Maryam · Makki · ayah 66 of 98

Maryam 19:66

وَيَقُولُ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنُ أَءِذَا مَا مِتُّ لَسَوْفَ أُخْرَجُ حَيًّا

“And man [i.e., the disbeliever] says, "When I have died, am I going to be brought forth alive?"”

Saheeh International

Essence

This sentence belongs to man, in the present tense, because every age crumbles its own dry bone and asks: really, after this?

A reflection

Man says it, and keeps saying it

It is tempting to read this ayah as a quotation from a long-dead pagan. Some Makkan scoffer said it, the Qur'an recorded it, and it belongs to history. A believer reads it with a slight sense of distance.

Look at how the Qur'an frames it. Not a man said, but wa-yaqūlu al-insān: and man says. The subject is the human being. The verb is in the present tense.

The commentaries take both choices seriously. One explains why the whole of humanity can be named when only some say it. This doubt, he writes, lies in everyone's nature at the start. Some leave it behind through clear proof; the doubt itself is natural to all. Another commentary says the present tense was chosen because this saying keeps being renewed, generation after generation, until the Trumpet is blown.

That changes who is being described. Not a pagan in a marketplace fourteen centuries ago. A sentence that every age produces in its own idiom. When I'm dead, I'm dead. Nobody has ever come back to tell us. It is a nice idea, but really?

And not only sceptics. Many believers have felt this sentence rise quietly inside them, most often at a graveside. The body is lowered, the earth goes in, and something whispers: is anything going to come of this? The faith is there, but the instinct of the eye says this is the end.

The ayah does not shame that instinct. It names it, as the voice of al-insān, the human being as such. Then, in the very next ayah, it answers it.

The first step towards an answer is admitting that the question lives in you too.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.