"Indeed I am near": what Al-Baqarah 186 says

A verse about answered prayer, set in the middle of the fasting verses and answered without an intermediary - read in Al-Tafsir al-Muyassar and in al-Safi and al-Mizan, with its words counted against the mushaf.

A bedouin asked the Prophet a very plain question: is our Lord near, so that we may whisper to Him, or far, so that we must call out? The answer came as a verse.

The verse

And when My servants ask you, [O Muhammad], concerning Me - indeed I am near. I respond to the invocation of the supplicant when he calls upon Me. So let them respond to Me [by obedience] and believe in Me that they may be [rightly] guided.

Al-Baqarah 186

That question and its answer are what this article follows: what kind of nearness is this, how far does the promise of an answer reach, and why does someone pray and see no answer?

Where it sits

The first thing to notice is that the verse is not in a passage about prayer. It is in a passage about fasting. Before it stands the Ramadan verse — "The month of Ramadhan [is that] in which was revealed the Qur'an" (Al-Baqarah 185) — and after it the verse that opens the night of the fast: "It has been made permissible for you the night preceding fasting to go to your wives" (Al-Baqarah 187).

So the verse is fenced on both sides by rulings about the fast. The position is part of the meaning: whoever fasts is carrying hunger for the sake of the unseen, and this is where he is told the unseen is near.

It is worth noticing that the Ramadan verse has already said "Allah intends for you ease and does not intend for you hardship". The relief is in the ruling; the nearness is in the verse right after it.

What the wording does

Al-Mizan counts seven things in how the verse is built, each of them a choice that could have gone otherwise:

It is in the first person throughout, not the third.
It says "My servants", not "the people".
It drops the intermediary in the answer: "indeed I am near", not "say that He is near" — although the question was put to the Prophet.
It adds the emphatic particle.
It answers with the adjective "near" rather than a verb of approaching, which marks the nearness as settled and continuous.
It states the response with an imperfect verb, "I respond", which marks it as renewed and ongoing.
It qualifies the response with "when he calls upon Me" — a qualification that adds nothing to "the supplicant", being the same thing said twice, and so marks the call as answered without further condition, as in "Call upon Me; I will respond to you" (Ghafir 60).

To those seven al-Mizan adds an observation about counting: the verse repeats the speaker's own pronoun seven times despite its brevity, and it holds this to be the only verse in the Quran of that description. The reader can count them in the Arabic for himself: ibadi, anni, fa-inni, ujibu, da'ani, li, bi — seven, in seventeen words.

The Sunni reading: Al-Tafsir al-Muyassar

Al-Tafsir al-Muyassar, issued by the King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran, supplies the command the verse omits: "and when My servants ask you, O Prophet, about Me, say to them: I am near to them". It reads "so let them respond to Me" as obedience in what He commanded and forbade, and "that they may be guided" as being guided to what serves them in religion and in this world. Then it puts a doctrinal limit on the nearness in plain words: it is the nearness befitting His majesty.

The Arabic of that gloss is quoted in full on the Arabic version of this page; the English here is ours.

The Shia reading: al-Safi and al-Mizan

Tafsir al-Safi

Al-Fayd al-Kashani begins with the occasion of revelation — the bedouin's question above, reported as the reason the verse came down. Al-Muyassar gives no occasion for the verse.

He then answers the question the verse's own words leave open — what is this nearness? — by referring it to God's being-with: His nearness, he writes, is an expression of His being with His creation, as in "He is with you wherever you are". And just as His being with things is not by mingling or interpenetration, and His being apart from them is not by separation or removal, so His nearness is not by assembly or place, and His distance is not by parting — but in another manner, nearer than this nearness and farther than this distance. He cites "We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein" (Qaf 16) and the verse of Al-Waqiah: "And Our angels are nearer to him than you, but you do not see" (Al-Waqiah 85) — whose Arabic reads "and We are nearer to him than you are".

