Al-Mursalat · Makki · ayah 17 of 50

Al-Mursalat 77:17

ثُمَّ نُتْبِعُهُمُ ٱلْـَٔاخِرِينَ

“Then We will follow them with the later ones.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Then We make the later ones follow them: not a fresh fate invented for new deniers, but the same track, walked by anyone who denies the same way.

A reflection

A calf at its mother's heels

Tabaʿa, to follow, is pictured by the lexicons through a calf trailing its mother through its first year, never straying from the exact track she sets, and through a person's own shadow, which follows every step without ever once choosing a different direction of its own. Following, on this root's own terms, is not coincidence or resemblance from a distance. It is walking the identical path someone else has already laid down, step for step, arriving wherever that earlier path leads.

This ayah applies the image directly to the relationship between 'Ad, Thamud, and every later people who denied in the same way: al-akhirin, the later ones, are made to follow the earlier ones, not merely to resemble them in some loose, general sense. The fate was not reinvented for each new generation of deniers as though their situation were somehow unprecedented. It was the same track, walked again by people who had chosen, through the same denial, to put their own feet exactly where the earlier feet had already gone.

That should unsettle anyone tempted to think their own circumstances are simply too different, too modern, too unique for an ancient pattern to apply to them. A calf does not get to claim its mother's track is irrelevant to its own walking simply because the ground has changed since she first crossed it. If the steps being walked are genuinely the same steps, denial met plainly with warning, that warning then met with stubborn refusal, and refusal finally met with its own consequence, the destination at the end of the track tends to be the very same destination, however many centuries or however much apparent progress separate the two journeys from each other.

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.