Al-Jabbar

The root. Al-Jabbar comes from j-b-r, a root that carries two senses side by side: to mend or set right something broken — the word for setting a fractured bone uses this same root — and to compel or overpower, bending something to a will it cannot resist. Most Arabic roots settle on one direction; this one keeps both, and Al-Jabbar as a name draws on the pair together rather than choosing between them.

What it means here. Applied to Allah, Al-Jabbar carries both senses the root allows: the one whose will nothing can resist or oppose, and the one who mends what is broken — restoring the poor, the wronged, and the brokenhearted to a state repair could not otherwise reach. The same word applied to a person is a term of criticism, naming a tyrant who compels others by force alone; applied to Allah it turns positive, because the power described is not arbitrary domination but compulsion joined to restoration.

Where it is met. Al-Jabbar is named in the Surah al-Hashr cluster, alongside Al-Aziz and Al-Mutakabbir. The same root appears in a small number of other surahs, mostly describing a jabbar in the negative, human sense — a tyrant the Quran warns against becoming — which sharpens, by contrast, what it means for the word to describe Allah instead.