Texts of Islam

041

Summary only - full text stays on its own separately-gated source. Read the full text at the source »

This is Chapter 41 (Fussilat, "The Detailed") of the Quran, a Meccan sura from the Islamic scriptural tradition, presented here in a 19th-century English translation. Its central argument is the divine authority of the Quran itself: the chapter opens by defending the revelation as a clear Arabic text, not foreign or obscure, and warns those who refuse to hear it. The sura moves through a compressed cosmogony — God creating the earth in two days, mountains and sustenance in four, and seven heavens in two — before pivoting to the fates of the ancient peoples Ad and Thamud, destroyed for their pride and rejection of God's messengers. A vivid eschatological passage describes the damned being testified against on Judgment Day by their own ears, eyes, and skin, having wrongly assumed God was ignorant of their deeds. The chapter is distinctive for its reflexive, self-defending quality: it repeatedly addresses the objection that the Quran is foreign or insufficiently detailed, and insists that the same revelatory logic applied to Moses applies here. It closes on a note of cosmic witness — God's signs visible in nature, in human experience, and ultimately in history itself — pressing the claim that disbelief is not intellectual but willful.

041

Related pages View as graph →