Wherever You Turn: A Tafsir-Style Commentary on Qur’an 2:115–117 in the Light of the Cosmic Glorification (Tasbīḥ) Verses

Epigraph

وَلِلَّهِ الْمَشْرِقُ وَالْمَغْرِبُ ۚ فَأَيْنَمَا تُوَلُّوا فَثَمَّ وَجْهُ اللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ وَاسِعٌ عَلِيمٌ

Al Quran 2:115

Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

This essay offers a scholarly commentary on three consecutive verses of Sūrat al-Baqarah — 2:115, 2:116, and 2:117 — read through the lens of the Qur’an’s recurring declaration that everything in the heavens and the earth glorifies God (the tasbīḥ verses: 17:44, 24:41, 57:1, 59:1, 61:1, 64:1). The thesis is that these three verses form a compact, internally coherent theology of divine omnipresence, universal ownership, universal obedience, and effortless creative power — and that this theology is the doctrinal engine behind the “all roads lead to God” motif in 2:115’s fa-aynamā tuwallū fa-thamma wajhu Allāh (“wherever you turn, there is the Face of God”). I argue that the verse’s asbāb al-nuzūl (qibla controversy, prayer in the dark, supererogatory prayer on a moving mount) are not merely legal footnotes but a lived enactment of the cosmic truth that no direction is void of God. Drawing on al-Ṭabarī, al-Rāzī, al-Qurtubī, Ibn Kathīr, al-Jalālayn, and the Sufi readings of al-Qushayrī, al-Kāshānī, and Ibn ʿArabī, I show how the “Face of God” (wajh Allāh) is interpreted along a spectrum from the concrete (the direction of valid prayer, God’s pleasure) to the metaphysical (God’s essence, mercy, and self-disclosure). I then connect 2:116’s kullun lahu qānitūn (“all are devoutly obedient to Him”) directly to the tasbīḥ verses, demonstrating that the Qur’an teaches a two-tiered worship: the free, chosen praise of humans and jinn, and the necessary, law-bound “praise” of everything else. Finally, the story of Sulaymān and the fine horses (38:30–33) is integrated as a case study in the peril and the promise of created beauty: the love of good things is legitimate only when subordinated to, and made a means of, the remembrance (dhikr) of God. A thematic epilogue draws the threads together around a single insight: the whole cosmos is already a mosque, and the human vocation is to join — freely — a worship that is already underway.

Part I — The Text, the Translation, the Setting

The three verses under study fall in the great “qibla section” of Sūrat al-Baqarah, immediately preceding the celebrated passage on the change of the direction of prayer (2:142–150). They read:

Qur’an 2:115

وَلِلَّهِ الْمَشْرِقُ وَالْمَغْرِبُ ۚ فَأَيْنَمَا تُوَلُّوا فَثَمَّ وَجْهُ اللَّهِ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ وَاسِعٌ عَلِيمٌ

Wa-lillāhi l-mashriqu wa-l-maghrib, fa-aynamā tuwallū fa-thamma wajhu Llāh, inna Llāha wāsiʿun ʿalīm.

“And to God belong the east and the west. So wherever you turn, there is the Face of God. Indeed, God is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.”

Qur’an 2:116

وَقَالُوا اتَّخَذَ اللَّهُ وَلَدًا ۗ سُبْحَانَهُ ۖ بَل لَّهُ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ كُلٌّ لَّهُ قَانِتُونَ

Wa-qālū ttakhadha Llāhu waladan, subḥānah, bal lahu mā fī s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, kullun lahu qānitūn.

“And they say, ‘God has taken a son.’ Exalted is He! Rather, to Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth; all are devoutly obedient to Him.”

Qur’an 2:117

بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ وَإِذَا قَضَىٰ أَمْرًا فَإِنَّمَا يَقُولُ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ

Badīʿu s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, wa-idhā qaḍā amran fa-innamā yaqūlu lahu kun fa-yakūn.

“Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is.”

Together the three verses move from space (God owns all directions), to ontology (God owns all beings, who all obey Him), to causation (God originates and commands all things into being). It is a descent from the horizon to the atom, and the unifying claim is tawḥīd: there is nothing outside the reach, the ownership, the will, and the presence of the One.

