Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 62 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:62

وَلَقَدْ عَلِمْتُمُ ٱلنَّشْأَةَ ٱلْأُولَىٰ فَلَوْلَا تَذَكَّرُونَ

“And you have already known the first creation, so will you not remember?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The verb is not recall but keeping present, and what you are asked to keep present is something you already know.

A reflection

A thread round the finger

The first hearers of this ayah knew a small, homely picture for its last word. A man would tie a thread round his finger so that a need would not be forgotten by the evening. The lexicons record it, and the word for doing it is from this root.

That changes what the ayah is asking for, because English hears remember as retrieving something from the past.

The lexicons say dhikr is the opposite of forgetting. The thing you remember by is a tadhkira. To keep a matter ʿalā dhukr is to keep it where you will not lose it. And the word lives in two places, the heart and the tongue. So dhikr is both inward presence and outward speech: praise, prayer, a name spoken. From that it also means renown, since a man with dhikr is a man people speak well of.

So the request is not: cast your mind back. It is: keep this where you will not lose it, and say it.

And what is to be kept present is named in the first half of the ayah, and it is not obscure. You have already known the first creation.

That is why the question is phrased as a reproach rather than an instruction. Nobody is being told something new. The commentaries gloss it simply. You have known that Allah brought you into being when you were not a thing worth mentioning. Will you not remember that the One able to this is able to the other?

A man with a thread round his finger has not been given information. He has been given a way of not mislaying it for nine hours.

Most of what goes wrong in a believing life is of that kind. Not ignorance. Mislaying. And the remedy in the Quran's own vocabulary is not study. It is a thread, tied where you will see it, five times a day.

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.