Ya-Sin · Makki · ayah 70 of 83

Ya-Sin 36:70

لِّيُنذِرَ مَن كَانَ حَيًّا وَيَحِقَّ ٱلْقَوْلُ عَلَى ٱلْكَـٰفِرِينَ

“To warn whoever is alive[1280] and justify the word [i.e., decree] against the disbelievers.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The warning is breath on embers: it reaches everyone, but it only catches where something in the heart is still alight.

A reflection

Alive is not the same as breathing

Read quickly, to warn whoever is alive sounds like a statement about everybody. Everyone reading it is alive. So the Quran warns all of us, and that is that.

The commentators read the word far more searchingly. One early authority glossed alive as alive of heart, alive of sight. Another said simply: whoever has sense. One of the great commentaries explains it as the one alive of heart. He understands what is said to him and grasps what is made clear. Not dead in the heart and dull. The concise commentaries say: alive of heart, with insight lit up.

Then notice who stands opposite them in the same ayah. Not the dead, but the disbelievers. One commentator draws the conclusion. Placing them over against whoever is alive hints that, empty of what life produces, such as knowing and understanding, they are in truth dead. Another puts it plainly: the disbeliever is like the dead, because he does not reflect or think.

So the ayah divides people not by whether they breathe, but by whether anything in them responds. Another commentator holds both truths together. The Quran warns every living person on the face of the earth, as the Quran says elsewhere: and whoever it reaches. But only the one alive of heart benefits from the warning.

That turns the ayah from a statement about others into a question about you. When a warning in the Quran reaches you, what happens? Does anything stir? Or does it pass over you like rain over a stone?

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.