Al-Mu'minun · Makki · ayah 37 of 118

Al-Mu'minun 23:37

إِنْ هِىَ إِلَّا حَيَاتُنَا ٱلدُّنْيَا نَمُوتُ وَنَحْيَا وَمَا نَحْنُ بِمَبْعُوثِينَ

“It [i.e., life] is not but our worldly life - we die and live, but we will not be resurrected.”

Saheeh International

Essence

There is only this near life, the chiefs said: some die, some are born, and no one will ever be roused again.

A reflection

People as crops

At a funeral without prayers, the celebrant speaks warmly. He lives on in our memories, she says, and in the great circle of life. People nod. It is meant as comfort. On the way out, a teenager asks her father quietly what the circle of life actually means for Grandad.

The chiefs had their own version of that circle. We die and we live, they said. The commentators explain that they did not mean the same person dying and living again. They meant that some die and others are born. One early authority, quoted by a commentator, put their view in a picture: people are like crops, this one harvested, that one sprouting.

It is a calm, even poetic view, and many people hold it today. Generations come and go like seasons. Nothing is lost, because new people replace the old.

But follow the picture through. If people are crops, then nobody in particular matters. The child who died young was just an early harvest. The grief of a mother is weather. A life of sacrifice and a life of cruelty end in the same field.

The Quran refuses that flattening. Later in this very surah, Allah asks a question. Did you think We created you in vain, and that you would not be returned to Us (23:115)? A crop is grown for someone else's use. A human being is created to be answerable.

When someone offers you the circle of life as comfort, take the kindness in it. Then remember that you are not a crop. Someone particular made you, and someone particular will raise you.

The full entry has 2 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.