Page 430
quli dʿū lladhīna zaʿamtum min dūni llāhi lā yamlikūna mithqāla dharratin fī s-samāwāti wa-lā fī l-ʾarḍi wa-mā lahum fīhimā min shirkin wa-mā lahū minhum min ẓahīrin
Say, ‘Invoke those whom you claim [to be gods] besides Allah! They do not control [even] an atom’s weight in the heavens or the earth, nor do they have any share in [either of] them, nor is any of them His helper.’
— Ali Quli Qarai
Surah As-Saba- Verse 22
22. “Say: ‘Call upon those whom you have asserted apart from Allah; they own not the weight of an atom in the heavens nor in the earth, nor for them is any partnership in either (of them), nor for Him is (there) from among them any one to back Him up.”
No one other than Allah is the owner of the heavens and the earth, nor is any one His partner and helper. At the beginning of this holy Surah it was said that a considerable part of the verses of this Surah is about Origin and the End and the true beliefs, so that by joining them together there comes into being a collection of true Qur’anic wisdom. In this section of verses, in fact, the Holy Qur’an takes the polytheists into trial and by some logical questions it knocks them out. It makes manifest their baseless decayed logic in the field of intercession of idols.
In these verses the Qur’an addresses the Prophet (S) for five times and commands him to say to them something, and every time it propounds a new matter in connection with the fate of idols and idolatry, in a manner that at the end anybody feels that there is no empty school worse than the school of idolism, and that it can not be called even a school of thought and a religion. By the above verse, it implies that they may call those that they consider (as their object of worship) other than Allah, but they should know that these idols never answer their pray nor do they solve any problem of theirs.
It says:
Then, the Qur’an refers to the reasoning of this statement and implies that it is for the sake that these hand-made objects of worship do not own anything. It continues saying:
If they were able to solve any problem they would have one of these three qualities: they owned something in the heavens and the earth; or, at least, they were partner of Allah in the creation, or, at last, they were assistants of Allah in something of these affairs. While it is clear that ‘necessary being’ is only One and the rest are all ‘possible being that are dependant to Him, so that if He takes His grace from them, all of them will pave the way of destruction.
It is interesting that when it says:
it means that the beings which do not own anything as heavy as the weight of an atom in the endless heavens and in the vast earth, what kind of difficulty can they remove from themselves than from you?