Al-An'am · Makki · ayah 36 of 165

Al-An'am 6:36

۞ إِنَّمَا يَسْتَجِيبُ ٱلَّذِينَ يَسْمَعُونَ ۘ وَٱلْمَوْتَىٰ يَبْعَثُهُمُ ٱللَّهُ ثُمَّ إِلَيْهِ يُرْجَعُونَ

“Only those who hear will respond. But the dead[301] - Allāh will resurrect them; then to Him they will be returned.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Only those who truly hear will answer the call; the rest Allah will raise, and every one of them will be returned to Him.

A reflection

The folder of arguments he won

A young man keeps a folder on his phone. It holds screenshots of online arguments about religion that he believes he won. A crushing reply to an atheist. A neat answer to a sectarian troll. Some nights he scrolls through it. It feels like a trophy cabinet.

This ayah quietly empties that cabinet. It ends: thumma ilayhi yurjaʿūn, then to Him they will be returned. The same closing phrase recurs across the Quran, in at least five other surahs. Every listener and every refuser, every debater and every bystander, will be brought back to Allah. The verb is passive. No one returns by their own arrangement. They are returned.

That changes what an argument is. It is not a contest that ends when one side runs out of replies. It is a moment in a much longer journey, whose last stage is with Him. One commentary says that only then will the deniers truly hear. Before that, nothing could reach them.

This is where the ego shrinks. The need to win now, in public, with screenshots, is the ego's need. It wants to be the judge of who was right. The ayah reserves judgement for the One to whom all return.

Does Allah need to remind us that everyone returns to Him, as if He wanted the last word? He needs nothing. The reminder is for the one who is exhausted by argument. It tells him he can stop trying to settle everything himself. He can say the truth well, and then let the matter go to its true destination.

Perhaps the young man deletes the folder. Or perhaps he keeps one screenshot: the one where he was unkind. A reminder of what he will be returned with.

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.