Al-Hajj · Madani · ayah 66 of 78

Al-Hajj 22:66

وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِىٓ أَحْيَاكُمْ ثُمَّ يُمِيتُكُمْ ثُمَّ يُحْيِيكُمْ ۗ إِنَّ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ لَكَفُورٌ

“And He is the one who gave you life; then He causes you to die and then will [again] give you life. Indeed, mankind is ungrateful.”

Saheeh International

Essence

After rain, ships and a held sky, the last sign is you: given life, to die, to live again, and still slow to thank.

A reflection

The first document you never signed

For several ayat the surah has been saying 'Do you not see?' Look at the rain. Look at the green ground. Look at the ships and the sky. Now the camera turns round. 'And He is the One who gave you life.'

The last sign in the series is the person reading it.

One commentator lists what you were before that first life. Lifeless elements, then dust, then a drop, then a clinging clot, then a lump of flesh. The surah's own opening laid out these stages (22:5). None of them chose to become you.

Picture an old man sorting papers after a hospital stay. At the bottom of the box is his birth certificate, yellowed and soft at the folds. He reads his own name in someone else's handwriting. His parents' names, the date, the place. It strikes him for the first time that the most important document of his life carries no signature of his. He did not apply to exist.

That is where the ego meets its beginning. We speak of 'my life' as if we had built it. The ayah gently corrects the grammar. He gave you life. He will take it. He will give it again. In each of the three verbs, you are the one acted upon.

Allah does not remind us of this to win our applause. The One who made us from dust gains nothing from our praise. He reminds us so we stop living as authors of a story we never started, and turn to the One who did.

There is freedom in that. A person who believes he authored his own life must also hold it together alone. Every failure is his to absorb, every loss his to explain. The one who knows who gave the life can hand it back, each night, with trust. He is not the foundation of his own existence. He only has to be grateful for it, and to use it well.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.