Then he raises a precise difficulty: how can one thing be near another while that other is far from it? His answer:

This is as when you have someone you love who is present beside you while you are blind to him — you do not see him and are not aware of his presence. He is near to you, and you are far from him.

So the nearness in the verse runs one way. He is near; it is the servant who may be far from someone who is already present.

On "and believe in Me" al-Safi narrates from al-Sadiq a specific content for the belief required: that they be certain He is able to give them what they asked for. The belief asked for here is not belief in general.

Tafsir al-Mizan

Al-Tabatabai builds the nearness on ownership. Because His ownership of His servants is a real ownership, not the ownership people have of one another, it follows that He is nearer to them than any relation one might measure against: nearer to His creation, he writes, than anything that could be supposed, and so near without qualification. He adds to the two verses above "Allah intervenes between a man and his heart" (Al-Anfal 24) — the heart here being the perceiving self.

That same verse of Al-Anfal spells out the command this verse gives in brief: "respond to Allah and to the Messenger when he calls you to that which gives you life". The response asked of the servant is a response to a call toward what gives him life.

From that same ownership al-Mizan then draws the conclusion that an answer is always possible: the dominion and the encompassing hold on every reckoning without exception, so there is no door in the matter already shut and finished with, such that the answering of a prayer would be ruled out.

As for the two commands that close the verse — "so let them respond to Me and believe in Me" — al-Mizan reads them as following by implication from what precedes: that God is near, that nothing stands between Him and their calling, and that He is the one calling them to call on Him; so let them answer that call, and let them be certain that He is near and answering.

Why is my prayer not answered?

This is the heaviest question the verse carries, and it is where the two Shia commentaries have the most to say. The two main answers face opposite directions: one examines the one praying, the other examines what "an answer" means.

Examining the supplicant. Al-Safi gives several faces of it. One puts the fault in the one being asked — or rather, in not knowing Him:

You call upon one you do not know, and ask for what you do not understand… Whoever does not witness the lowliness of his own self, his heart and his inmost part beneath the power of God has passed judgement on God by his asking, and supposed his asking was prayer; and passing judgement on God is a form of presumption toward Him.

Another is that prayer has a direction, and missing it misses the mark. Asked why people pray without seeing an answer, al-Sadiq answers that whoever obeys God in what He commanded and then calls on Him from the direction of prayer is answered — and, asked what that direction is, describes it in order: you begin by praising God, recalling His blessings upon you, thanking Him, then invoking blessings on the Prophet, then recalling your sins, confessing them, and seeking refuge from them.

A third is keeping the covenant: because you do not fulfill God's covenant — and God says "fulfill My covenant [upon you] that I will fulfill your covenant" (Al-Baqarah 40) — and by God, had you fulfilled it for God, He would have fulfilled it for you. To these al-Safi adds that whoever would like his prayer answered should make his earnings wholesome.

What an answer means. Al-Mizan works this out through Ali's counsel to his son al-Husayn, in the Nahj al-Balagha:

Do not let the slowness of His answer make you despair, for the gift is according to the intention. Sometimes the answer is delayed so that the reward of the asker may be greater and the gift to the hopeful more generous. Sometimes you ask for a thing and are not given it, and are given something better than it, now or later, or it is turned away from you for what is better for you. For many a matter you have sought held the ruin of your religion had you been given it.

The clause "the gift is according to the intention" is, as al-Mizan says, the most comprehensive thing said about the link between asking and answering: what is given is what the asker's inmost self actually settled on, not what his words disclosed. On that principle the cases where an answer seems to have failed resolve: delay; substitution of something better in this world; substitution of something better in the next; or diversion to what suits the asker better. Someone who asks for an untroubled blessing has in truth asked for a slow answer — because granted at once it would not have been untroubled.

Al-Mizan then narrates what makes an answer three doors rather than one:

There is no believer who calls upon God but that He answers: either He hastens it for him in this world, or He defers it for him in the next, or He remits some of his sins in the measure of his calling — so long as he does not pray for something sinful.

