As-Sajdah 32:10 - Linguistic Miracle

back to this verse.

They said,” When we have disappeared into the earth, are we to be in a new creation?” Rather, they are disbelievers in the meeting of their Master.

Now it again shifts back to the third person. They said, not You said. The natural flow after the words “How little grateful you are” in the previous verse should have been to

use the second person. This is Iltifāt. Because they have been ungrateful to Allah, they are not worthy to be addressed directly by God and have distanced themselves from Him. This is why they are addressed to in the third person, as if they are far away from Him.

To the believers and others, the disbelievers say “When we have disappeared into the earth,

are we to be in a new creation?” but in actuality, they are just in denial of meeting Allah

in the hereafter. The root problem is denial of meeting Allah, not these and other petty arguments they make. It is clear what they are trying to say. How can a person who has died, gets decomposed and vanishes be brought back to life again? This is a stupid argument because the all powerful God is indeed capable of doing it. If God is capable of creating from nothing, then how can He not do it again with the dead?

Their actual problem is that they simply deny meeting Allah in the hereafter. They just come up with simple, stupid and worthless arguments to cover it up. Now what does denying the meeting with Allah imply? We covered earlier in the surah that Allah establishes the rule of this universe that actions have consequences. Just as one stage of the universe leads to another, so do actions lead to their consequences. The Prophet’s ﷺ role was described as being a nadhīr which linguistically means warning of consequences that are inherently tied to actions.

When do people get repaid for their actions? Judgment day; the day they meet Allah; and this is what this verses again mentions. They are disbelievers in the meeting of

their Master. They are disbelievers in the fundamental fact that they will be repaid for what they do.

We can ourselves see in our daily lives that the people most averse to the notion of justice are the criminals themselves. Most criminals deny they deserve to be punished. You will mostly find them trying to justify their crimes. The people most averse to justice are the guilty, those against whom justice stands, who are on the other side of justice. Same is the case here. As mentioned in verse 7, these people denied the Qurʾān not because of a flaw inside it, but because of their crime of neglecting the amr - the rūḥ - inside of them. We normally see, when justice is against someone, you either deny it or make stupid arguments to justify your actions, and this is exactly what they did above.

The disbelievers only believe in the visible aspect (khalq) but deny the invisible Amr. You will see how this surah will revolve around this subject that we so often hear to this day - if I cannot see it, then it is not true.