At-Taghabun · Madani · ayah 7 of 18

At-Taghabun 64:7

زَعَمَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوٓا۟ أَن لَّن يُبْعَثُوا۟ ۚ قُلْ بَلَىٰ وَرَبِّى لَتُبْعَثُنَّ ثُمَّ لَتُنَبَّؤُنَّ بِمَا عَمِلْتُمْ ۚ وَذَٰلِكَ عَلَى ٱللَّهِ يَسِيرٌ

“Those who disbelieve have claimed that they will never be resurrected. Say, "Yes, by my Lord, you will surely be resurrected; then you will surely be informed of what you did. And that, for Allāh, is easy."”

Saheeh International

Essence

They claimed, as if it were knowledge, that there would be no resurrection; the answer commanded in reply is a sworn, doubly emphatic yes.

A reflection

A claim wearing the costume of knowledge

Zaʿama is not a neutral word for saying something. One early authority called it the nickname of a lie, a byword Arab speech reached for specifically when a claim was being presented with more confidence than it had actually earned. The verb takes its grammar from the same family as "knowing": a person does not merely zaʿama a thing, they zaʿama it the way a person claims to know something, dressed in knowledge's clothing without doing the work knowledge requires.

That is precisely what is happening in the claim being described: that resurrection will never happen. Stated flatly, it sounds like a conclusion reached after investigation. It was never that. Nobody present had access to death and beyond it, examined the matter, and returned with findings. The denial was asserted with the posture of certainty and none of certainty's actual grounds, which is exactly what zaʿama was coined to catch.

This pattern has not aged. A great deal of modern confidence about what happens after death, in either direction, borrows the same costume: stated as settled, argued as if self-evident, when the honest position for anyone without access to the afterlife is uncertainty rather than confident denial. The ayah's answer does not meet the claim by hedging politely or trading one unproven guess for another. It commands a direct, sworn reply, qul balā wa-rabbī, say: yes, by my Lord. Against a claim dressed up as knowledge, the Quran's response is not a softer guess. It is a different kind of certainty altogether, grounded in revelation rather than borrowed confidence.

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.