يَٰبُنَىَّ إِنَّهَآ إِن تَكُ مِثْقَالَ حَبَّةٍ مِّنْ خَرْدَلٍ فَتَكُن فِى صَخْرَةٍ أَوْ فِى ٱلسَّمَٰوَٰتِ أَوْ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ يَأْتِ بِهَا ٱللَّهُ
"My dear son! Though the deed be the weight of a mustard seed and lie inside a rock, or in the heavens, or in the earth, God will bring it forth."
| Place | What it stands for |
|---|---|
| Fī ṣakhra | A solid body whose interior cannot be seen |
| Fi's-samāwāt | Too far off to be reached |
| Fi'l-arḍ | Too deep to be looked beneath |
That is, concealment can be established for three separate reasons: enclosure, distance, depth. The verse names all three.
خَرْدَل — the mustard seed. The word occurs in two places in the Qurʾān, and in both it is used as a unit of measure.
The choice of the measure is worth recording, and I give this as an observation: the mustard seed is one of the smallest grains known in the kitchen of that day. That is, the measure is taken from something the listener could handle. The same logic of measure holds for mithqāla dharra in Sabaʾ.
إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَطِيفٌ خَبِيرٌ — laṭīf: root ل-ط-ف, to penetrate to the fineness of a thing, to reach the finest place. The attribute overlaps exactly with the subject of the verse: the one who reaches the smallest.