Al-Mu'minun · Makki · ayah 35 of 118

Al-Mu'minun 23:35

أَيَعِدُكُمْ أَنَّكُمْ إِذَا مِتُّمْ وَكُنتُمْ تُرَابًا وَعِظَـٰمًا أَنَّكُم مُّخْرَجُونَ

“Does he promise you that when you have died and become dust and bones that you will be brought forth [once more]?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The chiefs turn resurrection into a joke: he promises you that after dust and bones you will be brought out again.

A reflection

Dust and bones, taken seriously

An archaeologist kneels in a trench, brushing soil from a skeleton with a paintbrush. The bones are brown and fragile. On one wrist there is still a small copper bracelet, green with age. She sits back on her heels. This was a person who chose that bracelet one morning.

The chiefs' objection is the oldest and most physical one. When you have died, and become dust and bones, he promises you will be brought out? One commentator notes the order: dust is mentioned first because it seemed the most impossible to them. Another possibility he gives is that the earliest ancestors were pure dust by then, and the recent dead still bones.

This objection deserves to be taken seriously, because it is still the one people feel. Bodies decay. They become soil. How could they return?

A classical theologian says the Quran does not stop to answer the chiefs here, because the weakness of their doubt is plain. But he gives the answer anyway. The One who returns them is able to do anything possible and knows everything that can be known. Nothing about dust is beyond such a One.

The Quran gives the same answer in its own words elsewhere. He will give them life who produced them the first time (36:79). The first making was from less than dust: from nothing. A return from dust is, if anything, the easier of the two.

What remains open is our imagination. We cannot picture it, and the Quran does not ask us to. It asks us to compare it with something we cannot picture either, yet know happened: our own coming into being.

Next time you see old bones in a museum, think of the bracelet. Then think of the One who made its wearer the first time.

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.