An-Nazi'at · Makki · ayah 10 of 46

An-Nazi'at 79:10

يَقُولُونَ أَءِنَّا لَمَرْدُودُونَ فِى ٱلْحَافِرَةِ

“They are [presently] saying, "Will we indeed be returned to [our] former state [of life]?”

Saheeh International

Essence

The deniers mock being sent back along their own tracks to life; the question they ask to dismiss, a believer can ask in hope.

A reflection

Is it still me who comes back?

A man in his fifties finds a photograph of himself at six, squinting on a beach with a bucket. The body in that picture has grown, aged, been injured, healed and changed over and over since. Hardly anything about it is the same. Yet he looks at the boy and says without hesitation that it is him.

The deniers in this ayah ask, 'Shall we really be returned?' One classical scholar lays out their objection more carefully than they did. What a person means by 'I', they assume, is this body, built in this particular way. At death the body falls apart. Its parts crumble and scatter into soil, water and air. So how could the one who returns be the same person? Surely whatever comes back would be a copy.

It is a serious question, and people still ask it. The scholar's first and strongest answer is to question the assumption. Is the 'I' really the same thing as the body? He offers two observations. First, the body's parts are constantly dissolving and being replaced, yet the one who says 'I' does not change. What changes is not the same as what stays. Second, a person knows himself even while thinking of none of his organs. You can be fully aware of yourself without once picturing your liver.

That is exactly the man with the photograph. The body in the picture is long gone, in any meaningful sense. The person is not.

Then the scholar goes further. Suppose, for argument's sake, the person really is the body. Why assume the scattered parts cannot be gathered? The Creator of the world knows every particle and has power over every possibility. Gathering them is no harder for Him than making them the first time.

What remains open, the sources admit, is exactly how the soul and body relate; scholars have held different views. But none of those views makes the return impossible. The deniers' question sounds like hard-headed realism. On inspection, it rests on a guess about the self that they never examined.

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.