(107) “If Allah afflicts you with harm, none can remove it except Him; and if He intends good for you, none can repel His bounty. He bestows it upon whichever of His servants He wills. And He is the All-Forgiving, the Most Merciful.”

This is among the greatest proofs that Allah alone deserves to be worshipped. He is the One who brings benefit and harm, gives and withholds. If He afflicts someone with harm—such as poverty, illness, or the like—“none can remove it except Him.” For if all created beings were to unite to benefit someone in any way, they could benefit him only with what Allah had decreed; and if they were to unite to harm someone, they could cause him no harm if Allah had not willed it. He therefore says: “If He intends good for you, none can repel His bounty.” That is, no created being can repel His bounty and benevolence. As Allah Most High says: “Whatever mercy Allah opens up for people, none can withhold; and whatever He withholds, none can release thereafter.”

“He bestows it upon whichever of His servants He wills.” That is, He singles out for His mercy whomever He wills among His creation. Allah is the Possessor of immense bounty. “And He is the All-Forgiving” of every lapse. He guides His servant to the means of attaining His forgiveness; then, when the servant undertakes them, Allah forgives all his sins, great and small.

“The Most Merciful”: His mercy encompasses all things, and His generosity reaches every created being, such that none can dispense with His benevolence for even the blink of an eye. Once the servant knows through conclusive proof that Allah alone bestows blessings, removes afflictions, grants good things, and dispels evils and distress—and that no created being has any power over these things except insofar as Allah brings them about through its agency—he becomes certain that Allah is the Truth and that whatever they invoke besides Him is falsehood.

For this reason—after presenting the clear proof—He then says: