Surah An-Nisa Verse 1

504 Nafs may mean: (1) soul; (2) self; (3) person, living person; (4) will, good pleasure, as in 4:4 below. Minha; I follow the construction suggested by Imam RazT. The particle min would then suggest here not a portion or a source of something else, but a species, a nature, a similarity. The pronoun Ha refers of course to Nafs (Cf. 7:189). (R). 505 All our mutual rights and duties are referred to Allah. We are His creatures: His Will is the standard and measure of Good; and our duties are measured by our conformity with His Will. "Our wills are ours, to make them Thine," says Tennyson (In Memoriam). Among ourselves (human beings) our mutual rights and dudes arise out of Allah's Law, the sense of Right that is implanted in us by Him. 506 Among the most wonderful mysteries of our nature is that of sex. The unregenerate male is apt, in the pride of his physical strength, to forget the allimportant part which the female plays in his very existence, and in all the social relationships that arise in our collective human lives. The mother that bore us must ever have our reverence. The wife, through whom we enter parentage, must have our reverence. Sex, which governs so much our physical life, and has so much influence on our emotional and higher nature, deserves-not our fear, or our contempt, or our amused indulgence, but-our reverence in the highest sense of the term (Cf. 30:21). With this fitting introduction we enter on a discussion of women, orphans, and family relationships.