And al-Safi carries a report that turns the question upside down: that a servant's request may be held back not as a refusal but to keep him calling. God says to the two angels, I have answered him, but hold back his request, for I love to hear his voice; and of another, hasten his request to him, for I dislike his voice.

Where they agree

That the verse omits a "say", and that the omission is deliberate: al-Muyassar supplies it, al-Mizan counts it as the first of the seven points.
That the nearness asserted is not nearness of distance: al-Muyassar limits it to what befits His majesty, al-Safi refers it to being-with rather than mingling, al-Mizan builds it on ownership rather than place.
That "so let them respond to Me" is obedience, not merely words — stated by al-Muyassar, held by al-Mizan, and the sense of al-Safi's report on the direction of prayer.
That the promise of an answer is unqualified in the verse's own wording, and that what looks like a failure lies in the supplicant or in the meaning of the gift, not in the promise.
Al-Mizan notes that the hadith "prayer is the believer's weapon" is narrated by both schools — the standing of prayer itself is not a point of dispute between them.

What each commentary adds

Al-Muyassar is brief: it supplies the omitted command, reads the responding as obedience, limits the nearness to what befits His majesty, and does not enter into how.
Al-Safi gives the occasion of revelation, works out the nearness through being-with and through the distance running only from the servant's side, and gathers the largest body of reports on why an answer is delayed — from not knowing the One called, to the direction of prayer, to the covenant, to one's earnings, to a request held back out of love for the caller's voice.
Al-Mizan analyses the wording into seven points, builds the nearness on real ownership, derives from it that an answer is always possible, and refers the differences in answering to "the gift is according to the intention".

Counted against the mushaf

The word for God speaking of His own answering, ujibu, occurs nowhere else in the Quran. The promise in Ghafir 60 uses a different form, astajib.
"Indeed I am near" — His describing Himself as near in the first person — likewise occurs only here. The bare word for "near" occurs in fourteen verses across ten surahs, and in all its forms in twenty-six verses; among those describing Him are "Indeed, my Lord is near and responsive" (Hud 61) and "Indeed, He is Hearing and near" (Saba 50) — and not one of them is in the first person.
The word for "the caller" occurs in four verses, and this is the only one in which the caller is the one praying. In the other three he is the summoner on the Day of Judgement: "everyone will follow [the call of] the Caller" (Taha 108), "Racing ahead toward the Caller" (Al-Qamar 8), and likewise Al-Qamar 6.
"Closer to him" occurs in two verses only, both about God's nearness to man — Qaf 16 and Al-Waqiah 85 — and these are the two that al-Safi and al-Mizan both cite.

What the verse says, and what it does not

It establishes a nearness and promises an answer, and does not state how the nearness works; which is why each commentary had to qualify it with something — majesty, or being-with, or ownership.
It makes the answer conditional on no form of words, no time and no place. Its one qualification is "when he calls upon Me", which al-Mizan holds to be the condition itself rather than a condition added to it.
It does not say that the thing asked for is given as asked; nor does it say the opposite. That silence is where the commentators' discussion of delay and substitution sits.
It does not make prayer a substitute for obedience: the command that follows it is "so let them respond to Me", which all three read as obedience.
Its place is in the rulings of the fast, not in a passage of its own about prayer.
What is set out above are the commentators' own positions, presented as they stand and not weighed against one another; the full texts sit on the page of each verse.

Sources

Quran text: the Madinah mushaf, the narration of Hafs from Asim, King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran. The English is the Sahih International translation this site serves.
Al-Tafsir al-Muyassar — a panel of commentators, King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran.
Tafsir al-Safi — al-Fayd al-Kashani.
Al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Quran — Sayyid Muhammad Husayn al-Tabatabai.

The Arabic of every quotation is on the Arabic version of this page and on the page of each verse. The English renderings of the commentaries are ours.