In the Name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful
The background
to the extract below from QUR’AANIC
STUDIES – A Modern Tafsir PART I is that someone had killed a person, and
people were quarrelling on who the murderer was. Allah Almighty made that case
an example to show how He would resurrect people on Judgment Day. The murdered
man, thus resurrected in that case, would name the murderer.
73. Faqulna idriboohu bibaAAdiha
kathalika yuhyee Allahu almawta wayureekum ayatihi
laAAallakum taAAqiloona
2:73. So We asked them to
raise him up86 from something thereof 87 to 89. Thus, does
Allah give life to the dead 90 & 91, and show you His signs so
that you understand 92..
86. Among the various meanings in which the Arabic root
word zaraba is used in the Qur'aan, one is 'to set up' or 'to raise'. It
is in this meaning that this word, with its grammatical variation, is used in
Verse 57:13. It is used therein to connote 'setting up' or 'raising' a wall
between the believers and the hypocrites, in the Hereafter. And the pronoun hu
obviously refers to the murdered person mentioned in the preceding Verse 2:72.
Since the pronoun is masculine, it is obvious that the murdered person was a
man. And in the context of the reference made to Allah giving life to the dead,
further down in this very Verse (2:73), it is obvious that the killed man was
brought to life again to disclose to the people as to who had killed him.
87. Here, the pronoun used is the feminine ha.
This has led some of the commentators of the Qur'aan to link it to the
slaughtered cow referred to in Verse 2:71. But this linkage is unwarranted. For,
in the immediately preceding Verse 2:72, mention is made of a murdered man, and
his dead body (the Arabic word for which is feminine in gender) is already
referred to therein as ha. We should remember that the All-knowing Allah
could make no mistakes!
88. The fact, that His choice of words is perfect, is
well illustrated in the use of the masculine pronoun hu just before, in
this very Verse 2:73. Had the Jews been told to hit or strike at the dead body
of the murdered man, the pronoun used would have been ha and not hu.
The use of hu there conclusively proves that the Jews were told to raise
a living man, and not to strike at a dead body.
89. So, the Jews were asked to raise the murdered man
to life from or with something or some part of the dead body. It needs no
mentioning that in this act of raising the living from the dead, Allah was the
sole Architect and the people were just the instruments! Just like: a man and a
woman are merely the instruments with which Allah brings a new human being into
this world.
90. And in this divine statement lies the divine
confirmation of the conclusions drawn in the foregoing notes! The reference
here, obviously, is mainly to the Resurrection of mankind in the Hereafter.
Allah says that He thus gives life to the dead. That is, just as He had
given life to the murdered man (of the episode narrated in these two Verses)
from some part or remnant of his dead body. Allah has thus disclosed to us that
on the Resurrection Day, He will give life to every human that ever lived on
this earth and died, from any remnant of that human. And the good earth
contains distinctive remnants aplenty of every such individual! A tiny bit of a
bone, a tooth, or even hair from any dead person, mixed with the earth, serves
as a good enough remnant for the Almighty Allah to resurrect that person from!
91. Modern knowledge has enabled us to have an insight
into these wonderfully meaningful divine Verses. Any bit of a remnant from the
dead person contains microcells. And every such cell contains a DNA map
distinctive to that person! So even a man now can come to know, by conducting a
proper DNA test, as to which person that remnant belongs to. So, we can now
understand how the Almighty Creator can have no problems at all in
distinguishing the remnants, one from another.
92. In the pre-historic age – the setting for this
episode described here in these two Verses under our study – the extent of
human knowledge was limited. The All-knowing Allah had compensated the people
living then with seemingly miraculous signs to make them understand the Reality
of, inter alia, the Hereafter. The seemingly miraculous bringing of a murdered
person back to life in the episode, described here in these two Verses, was one
such sign. But now, with the considerable advance in human knowledge, the
divine signs about the Reality are implanted in that advanced knowledge itself.
A few years back, with such knowledge, man succeeded, for the first time, in
making a surrogate mother sheep give birth to a lamb that was genetically identical
– a clone – to another sheep! The lamb was made to be conceived in the
surrogate mother's womb asexually by implanting the nucleus of a cell
taken from the body of the other sheep into an unfertilised egg of the mother
sheep! This human effort of course involved a very complicated and uncertain
procedure, the success rate of which is said to be very, very low! But it did
give the unmistakable sign that the Resurrection is a distinct possibility!
Friday, the 7th of June 2019.
