al-Mulk 67:15

Huwa'lladhī jaʿala lakumu'l-arḍa dhalūlan fa'mshū fī manākibihā wa kulū min rizqih, wa ilayhi'l-nushūr "It is He who made the earth submissive for you. So walk upon its shoulders and eat of His provision. And to Him is the rising."

Root: ذ-ل-ل. And beneath this root lie two neighbouring senses; they need separating.

• ذُلّ (dhull) — humiliation, being despised. Negative.
• ذِلّ (dhill) — softness, tractability, docility. Not negative.

And dhalūl comes from the second. The concrete equivalent of the word is an animal broken in to be ridden: a camel or a horse that comes to the halter, that can be loaded, that does not turn skittish. The wild one is ṣaʿb; dhalūl is the one that has been tamed.

The Qurʾān uses this word very clearly in one other place, and that is Sūrat al-Baqara:

"…a cow not broken in (lā dhalūlun tuthīru'l-arḍa), that does not plough the soil or water the field…" (al-Baqara 2/71)

In the discussion of al-Baqara, when the story of the cow was treated, this description came up: the animal sought was not dhalūl — that is, it had never been worked, had never known the yoke.

Now, setting the two verses side by side, the meaning of the word becomes entirely clear:

That is, the earth is described, in the Qurʾān's own word, like "an animal put to work".

In the discussion of al-Baqara 2/22, firāsh (bedding) was treated and this reservation was entered: this expression does not say that the earth is flat; what the word says is not shape but function — the earth has been made a place that can be stood on and lived on. And it was noted there that the Qurʾān mentions the same function with other words too: mihād (a cradle, al-Nabaʾ 78/6) and dhalūl (al-Mulk 67/15).

Now, resting on that record, we can compare the three:

The third says something different from the first two, and the difference is important. Bedding and a cradle are passive: they are spread out, one lies in them. A mount is active: it walks, it carries, but it has to be driven.

The word dhalūl sets the earth up as something in motion — not a floor to stand on but an animal to be mounted.

And here the warning from the discussion of al-Baqara 2/22 must be repeated: no conclusion about the shape of the earth is to be drawn from these words. Neither "it is flat" nor "it is round" has been said; "it is tamed" has been said. The question the verse answers is not a question of shape but a question of relation.

And I do not go into a forced reading in the other direction either: to draw from the word dhalūl a proof of the earth's motion (its rotation) is the other face of the same mistake. The word is a mount; a mount's moving is part of the likeness, not an announcement about astronomy.

An imperative. And this is the third command in the sūra — after the "look" commands in the third and fourth verses. The first two were given to the eye; this one to the foot.

مَشَى — root م-ش-ي. To walk. Beneath the word lies going on foot, step by step; not running (saʿā, jarā) or travelling (sāra). Everyday, ordinary, slow movement.

And this verb will come once more in the sūra — in the twenty-second verse, twice: "Is one who walks fallen on his face better guided, or one who walks upright on a straight path?"

The link between the two verses stands in the text and is worth recording: the fifteenth verse commands walking, the twenty-second verse asks how one is to walk. The command and the measure, seven verses apart.

Root: ن-ك-ب. And the root is interesting: to swerve to one side, to incline sideways. Nakaba ʿani'l-ṭarīq — he swerved from the road; nakbāʾ — the wind that blows from between two cardinal directions. The Turkish nekbet (misfortune) is from this root too: the swerving of the road.

مَنْكِب (mankib) — shoulder. The shoulder is given this name because it is the side of the trunk: not the centre but the edge.

Manākib is a plural, and in the verse the "shoulders" of the earth are spoken of. What does this mean?

All three views are found in the classical sources and they do not exclude one another. I state my preference: within the wholeness of the likeness, the first and the second seem to work together — the shoulders of a riding animal are the highest and firmest place one stands on. But this is not binding.

And the likeness as a whole is this, as my own reading: the earth is a tamed animal and the human being walks not on its back but on its shoulders. That is, on it but not at its centre; carried but not steering.

One more observation: the proper sense of the root is "to swerve", and in the verse the human being is sent to walk in exactly the places where one may swerve. This tension inside the word — shoulders both carry and open out to the sides — seems to prepare the ground for the question of the "straight path" in the twenty-second verse. I write this as an inference, not as a classical transmitted report.

The second command: eat. And the construct calls for attention: "of His provision" — the pronoun refers not to the earth but to God.

The logic of the sentence is this: it is you who walk, the earth is beneath you, it is you who bring out the food — but the provision is His.

رِزْق — root ر-ز-ق. The share given, one's portion. The distinguishing side of the root is this: rizq is not what is earned but what is given. Arabic uses the word kasb for earning; rizq is something else.

The difference between the two will turn into a question in the twenty-first verse of the sūra: "If He were to withhold His provision, who is there to provide for you?" That is, the question of where provision comes from is here a statement and there a challenge.

Root: ن-ش-ر. And the concrete sense of the root is to spread out, to lay out, to open. Nashara'l-thawb — he spread out the cloth. Nashara'l-kitāb — he opened the book or the page. The Turkish neşretmek (to publish) is from the same root: to open out a text and spread it.

Nushūr, from this root, means "the resurrection". And the likeness is plain: death is a folding up, resurrection an opening out. The spreading again of a folded cloth.

Now set the three parts of the verse side by side:

1. The earth was made submissive for you — the ground was made ready. 2. Walk and eat — movement and provision. 3. To Him is the rising — and the return.

The structure of the sentence is the structure of a day, indeed of a lifetime: get up, walk, eat, return.

And there is a fine point of vocabulary, which I record as my own reading: nashr (spreading) and mashy (walking) stand in the same scene. The human being is spread over the earth (scattering by walking), then spread again (opened out by rising). And in between there is a gathering: in the twenty-fourth verse tuḥsharūn — you will be gathered. Scatter, gather, open.

The command "walk" is worth dwelling on, because it is the kind of command the Qurʾān uses in very few places: turned towards the world, turned towards production, conveying movement.

That this command is not a command of worship is striking. The verse does not say "the earth has been given to you, worship"; it says "walk and eat". To work on the earth, to move about, to seek a living — these are mentioned not as a field outside religious life but inside the same sentence.

And the end of the sentence bounds this field: wa ilayhi'l-nushūr. Walking and eating are framed by the sentence of return.

This threefold structure — means, use, reckoning — is a summary of the relation the Qurʾān sets up with the world. The means are not refused, the use is not blocked; only a frame is placed.

A second aspect: the present-day counterpart of the word dhalūl.

The earth's being "tamed" is a notice of readiness: this planet has been made usable. And within the likeness of the domestic animal there is also a warning, because the relation with a domestic animal is reciprocal: whoever treats the animal badly loses his mount.

The verse does not say this, and I do not make the verse say something it does not say. But the word itself sets up a relation, and relations are not one-sided. I leave this as a direction for thought.