Al-Mu'minun · Makki · ayah 83 of 118

Al-Mu'minun 23:83

لَقَدْ وُعِدْنَا نَحْنُ وَءَابَآؤُنَا هَـٰذَا مِن قَبْلُ إِنْ هَـٰذَآ إِلَّآ أَسَـٰطِيرُ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ

“We have been promised this, we and our forefathers, before; this is not but legends of the former peoples."”

Saheeh International

Essence

They treated an old promise as a stale story, as if a promise grows false by being repeated and not yet kept.

A reflection

Three years in, and nothing has paid out

A twenty-five-year-old looks at his payslip and grumbles about the pension deduction. 'Three years I've been paying into this,' he says, 'and I've seen nothing.' His older colleague laughs. 'You're not supposed to see anything yet. It pays out at the end.'

That is the shape of the objection in this ayah. We were promised this, we and our fathers, before. Commentaries spell out their reasoning. Messengers had promised their forefathers the same resurrection. Generations passed. Nothing happened, so they concluded it was never going to. One major commentator adds a sharp detail: they seem to have expected the return to happen in this world. When it did not, they filed it under old tales.

The argument has a modern form. Every generation of believers has been told the Day is coming. Two thousand years, fourteen hundred years, and still the world turns. Is that not evidence against it?

It is worth answering fairly. A promise with no stated date is not broken by delay. The Quran never gave a date. It insists, on the contrary, that knowledge of the Hour is with Allah alone (31:34). The promise was never 'soon in your lifetime on this earth'. It was 'after death'. And their fathers, the very people they cited, had already died. For them, the promise was no longer future at all.

Notice too the commentary's point that prophets spoke of the resurrection to everyone who dies. Hearing the same promise from many messengers across centuries is not evidence it is false. If anything, it is a strange consistency for a story that keeps being called invented.

What remains open is the wait itself. It is hard to live by a promise you cannot see. That is precisely what the word faith is for.

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.