56. That is, some people had believed in it and some others had made up their minds to oppose it.

57. It has two meanings:

(1) If Allah had not already decreed that the people would be given enough respite for consideration the disputants would have long been destroyed.

(2) If Allah had not already decreed that the disputes would finally be decided on the Day of Judgment, the reality would have been made plain as to who is in the right and who is in the wrong.

58. In this brief sentence the spiritual disease of the disbelievers of Makkah has been clearly diagnosed. It says that they are involved in doubt about the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and this doubt has caused them great anguish and confusion. That is, although apparently they deny the Quran as being Allah’s Word and the Prophet (peace be upon him) as being His Messenger very vehemently, yet this denial is not based on any conviction, but their minds are afflicted with great vacillation, and doubt. On the one hand, their selfish motives, their interests and their prejudices demand that they should belie the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and oppose them strongly. On the other hand, their hearts are convened from within, that the Quran is, in fact, a unique and un-paralleled Word the like of which has never been heard from any literary man or poet. Neither can the insane utter such things in their madness, nor can devils come to teach God-worship, piety and righteousness to the people. Likewise, when they say that Muhammad (peace be upon him) is a liar, their heaps from within put them to shame, and ask: Can such a person ever be a liar? When they brand him a madman, their hearts cry out from within and ask: Do you really think that he is mad? When they accuse that Muhammad (peace be upon him) is not interested in the truth but is working for selfish motives, their hearts from within curse them and ask: Do you call this virtuous man selfish, whom you have never seen striving for the sake of wealth and power and fame, whose life has been free from every tract of selfinterest, who has always been working to bring about goodness and piety, but has never acted from any selfish motives.

59. That is, your Lord can never be so unjust as to let go to waste the good deeds of a good man and fail to punish the evil-doers for their evil.

61. The Hour: the Hour of Resurrection, i.e. the Hour when the evildoers will be punished for their evil and the grievances of the oppressed good people will be redressed.

62. By this the listeners have been made to realize two things:

(1) That not only of Resurrection but the knowledge of all unseen things is reserved for Allah alone; there is no other knower of the unseen.

(2) That God Who possesses the detailed knowledge of the most minor things cannot remain unaware of the acts and deeds of anybody.

Therefore, no one in His kingdom should act fearlessly, with impunity. Only according to this second meaning the sentence becomes relevant to what follows. If one studies the following sentences, the theme that immediately becomes obvious is: Don’t concern yourselves about finding our the date of the coming of Resurrection; you should, however, be anxious about the consequences of your deviations you will have to bear when it comes. This same thing had the Prophet (peace be upon him) once said to a person, who asked him the date of the coming of Resurrection. All the major collections of Hadith contain a commonly reported tradition to the effect: Once when the Prophet (peace be upon him) was on a journey, a man on the way shouted his name from a distance. The Prophet (peace be upon him) asked what he wanted to say. He said: When will Resurrection come? The Prophet (peace be upon him) replied: It must come, in any case! What preparations have you made for it?

63. That is, now we have realized that what we had in our minds was absolutely wrong. Now none among us is of the view that there is another one who is also your associate in Godhead. The words “we announce” show that on the Day of Resurrection the disbelievers will be asked again and again, on every occasion: In the world you went on refusing to believe what the Messengers of God said: now say who was in the right: they or you? And the disbelievers will every time confess that the truth indeed was that which the Messengers preached and they themselves were in the wrong because they forsook the knowledge and persisted in their own ignorance.

64. That is, in their utter hopelessness they will look around to see if they could find any one of those whom they used to serve and worship in the world, who could come to their rescue and save them from God’s torment, or at least have their punishment reduced, but they will find no helper on any side.

64. That is, in their utter hopelessness they will look around to see if they could find any one of those whom they used to serve and worship in the world, who could come to their rescue and save them from God’s torment, or at least have their punishment reduced, but they will find no helper on any side.

65. “For good”: For prosperity, abundance of provisions, good health, well-being of children, etc. And man here does not imply every human being for it also includes the prophet and the righteous people, who are free from this weakness as is being mentioned below. But here it implies the mean and shallow person who starts imploring God humbly when touched by harm and is beside himself with joy when he receives the good things of life as most human beings are involved in this weakness, it has been called a weakness of man.

66. That is, I have gotten all this because of my being worthy of it. It is my right that I should receive all this.

67. That is, he turns away from Our obedience and worship, and thinks it is below his dignity to bow to Us.

68. For other verses on this subject, see (Surah Younus, Ayat 12); (Surah Bani Israil, Ayat 83); (Surah ArRoom, Ayat 33-36); (Surah Az-Zumar, Ayats 8-9, 49 )and the E.Ns.

