﴾and proportioned﴿—namely, His proportioning of the human being. ﴾Who created and proportioned﴿: He proportions everything in the manner befitting it.
﴾And Who determined and guided﴿. He—Mighty and Majestic is He—determined all things, as He Most High says:
﴾He created everything and determined it with precise determination﴿ [al-Furqān: 2].
He determined its present state, its ultimate end, its essence, and its attributes. Everything has a fixed measure: lifespans are fixed, circumstances are fixed, bodies are limited, and everything has been precisely determined, as He Most High says:
﴾He created everything and determined it with precise determination﴿.
His words, ﴾and guided﴿, encompass both revealed guidance and creational guidance. Creational guidance means that Allah has guided everything to the purpose for which He created it. Pharaoh said to Moses:
﴾“Who, then, is the Lord of you two, O Moses?” He replied, “Our Lord is He who gave everything its form, then guided it.”﴿ [Tā Hā: 49, 50].
You will find that Allah Most High has guided every creature to what it needs. When an infant emerges from its mother’s womb and seeks to nurse, Allah—Mighty and Majestic is He—guides it to the breast from which it suckles. Consider even the lowliest insects. Ants, for example, build their homes only in an elevated place, upon a rise in the ground, fearing that floodwaters might enter and ruin them. After rainfall, if there are grains of food in their burrows or homes, they bring them out when the sun rises and spread them so that they will not rot. Before storing a grain, they eat away its ends so that it will not sprout and spoil their provisions. This is something observed and established by experience. Who guided them to do so? It is Allah—Mighty and Majestic is He. This is creational guidance, meaning that He has guided every creature to what it needs.
As for revealed guidance—which is the more important of the two for the children of Adam—Allah—Mighty and Majestic is He—has also made it clear. Allah has guided even the disbelievers, meaning that He has made it clear to them. Allah Most High says:
﴾As for Thamūd, We guided them, but they preferred blindness to guidance﴿ [Fussilat: 17].
Revealed guidance is the purpose of the life of the children of Adam:
﴾I created jinn and mankind only to worship Me﴿ [al-Dhāriyāt: 56].
Allah has informed us of this only so that—