Part II — Qur’an 2:115: “Wherever You Turn, There Is the Face of God”

The occasions of revelation (asbāb al-nuzūl)

The classical tradition preserves genuine disagreement about the setting of 2:115 — a disagreement that, far from weakening the verse, multiplies its applications. Al-Wāḥidī, in his Asbāb al-Nuzūl, opens his entry by acknowledging: “There is a scholarly disagreement regarding the occasion of revelation of this Qur’anic verse.” He then records, with its chain (through ʿAṭāʾ ibn Rabāḥ from Jābir), the report of a military expedition on which the narrator was present: “It was dark and so we could not determine the precise direction of the qibla.” The soldiers split into groups, each praying and drawing lines toward what it guessed was the qibla; at dawn they discovered their lines pointed the wrong way. When they asked the Prophet, the verse was revealed. Al-Wāḥidī pairs this with the report transmitted through ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿĀmir ibn Rabīʿa from his father, concerning praying while travelling in whatever direction one’s mount happened to face. quranx

The classical exegetes gather several distinct settings:

The qibla controversy. ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭalḥa reports from Ibn ʿAbbās that “the first part of the Qur’an that was abrogated was about the qibla.” After the emigration to Medina the Prophet prayed toward Bayt al-Maqdis (Jerusalem); the canonical figure, given by al-Barāʾ ibn ʿĀzib in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (no. 399, and again at no. 4486), is that “Allah’s Messenger prayed facing Bayt al-Maqdis for sixteen or seventeen months, but he loved to face the Kaʿba… so Allah revealed [2:144].” (Ibn ʿAbbās’s report gives a rounder figure of “some ten months.”) When the direction was changed to the Kaʿba of Ibrāhīm, the Jews of Medina objected — and, on this reading, 2:115 answered them: east and west alike belong to God. My Islam tafsir
Prayer in the dark or under cloud, when the qibla cannot be determined (the Jābir tradition above).
Supererogatory (nāfila) prayer while riding. Ibn ʿUmar, cited in Bukhārī, Muslim, al-Tirmidhī, and al-Nasāʾī, used to pray facing whatever direction his mount was headed and reported that the Prophet did the same, reciting this verse. Quran.com
The case of the Negus (al-Najāshī), the Christian king of Abyssinia who accepted Islam and died without ever having prayed toward the qibla — a tradition al-Ṭabarī records from Qatāda.

Al-Jalālayn crisply captures the two dominant settings: the verse was revealed “either when the Jews criticised the change of the direction of prayer, or concerning the supererogatory prayers on animal-back during journeys which one may pray in any direction.” Surah Quran

Al-Ṭabarī’s considered position

It is a common oversimplification to assign al-Ṭabarī a single occasion of revelation. In fact, in his Jāmiʿ al-Bayān al-Ṭabarī deliberately declines to fix one sabab. His considered ruling (wa-l-ṣawāb min al-qawl fī dhālik) is that God singled out “the east and the west” as His possession in order to inform the believers that He owns them and everything between them, and that all of it owes Him obedience — including turning toward whatever direction (qibla) He commands. He paraphrases the verse: “fa-wallū wujūhakum — ayyuhā al-muʾminūn — naḥwa wajhī, fa-innakum aynamā tuwallū wujūhakum fa-hunālika wajhī” (“so turn your faces, O believers, toward My face; for wherever you turn your faces, there is My face”). On the question of abrogation he holds the elegant middle position that “it came in a general form while a specific meaning was intended” (jāʾat majīʾ al-ʿumūm wa-l-murād al-khāṣṣ), and that the verse is therefore neither decisively abrogating nor abrogated, since it can bear several meanings and no claim of naskh can be made without decisive proof. Notably, al-Ṭabarī also transmits Mujāhid’s reading that “wherever you turn your faces in your supplication (duʿāʾ), there is My face — I answer you,” linking the verse to 40:60 (udʿūnī astajib lakum, “Call upon Me; I will respond to you”). tafsir + 3

The meaning of wajh Allāh (the Face of God)

The phrase fa-thamma wajhu Llāh is the theological heart of the verse, and the exegetes read wajh (“face”) along a graded spectrum:

