Open HikmahAll Namesالْكَبِير
Al-Kabīr
The Most Great
Greatness that surpasses all measurement; every created greatness is finite and contingent while His is absolute and essential.
When the believer contemplates Al-Kabīr, he recognises that all greatness he perceives in creation — whether of wealth, station, intellect, or power — is borrowed, finite, and utterly dependent upon the One whose greatness alone is essential and absolute. This recognition dissolves arrogance from the heart, for the servant understands that to magnify himself before the truly Great is the height of ignorance, while to magnify Allah in every act of worship and speech is the beginning of wisdom. He responds by exalting the name of his Lord through takbīr in prayer, by belittling every obstacle that stands between him and obedience, and by refusing to bow his neck to any created power however imposing it may appear. In this way, the reflection of Al-Kabīr in the believer's life is a life shaped by humility before Allah, courage before creation, and a settled certainty that nothing in the heavens or the earth can rival the majesty of the One he serves.
This is the most frequent Quranic pairing (e.g., 4:34, 22:62, 31:30, 34:23, 40:12), where Al-ʿAliyy affirms Allah's transcendent loftiness of essence while Al-Kabīr affirms the absolute grandeur of His attributes, together negating any diminishment of Divine majesty in contexts of judgment and human accountability.
In 13:9, Al-Kabīr is coupled with Al-Mutaʿālī immediately after 'Knower of the unseen and the witnessed,' balancing His comprehensive knowledge of all created things (however small) with His transcendence above and greatness beyond them all.
In verses like 34:23 and 13:9, the pairing (through ʿālim al-ghayb wa-sh-shahādah) shows that His greatness (Al-Kabīr) is not remote abstraction but is joined to exhaustive knowledge of every detail, so nothing escapes the majesty that encompasses it.
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