A Note On the Word Malak
- philhoraia
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
The word malik ملك means 'king' but it is the quranic spelling of ملاك malak 'angel'. Quran was originally written without dots and vowel markings. Let's look at S 1:4 without either.
ملك ٮوم الدٮں
The word here is understood in the sense of either 'owner' or 'king'. But it might also be read as 'angel'. Angel of the day of judgment.
If this is Allah, might Allah be an angel?
Consider what we read in this hadith:
He used to take with him the journey food for that (stay) and then come back to (his wife) Khadija to take his food like-wise again for another period to stay, till suddenly the Truth [al-haqq--an Allah name] descended upon him while he was in the cave of Hira. The angel came to him in it and asked him to read.
The relevant part in Arabic: حَتَّى فَجِئَهُ الْحَقُّ وَهْوَ فِي غَارِ حِرَاءٍ فَجَاءَهُ الْمَلَكُ فِيهِ فَقَالَ اقْرَأْ.
Al-haqq of course isn't necessarily referring to Allah.
But in another hadith we read:
Yahya reported:
I asked Abu Salama what was revealed first from the Qur'an. He said:" 0, the shrouded one." I said: Or" Recite." Jabir said: I am narrating to you what was narrated to us by the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ). He said: I stayed in Hira' for one month and when my stay was completed, I come down and went into the heart of the valley. Somebody called me aloud. I looked in front of me, behind me, on the right of my side and on my left, but I did not see any body. I was again called and I looked about but saw nothing. I was called again and raised my head, and there on the Throne in the open atmosphere he, i. e. Gabriel (peace be upon him) was sitting. I began to tremble on account of fear. I came to Khadija and said: Wrap me up. They wrapped me up and threw water on me and Allah, the Exalted and Glorious, sent down this: you who are shrouded! arise and deliver warning, your Lord magnify, your clothes cleanse."
Jibril is supposedly an angel and he is supposedly on the throne. Not a throne.
S 19:63-64 That is the Jannah, which we make our slaves inherit, those who were fearing. / And we do not descend except by your lord’s command. His is what is in front of us and what is behind us and what is between that. And your lord was not oblivion.
Verse 63 has 'we' saying that they make their slaves inherit the Jannah. Verse 64 has 'we' saying that they don't descend except by the command of the author's lord. If 'we' in this verse refers to angels, why might the preceding verse not?
Let's look at some more verses.
S 53:4-14 It is nothing but inspiration that is inspired. / The one severe in power has taught him, / A possessor of might and he ascended / When he is on the highest horizon. / Then he approached and dangled. / And he was at a distance of two bows or nearer. / So he inspired his slave what he inspired. / The heart did not lie what it saw. / So do you dispute with him about what he might see? / He saw him in another descent, / At Sidrat al-Muntaha.
Muslims will say that "the one severe in power" is the 'angel' Jibril. So is Allah not 'severe in power'? It uses the article so we should understand that Allah is being referred to. Verse 5 speaks of his dangling, as from a rope. In hadith, Allah descends some how to the lowest sky in order to find out if anyone's invoking it.
Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) as saying:
Our Lord, the Blessed and the Exalted, descends every night to the lowest heaven when one-third of the latter part of the night is left, and says: Who supplicates Me so that I may answer him? Who asks Me so that I may give to him? Who asks Me forgiveness so that I may forgive him?
"He inspired his slave". Was Ibn Aminah the slave of Jibril, an 'angel'? " He saw him in another descent, / At Sidrat al-Muntaha." Ibn Aminah was supposedly taken skyward by Jibril on a flying donkey. The sky is up. But we may understand that Allah came down from a higher sky to whichever sky Ibn Aminah was.
Quran speaks of someone called Malik. This is supposedly the angel in charge of hell.
S 43:76-78 And we did not wrong them but they were the wrongdoers. / And they called: Malik, let your lord kill us. He said: You are staying. / We have come to you with the truth but most of you hate the truth.
Is Malik referring to himself as 'we'? Why might the 'we' of verse 78 be referring to a different person? Or persons?
Malik is a boy's name attested to in ahadith. How might we know that Malik isn't a man?
A non-quranic hadith,:
Narrated Jundab bin `Abdullah:
Gabriel did not come to the Prophet (for some time) and so one of the Quraish women said, "His Satan has deserted him." So came the Divine Revelation: "By the forenoon And by the night When it is still! Your Lord (O Muhammad) has neither Forsaken you Nor hated you." (93.1-3)
Jibril, supposedly Gabriel and supposedly an angel, didn't come to Ibn Aminah for some time. A Qurayshi woman, apparently his aunt, said: "His Satan has deserted him". Going by the text, "Your lord" would imply that Jibril was his lord.
A verse speaks of 'the king.
S 59:23 He is Allah, who is no god but him, the king, the holy one, the peace, the believer, the dominant, the mighty, the tyrant, the arrogant. Praise be to Allah from what they associate!
As 'the king' and 'the angel' would be spelled the same in quranic spelling, we might theoretically translate الملك as 'the angel'.
In Ibn Kathir for S 3:40, we read: فلما تحقق زكريا ، عليه السلام ، هذه البشارة أخذ يتعجب من وجود الولد منه بعد الكبر ( قال رب أنى يكون لي غلام وقد بلغني الكبر وامرأتي عاقر قال ) أي الملك : ( كذلك الله يفعل ما يشاء ) أي : هكذا أمر الله عظيم ، لا يعجزه شيء ولا يتعاظمه أمر .
"So when Zakariyya, peace be upon him, knew this good news for certain, he began to wonder at the child's coming into existence from him after old age. (He said: Lord, how can I have a boy and old age has reached me and my woman is infertile? He said:) That is, the angel : (Thus: Allah does what he wills.) That is: Thus Allah's command is great, he is not incapable of anything nor is a matter too great for him."
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