The direction of valid prayer / God’s appointed qibla. Mujāhid glossed it: “Wherever you may be, you have a qibla to face” — and al-Ṭabarī transmits from him, “qiblat Allāh, so wherever you are, east or west, face it.” Ibn ʿAbbās (via ʿIkrima) said it simply means “God’s direction is wherever you face.” Alim + 2
God’s pleasure (riḍwān) and the path of His reward. Several authorities read wajh as God’s good pleasure, the acceptance He grants to sincere worship. Al-Jalālayn glosses “there is the Face of God” as “the direction of prayer with which He is pleased.” Surah Quran quranx
God’s essence and encompassing presence — but understood without spatial confinement. This is where the great theological caution enters. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, in Mafātīḥ al-Ghayb, treats 2:115 as “among the strongest proofs negating corporeality and affirming transcendence” (min aqwā al-dalāʾil ʿalā nafy al-tajsīm wa-ithbāt al-tanzīh). His argument is exact: directions are created, extended, and divisible, hence originated and in need of a Creator; therefore God, who owns and made them, transcends all direction and location. And if God had a literal, bodily face it would face one way only and could not be “wherever you turn” — so the verse itself refutes anthropomorphism. Al-Rāzī then enumerates the non-anthropomorphic senses of wajh: an honorific attribution like “House of God” (bayt Allāh) or “She-camel of God” (nāqat Allāh); purposeful orientation (qaṣd); God’s pleasure (citing 76:9 and 28:88); and wajh as an idiomatic filler. His conclusion: since place is impossible for God, the verse “must be interpreted” (fa-lā budda min taʾwīlihi) to mean “there is His qibla by which He is worshipped, or there is His mercy, His grace, the path of His reward, and the seeking of His good pleasure.” Al-Rāzī further observes that “fa-aynamā tuwallū” implies genuine option (takhyīr), and that real option exists in only two cases — voluntary prayer on a riding-mount and travel when determining the qibla is impossible in darkness — yet he ultimately prefers carrying the general wording on its generality so that it embraces every worshipper. quran-tafsir + 4

On the closing divine names, al-Rāzī warns against reading wāsiʿ (“All-Encompassing”) as spatial vastness (which would imply divisibility); it means vast in power and dominion, or vast in bounty and mercy. Ibn Kathīr, citing Ibn Jarīr (al-Ṭabarī), glosses wāsiʿ as God’s encompassing all creation with sufficiency and generosity, and ʿalīm (All-Knowing) as His knowledge from which “nothing escapes.” There is a subtle point of ʿaqīda here worth flagging honestly: al-Ṭabarī, in explaining one reported view, wrote that God “does not leave any place devoid of Him” — language Ibn Kathīr criticized as too close to affirming God’s essence in space. Al-Ṭabarī’s editor (Aḥmad Shākir) notes that al-Ṭabarī clarified elsewhere (at 58:7) that he meant the omnipresence of God’s knowledge (ʿilm), not the containment of His essence (dhāt) in any created thing. This is the mainstream Sunni resolution: God is present to all things by knowledge, power, and preservation, transcendent above spatial location. quran-tafsir tafsir

The Sufi and mystical reading: “all roads lead to God”

If the jurists read 2:115 as a concession (pray in any direction when you must), the Sufis read it as a revelation of the structure of reality. This is where the motif — wherever we see and whatever we see, all roads lead to God — finds its deepest classical expression.

Al-Qushayrī, in his Laṭāʾif al-Ishārāt, reads the “east and west” as the “eastern and western places of the hearts,” where the rising lights of gnosis (maʿrifa) dawn and the night-visitors of the lower self intrude. When “the Real takes over,” he writes, the traces of the created self are effaced, so “there is no witnessing of any trace… For as long as there is even a sliver of sensory perception… the qibla should be aimed for; but when those who have attributes become effaced, how can any attribute of theirs remain?” The outward qibla and the inward annihilation (fanāʾ) are two moments of one turning.

Al-Kāshānī’s mystical taʾwīl is even bolder: “east” is the realm of light and manifestation, “west” the realm of darkness and concealment; “in whichever direction you turn, outwardly and inwardly, there is the Face of God — that is, the Essence of God self-disclosed through the totality of His attributes… with no thing there except Him alone.” quranx

This verse became a locus classicus for Ibn ʿArabī and the school of waḥdat al-wujūd (the “unity of being”). For Ibn ʿArabī, “everything is a ‘face’ (wajh) of God” — the created things are the loci in which the Real discloses itself, so that “wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah” is literally true of every existent. William C. Chittick, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ibn ʿArabī, states the point precisely: “although everything is a ‘face’ (wajh) of God — ‘Wherever you turn, there is God’s face’ (Koran 2:115) — to distinguish among the omnipresent faces we need to know their names and recognize their ḥaqqs.” Crucially, this is not the pantheism it is often mistaken for. Chittick crystallizes Ibn ʿArabī’s dialectic in the formula that each thing is He/not He (huwa / lā huwa) — “Real/unreal, Being/nonexistence, Face/veil”: “Everything without exception is both God’s face (wajh)… and God’s veil (ḥijāb).” The classic image is the face in the mirror: the reflected face is genuinely there, “and yet it owns nothing of itself… it disappears the moment the real face turns away.” Creation is real, but its reality is borrowed, held in being at every instant by the One. The world is a theatre of divine self-disclosure (tajallī), not a second god. Sufi Philosophy