69. It does not mean that they should believe in it only owing to the danger that if it were really from Allah they would be inviting their own doom by denying it. But it means this: It is not wisdom that you should be bent upon opposing it stubbornly without seriously trying to understand what it says. You cannot assert that you have come to know that this Quran is not from God, and you have known with certainty that God has not sent it. Obviously, your refusal to believe in it as divine Word is not based on knowledge, but on conjecture, which may possibly be right as well as wrong. Now consider both the possibilities. If your conjecture were right, then, according to your own thinking, both the believers and the unbelievers would be equal, because both will became dust after death, and there is no life of Hereafter where belief and unbelief might be distinguished. But, if this Quran were really from God, and that of which it is forewarning did really take place, then think what doom you would invite for yourselves by denying it and opposing it like that. Therefore, your own interest demands that you should give up stubbornness and consider this Quran seriously; if even after due consideration, you decide not to believe in it, you may not, but you should not oppose it to the extent that you start employing falsehood and deception and persecution to bar the way of its message and prevent others from believing in it, not being content with your own unbelief.

70. This verse has two meanings and both have been given by the major commentators:

First, that they will soon see wit their own eyes that the message of the Quran has spread in all the adjoining lands, and they themselves have yielded to it. Then they will realize that what they are being told today, which they are denying, was absolutely true. Some people have objected to this meaning, saying that a message’s being dominant and overwhelming vast areas is no argument to prove that it is the truth. False messages also become dominant and their adherents also go on subduing one country after the other. But this is a superficial objection which has been raised without a thorough study of the matter. The wonderful conquests that Islam achieved in the period of the Prophet (peace be upon him) and the rightly guided Caliphs, were not the signs of Allah only in the sense that the believers conquered one country after the other, but in the sense that this conquest of the countries was not like other conquests of the world, which make one man or one family or one nation master of the life and property of others and God’s earth is filled with tyranny and injustice. Contrary to this, this conquest brought with it a great religious, moral, intellectual, cultural, political, economic and social revolution; whose influence, wherever it reached, elicited what was best in man and suppressed what was worst in him. This revolution developed and nurtured the moral excellences which the world could hope to see only in the hermits and the meditating recluses and could never imagine that they could also be found among the people responsible for running the worldly affairs in the politics of the rulers, in the chambers of justice, in the wars and conquests of the commanders of forces, in the work of the tax collectors and in the commerce of the big businessmen. This revolution so raised the common people in the society created by it in respect of the sense of morality, character, cleanliness and purity that even the select people of other societies seemed to be much inferior to them. It took man out of the labyrinths of superstition and whim and put him on the broad highway of scientific research and rational thought and action. It treated and cured these diseases of the collective life of whose treatment no idea existed in the other systems, or if at all they tried to treat them, they did not succeed in it. For example, separation between men on the basis of color, race, country and language, classification of men in the same society and discrimination among them, non existence of legal rights and equality in practical life, degeneration of women and their deprivation of the basic rights, prevalence of crime, liquor drinking and use of all intoxicating drugs, the governments being above criticism and accountability, deprivation of the fundamental human rights the masses, disrespect of agreements in international relations, barbarism in wars, and such other diseases. In Arabia itself this revolution brought about order in place of chaos, peace in place of bloodshed and anarchy, piety in place of wickedness, justice in place of tyranny and injustice, purity and culture in place of filth and indecency, knowledge in place of ignorance, brotherhood and love in place of long-standing feuds, and it made a nation whose people could not dream of anything beyond leadership of their tribe, leaders of the world. These were the signs which the very generation before whom the Prophet (peace be upon him) had recited this verse for the first time, saw with their own eyes, and after that till today Allah has been constantly showing those signs. The Muslims, even during their downfall, displayed such high morals as could never be attained by those people who represent as the leaders of civilization and culture. No precedent can be found from any period of the history of the Muslims of the tyrannical treatment that has been meted out by the European nations to the subdued nations of Africa, America, Asia and of Europe itself. This is the blessing of the Quran which has so humanized Muslims that they could not become so tyrannical even when they had attained domination as the non-Muslims have been in all periods of history and are even today. A person who has eyes can himself see how the Muslims treated the Christians in Spain when they ruled it for centuries, and how the Christians treated the Muslims when they gained power there; how the Muslims behaved towards Hindus during their eight hundred year long rule in India and how the Hindus are now treating them after they have attained power; how the Muslims treated the Jews during the past 1300 years and how the Jews are treating the Muslims in Palestine.

The other meaning of this verse is that Allah will show the people in the external world around them as well as in their own selves such signs as will make manifest that the teaching the Quran is giving is the very truth. Some people have raised the objection that the people even at that time were observing the world around them and also their own selves; therefore, it would be meaningless to show them any such signs in the future. But this objection also is as superficial as the objection against the first meaning. No doubt, the external world is the same as man has been seeing in the past and his own self also is of the same nature as has been seen in every age, yet in these the signs of God are so numerous that man has never comprehended them fully nor will ever be able to do so. In every age man has met with many new signs and this will go on happening till the Resurrection Day.

71. That is, is it not enough to warn the people of their evil end that Allah is watching whatever they are doing to belie and defeat the Message of the truth?

72. That is, the basic cause of their attitude and conduct is that they are not sure that they will ever have to appear before their Lord and be held accountable for their deeds and actions.

73. That is, they cannot escape His grasp nor can anything of their deeds be prevented from being recorded by Him.