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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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I.e., they cannot truly visualize the hereafter because its reality is beyond anything that man may experience in this world: and this, it cannot be stressed often enough, is an indirect explanation of the reason why all Qur'anic references to the conditions, good or bad, of man's life after death are of necessity expressed in purely allegorical terms.
I.e., blind to its logical necessity within God's plan of creation. For, it is only on the premise of a life after death that the concept of man's moral responsibility and, hence, of God's ultimate judgment can have any meaning; and if there is no moral responsibility, there can be no question of a preceding moral choice; and if the absence of choice is taken for granted, all differentiation between right and wrong becomes utterly meaningless as well.
The Unbelievers are generally materialists, who cannot go beyond the evidence of their physical senses. As to a spiritual vision of the future, their physical senses would only leave them in doubt and uncertainty, while their rejection of the spiritual light makes them blind altogether to the next world.
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I.e., those who denied the reality of a life after death and, hence, of man's ultimate responsibility for his conscious doings. As pointed out in the preceding note, the unavoidable consequence of this denial is the loss of all sense of right and wrong: and this, in its turn. leads to spiritual and social chaos, and so to the downfall of communities and civilizations.
Even if the Unbelievers are unwilling to take any doctrine, they have only to observe what has actually happened on the earth, and they will see that evil always came to an evil end, and that Truth and righteousness ultimately won.
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Lit., "by their scheming". For the Qur'anic use of the term makr in the sense of "devising false arguments [against something]", see 10:21 and the corresponding note [33].
Cf. xvi. 127, and n. 2164. 'The righteous need not worry over the unjust. The plots of the unjust can never defeat or deflect the purpose of Allah.
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