Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 49 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:49

قُلْ إِنَّ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ وَٱلْـَٔاخِرِينَ

“Say, [O Muḥammad], "Indeed, the former and later peoples”

Saheeh International

Essence

The first word is an instruction to publish, and what it publishes is that every human who ever lived is accounted for.

A reflection

Every human being who has ever lived

After a good night on the mackerel the quay is a sight that stops conversation. Fish come out of the hold by the ton and go across the floor by shovel. Nobody counts them. They are weighed. Each one was a whole animal with a whole life in the dark, and on that floor it is an eighth of a box.

This ayah is about a gathering that cannot be weighed, and one commentary pushes on precisely that.

It notices that the deniers had objected to being raised, and that the reply says gathered. Then it asks why that is the more astonishing claim, and answers in a sentence. The assembling of a number of the dead that nobody knows but Allah, in one single day, is more wondrous than the raising itself.

Sit with the arithmetic for a moment without reaching for a figure, because the ayah does not give one. Everyone who has ever been born. Every infant who did not live a week. Every unrecorded person in every unrecorded century. The ones with monuments and the ones whose names were never written anywhere. Former and later, in one appointment.

And now the thing it does to a person's self-importance, which is the point of reading it slowly. You spend most of your life maintaining a sense of being distinct: your work, your difference, the particular shape of your difficulties. That is not an illusion, and this ayah does not say it is. It says every single one of the others has one too.

Someone may ask why God would describe His own reach over all generations at all. He is free of all need (35:15), and tells us plainly that if we are ungrateful, He has no need of us (39:7). A man who lists his powers is covering something. Allah is stating what is the case.

And the comfort in it is exact. On that quay nobody counts the fish. In this ayah nobody is weighed by the ton.

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.