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qālat ʾinna l-mulūka ʾidhā dakhalū qaryatan ʾafsadūhā wa-jaʿalū ʾaʿizzata ʾahlihā ʾadhillatan wa-ka-dhālika yafʿalūna
She said, ‘Indeed when kings enter a town, they devastate it, and make the mightiest of its people the weakest. That is how they act.
— Ali Quli Qarai
Surah An-Naml - Verse 34
34. “She said: ‘Verily the kings, when they enter a township, despoil it, and make the noblest of its inhabitants the meanest; and thus they (always) do’.”
We should not rely only on our power; we must also keep the potentialities of others in mind. Those who were around Bilqiys said:
But Bilqiys warned them not to take the power of Solomon so little. Then, when the Queen understood their willing for fighting, while she had not inwardly any inclination for this job, in order to quench this thirst and to encounter this matter calculatedly, she said as follows:
This sentence means that the kings may kill a group of people, captivate another group, and finally they make others homeless, and they spoil their properties as much as they can. Then for the sake of some further emphasis, she said:
In fact, the Queen of Sheba, who was a king herself, knew the kings well that their program was summarized in too things: ‘despoil’, and ‘making the noblest into meanest’, because the kings used to think only over their own interests, not over the interests of nations and exalting them. These two things always contrast to each other.