The same intuition animates the Persian mystical poetry of the tradition — “Open the eye so that the manifestation of the Beloved / is resplendent from door and wall” — and Rūmī’s insistence that the seeker who looks with the eye of the heart finds the Friend’s signature on every wall and in every direction. The theological guardrail, which the sober tradition never relaxes, is that God is munazzah — transcendent — even as He is maʿakum aynamā kuntum (“with you wherever you are,” 57:4): near by knowledge and self-disclosure, never confined by place.

Part III — Qur’an 2:116: “All Are Devoutly Obedient to Him” (kullun lahu qānitūn)

The refutation of “God has taken a son”

Verse 116 pivots from space to theology proper. Against those who say “God has taken a son” — the Christians regarding the Messiah, some Jews regarding ʿUzayr, and the pagan Arabs regarding the angels as “daughters of God” — the Qur’an first recoils: subḥānah (“Exalted is He!”), the very root (s-b-ḥ) that generates the word tasbīḥ, glorification. The refutation is then argued from ownership: “Rather, to Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth.” Al-Ṭabarī deploys the universal ownership as a logical proof against the need for an heir: one who owns all things needs no son. Al-Qurtubī adds the metaphysical argument that a child must be of the same genus (jins) as the parent, and nothing is of God’s genus — “There is nothing like unto Him” (42:11). The alleged “sons” — the Messiah, ʿUzayr, the angels — are themselves among the mā fī l-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, created and owned; they cannot be co-divine. Quran Gallery App Quran Gallery App

Qānitūn — the hinge word

The clause kullun lahu qānitūn (“all are devoutly obedient to Him”) is the bridge to the cosmic-glorification theme. The exegetes record a rich semantic field for qunūt:

Al-Ṭabarī notes that qunūt in Arabic carries three senses — obedience (ṭāʿa), standing (qiyām), and silence (refraining from speech). He then adjudicates: “The most fitting meaning of qunūt in ‘kullun lahu qānitūn’ is obedience and acknowledgment of servitude to God (al-ṭāʿa wa-l-iqrār li-Llāh… bi-l-ʿubūdiyya), by the testimony of their bodies through the marks of craftsmanship in them and their evidence of God’s oneness.” Decisively, he insists the verse is universal (ʿāmm): “it is not permissible to claim a specific meaning for a verse whose apparent sense is general” (wa-ghayr jāʾiz iddiʿāʾ khuṣūṣ fī āya ʿāmm ẓāhiruhā). All creation attests and submits to its Creator “either by the tongue or by evidential indication” (immā bi-l-lisān wa-immā bi-l-dalāla). tafsir + 2
Mujāhid, whose view al-Ṭabarī and Ibn Kathīr prefer, combined obedience and compelled submission, offering the arresting image: “the obedience of the disbeliever occurs when his shadow prostrates while he himself hates it.” He also glossed qānitūn by God’s creative command: “He says ‘Be a human,’ and he becomes a human; ‘Be a donkey,’ and it becomes a donkey” — obedience as the very responsiveness of a thing to God’s decree. Quran Surah Quran
Ibn Kathīr, endorsing “the choice of Ibn Jarīr,” summarizes: qunūt is “obedience and humble submission to God, and that is both religious (sharʿī) and existential/cosmic (qadarī),” comparing 13:15: “wa-lillāhi yasjudu man fī s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ ṭawʿan wa-karhan” (“to God prostrates whoever is in the heavens and the earth, willingly or unwillingly”). Quran
Al-Rāzī roots qunūt etymologically in al-dawām (perpetuity), then develops a striking philosophical reading: “the meaning of the verse is that the perpetual subsistence (dawām wa-baqāʾ) of all contingent beings is through Him and for His sake” — proving that the cosmos depends on God not only at its origination but continuously in its very existence. He also lists the evidential reading (all things bear witness, shāhida, to the Creator by the marks of craftsmanship) and the dominion reading (all are within His subjugation, fī mulkihi wa-qahrihi), and notes the pointed anecdote of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib silencing a Christian: if Jesus were God he would not worship another, for only a servant (ʿabd) fittingly worships — so the very “sons” people allege are themselves qānitūn.

