056

This is Surah Al-Waqi'ah (Chapter 56, "The Inevitable"), a chapter of the Quran from the Meccan period, here rendered in a 19th-century English translation. The chapter centers on the Day of Judgment and divides humanity into three categories: "the foremost" (those closest to God, granted paradise with its pleasures), "the fellows of the right hand" (the righteous, rewarded with gardens, shade, and peace), and "the fellows of the left hand" (the condemned, punished with scorching wind, boiling water, and the bitter Zaqqum tree). A distinctive structural feature is the use of rhetorical questions challenging skeptics — asking who truly creates human seed, grows crops, sends rain, and produces fire — to argue that divine creative power is self-evident and demands gratitude. The chapter explicitly addresses those who deny resurrection and the afterlife, insisting the doubters will be gathered for judgment regardless. It closes by asserting the Quran's divine and inviolable authority, accessible only to the ritually pure, and returns to the three-way division of humanity as the final frame.

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