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The story of Lot and the perverted people of Sodom is mentioned in several places, particularly in {7:80-84}, {11:69-83} and {26:160-173}.
Thus Zamakhshari and Razi, stressing the principle that a revolt against the God-willed nature of heterosexuality is a revolt against God Himself.
The story of Lut is referred to elsewhere. The passages to which reference may be made here are: xxvi. 160-175, and vii. 80-84. But the point emphasised here is that the crime of the Cities of the Plain was against their own nature, and they saw its enormity, and yet they indulged in it. Can degradation go further? His wife was not apparently a Believer. Her previous sympathy with the sinful people "destined her" (verse 57 below) to a miserable end, as she lagged behind and shared in the destruction of her kinsfolk.
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The ignorance referred to here is the spiritual Ignorance, the Ignorance of how grossness and sins that bring shame on their own physical and moral nature are doomed to destroy them: it is their own loss. That they knew the iniquity of their sins has already been stated in the last verse. That knowledge makes their spiritual Ignorance all the more culpable, just as a man consciously deceiving people by half-truths is a greater liar than a man who tells lies inadvertently.
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See note [65] on 7:82 .
Cf. vii. 82-84. Instead of being ashamed on account of the consciousness of their own guilt, they attack the pure ones with their sarcasms, as if not they but the pure ones were in the wrong in trying to set them on the right way.
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See note [66] on 7:83 ; also 11:81 and 66:10 , and the corresponding notes.
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Cf. 26:173 and the corresponding note [73].
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Lit., "Is God better, or that to which they ascribe. . .", etc.: thus including, by implication, not only deified beings or forces of nature, but also false social and moral values to which custom and ancestral tradition have lent an almost "religious" sanction.
Allah's revelation having been described as Light, Guidance, and Mercy, we ought all to be grateful to Allah for vouchsafing His revelation. We ought also to appreciate the services of Allah's Messengers, who are chosen to deliver Ms Message: we ought to send salutations of Peace on them, instead of plotting, as the wicked do, for their removal or persecution, or banishment or death. For these Prophets of Allah undergo every kind of hardship and forego every kind of advantage or pleasure in life for serving mankind. And Allah is truth and goodness, and all our fancies of false worship are falsehoods and evils. Shall we prefer falsehood and evil to truth and goodness?
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The order, beauty, and grandeur of the Universe are appealed to. They show unity of design and purpose. How can unjust, ignorant, foolish, heedless, false men think of a multiplicity of gods, or of any god, besides the One True God?
To make a single seed germinate and grow into a tree is beyond man's power. When it comes to a great well-laid-out garden of beauty and delight, no one would think it grew up of itself without a Gardener's consummate art. And the orchard is more than the trees in it: there is design and beauty in their arrangement: proper spaces have to be left between them for the growth of their roots, for the aeration of the soil beneath them, and for the penetration of air and sunlight between their branches. How can any one then think of the wonderful Universe as a whole, without thinking of the far higher Unity of Design, the evidence of the One True Allah?
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Lit., "place of rest" (qarar). But see also {77:25-26} and the corresponding note [9].
See 25:53 and the corresponding notes [41] and [42].
See footnote for 25:53.
Cf. xvi. 15 and notes 2038 and 2039. The terra firma, the flowing water, and the cycle of water circulation-sea, vapour, clouds, rain, rivers, and sea again,-all one and yet all distinct, with a sort of wonderful barrier between salt water and fresh water: can man see all this and yet be ignorant of Allah?
Cf. xxv. 53 and notes 3111 and 3112.
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Cf. 2:30 and the corresponding note [22]. In the present instance the accent is on God's having caused man to "inherit the earth" by endowing him with specific faculties and abilities - an implicit denial of man's claim that he is independent and "master of his fate".
Besides the evidence of external nature, there is the still more intimate evidence in man's inner conscience and heart. Allah listens to man's cry of agony and relieves his suffering, and He has given him superiority over other creation on this earth, through his mind and soul. Is man then going to run after inferior beings and forget Allah?
Cf. vi. 165, n. 988.
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I.e., metonymically, through all the seemingly insoluble complexities of human life.
See 7:57 and the corresponding note [44].
Via the stars and constellations.
In the form of rain.
Cf. xxv. 48, n. 3104. After external nature, our attention was drawn to our inner consciousness; after that, it is drawn here to our social and collective life, in which we use the forces of nature for international intercourse, trade, agriculture, production, and economic well-being generally. In the next verse, we are asked to contemplate creation from its primeval stages, through its intermediate processes, to the final Destiny in a new Creation-a new heaven and a new earth.
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This relates to man's life on earth and his resurrection after bodily death as well as to the this - worldly cycle of birth, death and regeneration manifested in all organic nature.
As in 10:31 , the term "sustenance" (rizq) has here both a physical and a spiritual connotation; hence the phrase, "out of heaven and earth".
Lit., "if you are truthful" - the implication being that most people who profess a belief in a multiplicity of divine powers, or even in the possibility of the One God's "incarnation" in a created being, do so blindly, sometimes only under the influence of inherited cultural traditions and habits of thought, and not out of a reasoned conviction.
Cf. x. 34, and n. 1428.
Sustenance: of course in the spiritual as well as the material sense.
All the arguments point to the Unity of Allah: there is none whatever against it.
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In this context, the term al-ghayb - rendered by me here as "the hidden reality" - apparently relates to the "how" of God's Being, the ultimate reality underlying the observable aspects of the universe, and the meaning and purpose inherent in its creation. My repetition, within brackets, of the words "none knows it", i.e., save God, is necessitated by the fact that He is infinite, unlimited as to space, and cannot, therefore, be included among the beings "in the heavens or on earth" who have all been created by Him.
The existence of Allah is certain. But nothing else can be known with certainty to our knowledge. He has told us of the Hereafter, and therefore we know it is true. But those who do not believe in Allah,-what knowledge or certainty can they have? Even when it is actually coming, they will not have the sense to perceive it.
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