The explicit link to the tasbīḥ verses

Here the internal coherence of the Qur’an becomes visible. What 2:116 calls qunūt — universal, willing-or-unwilling obedience — is precisely what the tasbīḥ verses call tasbīḥ, universal glorification. Read them together:

Qur’an 17:44

تُسَبِّحُ لَهُ السَّمَاوَاتُ السَّبْعُ وَالْأَرْضُ وَمَن فِيهِنَّ ۚ وَإِن مِّن شَيْءٍ إِلَّا يُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِهِ وَلَٰكِن لَّا تَفْقَهُونَ تَسْبِيحَهُمْ ۗ إِنَّهُ كَانَ حَلِيمًا غَفُورًا

Tusabbiḥu lahu s-samāwātu s-sabʿu wa-l-arḍu wa-man fīhinn, wa-in min shayʾin illā yusabbiḥu bi-ḥamdihi wa-lākin lā tafqahūna tasbīḥahum, innahu kāna ḥalīman ghafūrā.

“The seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them exalt Him. And there is not a thing except that it exalts [God] by His praise, but you do not understand their [way of] exaltation. Indeed, He is ever Forbearing and Forgiving.”

Qur’an 24:41

أَلَمْ تَرَ أَنَّ اللَّهَ يُسَبِّحُ لَهُ مَن فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَالطَّيْرُ صَافَّاتٍ ۖ كُلٌّ قَدْ عَلِمَ صَلَاتَهُ وَتَسْبِيحَهُ ۗ وَاللَّهُ عَلِيمٌ بِمَا يَفْعَلُونَ

A-lam tara anna Llāha yusabbiḥu lahu man fī s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍi wa-ṭ-ṭayru ṣāffāt, kullun qad ʿalima ṣalātahu wa-tasbīḥah, wa-Llāhu ʿalīmun bi-mā yafʿalūn.

“Do you not see that God is glorified by all those in the heavens and the earth, even the birds as they soar? Each knows its own manner of prayer and glorification. And God has full knowledge of all they do.”

Qur’an 57:1 (identically at 59:1 and 61:1)

سَبَّحَ لِلَّهِ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ وَهُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ

Sabbaḥa lillāhi mā fī s-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ, wa-huwa l-ʿazīzu l-ḥakīm.

“Whatever is in the heavens and the earth glorifies God, and He is the Almighty, the All-Wise.” (At 59:1 and 61:1 the wording is sabbaḥa lillāhi mā fī s-samāwāti wa-mā fī l-arḍ.)

Qur’an 64:1

يُسَبِّحُ لِلَّهِ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ ۖ لَهُ الْمُلْكُ وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ ۖ وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ

Yusabbiḥu lillāhi mā fī s-samāwāti wa-mā fī l-arḍ, lahu l-mulku wa-lahu l-ḥamd, wa-huwa ʿalā kulli shayʾin qadīr.

“Whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth glorifies God. To Him belongs the dominion, and to Him belongs [all] praise, and He is over all things competent.”

Three exegetical observations tie these to 2:116:

Same scope, same logic. 2:116’s “to Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth; all are devoutly obedient” is verbally echoed by 64:1’s “whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth glorifies God; to Him belongs the dominion.” Qunūt (obedience) and tasbīḥ (glorification) are two descriptions of one universal reality: the creation’s total belonging to and responsiveness toward its Owner. It is no accident that 2:116’s refutation opens with subḥānah — the exclamation is itself an act of tasbīḥ, and it summons the entire cosmos as a witness against the doctrine of divine offspring.
The two tiers of worship. The classical tafsīr of 17:44 (e.g., Ibn Kathīr, and the Maʿārif al-Qurʾān tradition) distinguishes the tasbīḥ that is self-evident (the conscious praise of angels, believing humans, and jinn) from the tasbīḥ of things ordinarily called “insensate.” Ibn Kathīr affirms the stronger of two views: “there is no created being that does not celebrate the praises of God,” and “you do not understand them, O mankind, because it is not in your languages” — this applying “to all creatures generally, animal, inanimate, and botanical.” He cites the report in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (no. 3579, Kitāb al-Manāqib), on the authority of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, that “we heard the food glorifying Allah (tusabbiḥ) as it was being eaten [by the Prophet].” This is the doctrine articulated precisely: humans and jinn, endowed with free will, choose whether to praise; everything else glorifies God by obeying, flawlessly and without deviation, the natural laws (sunan) He set for it. The orbit of a planet, the falling of rain, the photosynthesis of a leaf — each is a ṣalāt and a tasbīḥ in the sense of 24:41: “each knows its own manner of prayer and glorification.”
“You do not understand their glorification.” The Qur’an is careful (17:44) to say that human beings fail to grasp the manner of this cosmic praise — a built-in epistemic humility. The praise is real; our comprehension of its modality is limited. Modern readers may hear an invitation to see the regularities studied by the natural sciences as the very “language” of created tasbīḥ, though the Qur’an does not reduce the glorification to physical law alone.

