing before Allah
for a woman he could not see,
whose difficulty he had calculated
from a sound.

That is what the word looked like in a man.
Not softness, which is only force that was never there.
Force set down on purpose.
The exact weight withdrawn, no more and no less,
by someone who could have gone on as long as he liked
and knew precisely who was in the room.

And where did he come by it?
The verse that gives him the word is careful with the word:
to the believers, raʼūf, raḥīm —
the Name said of a man in this one verse, and in no other.
Placed. Not shared.
The way light is given to a room,
which does not thereby become the sun.

Because the proportion was published, and it is not close:
one hundred parts, ninety-nine kept back, one sent down —
and the one is the whole of what has ever been seen.
Every mother who ever went back into a burning house.
The mare lifting her hoof clear of the foal.
Fifty years of an old man carrying lambs inside his coat.
All of it out of the single part.
The other ninety-nine have not been spent yet.

Reflection

The Gentling

Arabic holds two words where English mostly has one, and this Name is built on the first. Ibn Fāris gives r-ʼ-f one word, pointing to tenderness and mercy: raʼfah. Aṭ-Ṭabarī calls raʼfah the tenderness of mercy, and at 2:143 its highest sense, reaching all creation in this world, where raḥīm is mercy for the believers in this world and the next. The Qurʼan keeps the order without arguing it: in all nine places raʼūf stands beside raḥīm, raʼūf comes first, and when raʼfah and raḥmah are placed in the hearts of those who followed ʻĪsā, raʼfah comes first there too. And then look at where He places the Name. On the beasts that carry your loads to a land you could not have reached except with hardship to yourselves — truly your Lord is Compassionate, Merciful. Of His mercy, aṭ-Ṭabarī says, He created the cattle for your benefit. The Name is set down on the weight.

Follow it through the other places and it keeps turning up where something was about to be lost, though not everywhere: at 3:30 the Name follows a warning, and al-Ḥasan says the warning is itself His raʼfah. At Tabūk, in the hour of difficulty, the Qurʼan says openly that the hearts of a group of them had very nearly slipped — and it is there, on the near-miss rather than the victory, that He turned to them, for indeed He is, to them, Raʼūf, Raḥīm. And most striking, on the day the qiblah turned. The community, in al-Barāʼ’s report, was troubled about the dead: men who had died, and been killed, while the prayer still faced Bayt al-Maqdis, after sixteen or seventeen months of it, and they did not know what to say about them. Had that been for nothing? The answer came with this Name attached to it: And Allah would never let your faith go to waste. Truly Allah is, to the people, Compassionate, Merciful. Hold that where you can reach it. He names Himself the One of tender mercy precisely at the fear that what was already spent has been thrown away.

Then there is an honor here that has to be handled with both hands. In one verse the Qurʼan says this Name of His Messenger ﷺ, with the one beside it: to the believers he is Compassionate, Merciful. Do not let the warmth of that blur what it is. What was in him was given to him — created, received, and bounded, present in a man who slept, who grieved, who could be worn out by a long day. There is nothing like Him. The proportion was stated for us so we would not confuse the two: mercy made into one hundred parts, ninety-nine held back, one sent down — and it is out of that single part that every creature that has ever been tender to another has been drawing, ever since. All the compassion in the history of the world is the runoff of one portion. Ninety-nine remain with Him, unspent.

And when He hands a piece of it to a man, this is what it looks like in practice, and it is not what we usually mean by the word. He stood for prayer intending to lengthen it, heard a child crying, and shortened it, from what I know of the intensity of his mother’s feeling at his crying. Not the child’s distress; the mother’s, computed from a sound, by a man who could have prayed as long as he wished. A bedouin urinated in the mosque, the Companions moved on him, and he stopped them: do not interrupt him — and then called for a bucket of water to be poured over the place. Notice what these have in common. In each, the one holding authority reduces its exercise, and does so on the basis of an accurate reading of somebody else’s fragility. Ibn Fāris calls raʼfah tenderness and mercy; in him it looked like accuracy about weakness, joined to the deliberate withdrawal of weight.

Which is why the Qurʼan, in the one place it speaks of raʼfah as a danger, forbids it to us and not to Him: let no pity for the two of them take hold of you in the religion of Allah. The same quality that is flawless in Him can, aimed wrongly in ours, take apart the very protection it meant to soften. So the discipline of this Name is not be softer. It is be exact — and most of us are not. We are gentle where gentleness costs us nothing and hard exactly where it would cost something, and we call the arrangement kindness. Correct it in the direction that hurts. And before you go looking for someone to be careful with, be honest about which end of this you are actually on. You are not the shepherd in the story. You are the second twin, the one the ewe would not take, being carried inside a coat through a cold month by Someone who has never once decided that the effort was disproportionate to the animal.

Ninety-nine parts withheld, one sent down — and every gentleness you have ever received in your life came out of the one. Carry what you need to the Owner of the other ninety-nine, and then go and be exact with somebody who cannot pay you back for it.

Qurʼan

Dua

Hadith

Study Notes