قُلْ أَئِنَّكُمْ لَتَكْفُرُونَ بِٱلَّذِى خَلَقَ ٱلْأَرْضَ فِى يَوْمَيْنِ … ثُمَّ ٱسْتَوَىٰٓ إِلَى ٱلسَّمَآءِ وَهِىَ دُخَانٌ فَقَالَ لَهَا وَلِلْأَرْضِ ٱئْتِيَا طَوْعًا أَوْ كَرْهًا قَالَتَآ أَتَيْنَا طَآئِعِينَ
"Say: Do you really disbelieve in the One who created the earth in two days?… Then He turned to the heaven, which was smoke, and said to it and to the earth: 'Come, willingly or unwillingly.' They both said: 'We come willingly.'"
The relation between the durations named in these verses (two days, four days, two days) and the expression "six days" that occurs elsewhere in the Qurʾān has been debated in the classical commentaries. The principal explanation is that the four days are counted so as to include the two preceding days as well (sawāʾan li's-sāʾilīn — "exactly, for those who ask").
And per the method (Method) I draw the limit explicitly: the text does not state how long a duration the word "day" corresponds to here. I do not dress these verses in modern cosmology; I derive no model of the universe from the word "smoke", nor do I equate the days with geological ages. Such an equation would be making the text say what it does not say.
What the text says is this, and that much is what I record: creation is described as ordered and measured; not at one stroke, but in stages. And the last sentence lays down a judgement: dhālika taqdīru'l-ʿazīzi'l-ʿalīm — that is the measuring of the Mighty, the Knowing.
This sentence is a scene of speech, and the lexicographers generally record that it is figurative expression (tamthīl): a picture set up to show that there is no resistance in the face of the command.
A second reading is transmitted as well: that the expression is literal, and that its manner cannot be known. I transmit both explanations; I do not impose a preference.
But one detail of the word order works on either reading and is worth recording: the offer is presented with two options (ṭawʿan aw karhan), the answer comes with one: ataynā ṭāʾiʿīn — "we come willingly."
A one-directional answer to a two-option command. I record this as my own reading: the scene shows that the possibility of resistance was not in fact used. And what will be described through the rest of the sūra is precisely the human counterpart of this: the answer man gives to the same call was seen in the fifth verse.