The upshot: 2:116 is not an isolated polemic against the doctrine of divine sonship. It is the Baqarah statement of a theme the Qur’an sounds again and again — that the entire cosmos is a single, ordered, worshipping whole, and that to imagine God with a “son” is to misunderstand the most basic fact about everything that exists: it is all ʿabd (servant), never walad (offspring).

Part IV — Qur’an 2:117: “Be — and It Is” (kun fa-yakūn)

The third verse supplies the metaphysical ground of the first two. God is Badīʿ al-samāwāti wa-l-arḍ — the Originator who brings the heavens and the earth into being with no prior model. Ibn Kathīr, following Mujāhid and al-Suddī, explains badīʿ as “He created them when nothing resembling them existed”; the word shares its root with bidʿa, an unprecedented novelty. Commentators note the nuance that distinguishes badīʿ from khāliq: the Badīʿ is the one who originates a thing utterly without precedent, the like of which had never been done before. My Islam My Islam

Then: “When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be,’ and it is” (idhā qaḍā amran fa-innamā yaqūlu lahu kun fa-yakūn). This is creation without instrument, without effort, without delay — the sheer efficacy of the divine will. This closes the loop with 2:116 beautifully: the reason “all are devoutly obedient” (qānitūn) is that all are, at the root of their being, nothing but the standing response to the command kun. Mujāhid’s gloss on qānitūn — “He says ‘Be a human,’ and he becomes a human” — is precisely a kun fa-yakūn reading of obedience. To exist at all is already to have obeyed. And the same word answers the sonship claim of 2:116: a “son” is begotten from the substance of a parent, but everything God brings forth is created by command — Jesus included, whom the Qur’an elsewhere (3:59) likens to Adam: “He created him from dust, then said to him, ‘Be,’ and he was.” My Islam

The tasbīḥ verses close the same way: 64:1 ends “and He is over all things competent” (qadīr); 57:1 ends “and He is the Almighty, the All-Wise” (al-ʿazīz al-ḥakīm). Power (qudra) and wisdom (ḥikma) are exactly the attributes kun fa-yakūn dramatizes. The cosmos glorifies God because it is the flawless output of an all-powerful, all-wise command. Knowthequran Quran O

Part V — The Fine Steeds of Sulaymān (38:30–33): Love of Beauty and the Remembrance of God

The commentary is embellished, as requested, with the passage on Sulaymān (Solomon) and the horses. Its thematic relevance is exact: it dramatizes, in the life of a prophet, the danger that even the love of good and beautiful things can eclipse the dhikr (remembrance) of God — the very remembrance that 2:115–117 makes the axis of reality.

Qur’an 38:30–33

وَوَهَبْنَا لِدَاوُودَ سُلَيْمَانَ ۚ نِعْمَ الْعَبْدُ ۖ إِنَّهُ أَوَّابٌ ﴿٣٠﴾ إِذْ عُرِضَ عَلَيْهِ بِالْعَشِيِّ الصَّافِنَاتُ الْجِيَادُ ﴿٣١﴾ فَقَالَ إِنِّي أَحْبَبْتُ حُبَّ الْخَيْرِ عَن ذِكْرِ رَبِّي حَتَّىٰ تَوَارَتْ بِالْحِجَابِ ﴿٣٢﴾ رُدُّوهَا عَلَيَّ ۖ فَطَفِقَ مَسْحًا بِالسُّوقِ وَالْأَعْنَاقِ ﴿٣٣﴾

Wa-wahabnā li-Dāwūda Sulaymān, niʿma l-ʿabd, innahu awwāb. Idh ʿuriḍa ʿalayhi bi-l-ʿashiyyi ṣ-ṣāfinātu l-jiyād. Fa-qāla innī aḥbabtu ḥubba l-khayri ʿan dhikri rabbī ḥattā tawārat bi-l-ḥijāb. Ruddūhā ʿalayya fa-ṭafiqa masḥan bi-s-sūqi wa-l-aʿnāq.

