An-Naba · Makki · ayah 18 of 40

An-Naba 78:18

يَوْمَ يُنفَخُ فِى ٱلصُّورِ فَتَأْتُونَ أَفْوَاجًا

“The Day the Horn is blown and you will come forth in multitudes”

Saheeh International

Essence

One breath into the Horn, and every buried human being rises and comes, wave after wave, each people behind the one they followed.

A reflection

Growing back like cress

In a primary classroom, a teacher gives each child a saucer, a damp flannel and a pinch of tiny brown seeds. On Monday there is nothing to see. By Wednesday the saucers are covered in a fine green carpet. The children are astonished every year, as if it were a trick.

The oldest objection to the Resurrection is simple. Bodies decay. They are scattered, eaten, dissolved into soil. How could any of it come back? The people of Makkah asked it with a laugh.

Sahih al-Bukhari preserves an answer that belongs directly to this ayah. The Prophet ﷺ said that between the two blowings of the Horn there are forty. His Companion was asked: forty days? He would not say. Forty months? He would not say. Forty years? He would not say. Then, the Prophet ﷺ said, Allah sends down water from the sky, and people grow as green plants grow. Everything of a human being decays except one small bone at the base of the spine. From it the creation will be assembled on the Day of Resurrection.

Notice how deliberately that answer connects to the surah. Only a few ayat earlier, Allah sent down pouring water to bring out grain and plants (78:14–15). Now the same pattern is applied to people: water, then growth, then emergence. The Companion's refusal to guess the forty is striking too. Some things were not his to specify.

One commentator points to the small word fa, 'and so', in 'and so you will come'. It leaps over the steps in between: you are given life, you rise from your graves, and you come. It shows how swift the coming will be.

What remains open is exactly how, and the ayah does not ask us to imagine the mechanics. It asks us to look at a saucer of cress. If the Maker can raise a green carpet from dust in two days, the question is not whether He can raise us. It is how we will look when we stand up.

The full entry has 4 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.