“And to David We gave Solomon. How excellent a servant! Indeed, he was ever turning back [to God]. [Mention] when there were displayed before him in the afternoon the poised, swift steeds. And he said, ‘Indeed, I have loved the love of good things over the remembrance of my Lord’ — until [the sun] disappeared behind the veil [of night]. [He said,] ‘Return them to me,’ and he began to pass [his hand] over their legs and their necks.”

The frame is set by the epithet given to Sulaymān before the incident: niʿma l-ʿabd, innahu awwāb — “how excellent a servant; indeed he was ever-returning” (to God). Ibn Kathīr notes this is praise for Sulaymān’s constancy in worship and repentance. The point of the episode is not that a prophet sinned gravely, but that even the best of servants must guard the remembrance of God against the pull of legitimate delights. Alim

The dominant interpretation. Ibn Kathīr, Maʿārif al-Qurʾān, and the majority hold that the ṣāfināt al-jiyād — the war-horses that (per Mujāhid) “stand poised on three legs, the tip of the fourth touching the ground,” swift and nobly bred — were paraded before Sulaymān in his capacity as king. He became so absorbed in inspecting them (they were prepared for a good cause, jihād) that the time of the ʿAṣr prayer, or his customary afternoon devotion, slipped away “until [the sun] disappeared behind the veil” of night. Several of the salaf and tafsīr scholars state that he missed the prayer not deliberately but through forgetfulness, as happened to the Prophet himself on the Day of the Trench (Khandaq). On this reading, “I have loved the love of good things (al-khayr, here the horses) over/to the neglect of the remembrance of my Lord” is a confession of inadvertent heedlessness — grievous to a prophet even when unintended. Distressed at having let a created good interpose between himself and God, he ordered the horses brought back and “passed his hand over their legs and necks” — which the majority read as slaughtering or hamstringing them (sacrificing them for God’s sake), removing the thing that had distracted him and offering it in God’s cause. The lesson the mufassirūn draw: the noble prophet makes amends even for so slight a lapse.

The interpretive debate. Sayyid Abul Aʿlā Maududi, in Tafhīm al-Qurʾān, records his reservations about the dominant reading and offers a more literal alternative. He argues that the standard account has to assume three things the text does not state: (a) that the missed devotion was specifically the ʿAṣr prayer or a special litany, whereas the Qur’an says only “I so preferred this wealth that I became heedless of the remembrance of my Lord”; (b) that “until it disappeared behind the veil” refers to the sun setting, whereas the nearest antecedent is the horses (al-jiyād) of the previous verse — i.e., the horses galloped out of sight; and (c) that “he passed his hand over their legs and necks” means striking them with a sword (masḥan bi-s-sayf), whereas the plain sense is affectionate stroking. On Maududi’s reading, Sulaymān, on noticing that his delight in the horses had begun to distract him, did not destroy them but recalled them and lovingly stroked them — reordering, rather than annihilating, a legitimate love. (Maududi also cites, from Bukhārī and Muslim on the authority of Abū Hurayra, the several-chained traditions about the number of Sulaymān’s wives — variously 60, 70, 90, or 100 — to contextualize the surrounding narrative.)

Both readings, whatever their differences, converge on the essay’s theme: created beauty is not evil, but it is dangerous when it comes “over” (ʿan) the remembrance of God. The Arabic ḥubba l-khayri ʿan dhikri rabbī pivots on the preposition ʿan — “away from,” “in preference to,” “at the expense of.” The horses are khayr (good); the fault, if any, is only in the ordering. This is the exact inverse of 2:115: there, wherever you turn you meet God’s face; here, Sulaymān momentarily turned toward the steeds and, for a while, let the sign eclipse the Signified. The corrective — whether by sacrifice or by re-consecration — is to make the beloved thing itself a route back to God, so that the love of the horse becomes, once more, a road that leads to its Maker. The war-horse, after all, is elsewhere in the Qur’an (100:1–6) a sign that itself “runs” — and its right ordering turns even a passion for fine animals into an act of remembrance.

Part VI — The Modern Commentators: Reading the Three Verses Together

The modern tafsīr tradition tends to read 2:115–117 as a single argument about the nature of God against the parochialism of the human religious imagination.

Maududi stresses that 2:115 dismantles the idea that God “resides” in a direction: “God is neither eastern nor western… all places and directions are His, though He is not confined to any.” He reads wāsiʿ against the human tendency to imagine God as “limited, mean, narrow-minded, or poor in resources,” projecting human smallness onto the Divine. The change of qibla, on his reading, is therefore no proper subject for dispute. Surah Quran
Muhammad Asad renders wajh as God’s “all-pervading presence” and reads the sequence as the Qur’an’s assertion of divine omnipresence and omniscience against every attempt to localize or domesticate God.
Sayyid Qutb, in Fī Ẓilāl al-Qurʾān, characteristically reads the passage as liberating the believer’s God-consciousness from spatial and material confinement: the believer who knows that “wherever you turn, there is the Face of God” carries a portable sanctuary and answers only to the One — a theme consonant with Qutb’s larger insistence that tawḥīd reorders all of human life and society around God alone. (Qutb’s Ẓilāl is a thirty-volume commentary — its 30 volumes corresponding to the 30 juzʾ of the Qur’an — written 1951–1965, most of it composed in prison following the 1954 crackdown after an attempt on President Gamal Abdel Nasser; Qutb was executed on 29 August 1966.)
The Study Quran and the broader tradition note the verse’s dual register: it functions both as a fiqh ruling (validating prayer when the qibla is uncertain) and as a metaphysical statement (God transcends and encompasses all directions), and observe that the Sufi tradition took the latter register furthest.

Where the classical jurists guard against anthropomorphism and the Sufis press toward the vision of God’s omnipresence, the moderns tend to draw the ethical and civilizational corollary: a God who is everywhere present and who owns all directions cannot be captured by any tribe, temple, or territory — and the human being who grasps this is freed from every lesser allegiance.

Part VII — Thematic Epilogue: The Cosmos as a Mosque

Read as a unit, and in the light of the tasbīḥ verses, Qur’an 2:115–117 sketches a single, luminous picture.

First, space is not neutral. “To God belong the east and the west,” and so “wherever you turn, there is the Face of God.” There is no direction that is merely a direction; every horizon is a threshold, every bearing a qibla, because the One who owns all bearings is present — by knowledge, mercy, and self-disclosure — to each. The traveler lost in the dark, the worshipper on a swaying mount, the migrant torn from the sanctuary of Mecca: none of them is ever out of range of God. This is the doctrinal substance of the phrase all roads lead to God, disciplined by the tradition’s insistence that God is met on those roads without being confined to them.

Second, being is not neutral. “To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and the earth; all are devoutly obedient.” What the philosophers call contingency the Qur’an calls qunūt: the creation’s ceaseless, structural dependence on and responsiveness to its Owner. And this obedience is worship — the tasbīḥ that “the seven heavens and the earth and whatever is in them” perform continuously, “though you do not understand their glorification.” The distinction the tradition draws is the one at the heart of this essay: humans and jinn worship by choice; the galaxies, the birds “with wings outspread,” the mountains, and the grain of wheat worship by obedience to law — each, in the words of 24:41, “knowing its own prayer and glorification.” The universe is not an inert stage on which a few religious people occasionally pray. The universe is already praying. It is a mosque in perpetual congregation, and the call to the human being is not to inaugurate worship but to join it — consciously, freely, and therefore meritoriously.

Third, existence is command. “Originator of the heavens and the earth; when He decrees a matter, He says to it ‘Be,’ and it is.” The reason the cosmos obeys is that its very being is a “yes” to kun. To exist is to have already answered. Against this backdrop, the claim “God has taken a son” collapses: nothing that exists stands beside God as kin; all of it stands before Him as ʿabd.

And here the horses of Sulaymān return as the human parable inside the cosmic one. The rest of creation cannot fall out of remembrance; it praises God by the necessity of its nature. Only the free creature — the one whose worship is chosen — can let the love of a beautiful thing come ʿan dhikri rabbī, “over the remembrance of my Lord.” That is at once our peril and our dignity. The peril is that the sign eclipses the Signified, that we mistake the steed for the goal. The dignity is that we, alone among the creatures, can turn the love of the good thing back into a road to God — can pass our hand over its neck and, in that very gesture, remember its Maker. When we do, we align our chosen praise with the unchosen praise of everything else, and the human being finally takes his place in the one vast liturgy in which “there is not a thing except that it glorifies Him.”

To live inside 2:115, then, is to walk through a world in which no direction is empty, no thing is mute, and no love is innocent of God — a world where, if we would only open the eye of the heart, we would find that wherever we turn, and whatever we see, all roads lead home.

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