al-Qiyāma 75:40

A-laysa dhālika bi-qādirin ʿalā an yuḥyiya'l-mawtā "Is the one who did this not able to give life to the dead?"

The last verse of the sūra. And the answer to the fourth.

This is the kind of question called istifhām taqrīrī: it asks for no information, it makes the one addressed say the answer himself.

English has its counterpart: the tag question, "is He not?" The sentence is built so that the answer can be nothing but "yes".

And this choice is meaningful. The sūra could have ended with a statement: "He is able to give life to the dead." Instead it ends with a question — leaving the last word to the one addressed.

The sūra had begun with a question (verse 3: a-yaḥsabu'l-insān) and it ends with a question. But the two questions run in opposite directions: the first rejected the addressee's opinion, the last asks the addressee for his assent.

The particle بِـ is here redundant: not required grammatically, present for reinforcement. In Arabic negative sentences built with laysa, this particle often comes at the head of the predicate and strengthens the negation.

It is hard to carry into English; it adds an emphasis like "is He not indeed able?"

Here the sūra closes its own opening:

The same word, the same structure, two different moods. At the beginning of the sūra the text builds the claim itself; at the end it makes the one addressed build the same claim.

And what happened in between? Over thirty-six verses the proof was laid out: a drop, a stage, a setting in order, a distinction of sex. The one addressed meets the question after seeing these proofs.

This is an example of the Qurʾān's way of building a proof: the claim is put first, the proof laid out after, and the conclusion made to be spoken by the one addressed.

In the section on al-Baqara this verse was treated:

"How do you deny God? You were dead and He gave you life; then He will make you die, then give you life again, then to Him you will be returned." (al-Baqara 2/28)

The finding recorded there was this: the verse contains a reasoning in four steps — you were dead, He gave life, He will make die, He will give life. The proof is this: the fourth step you object to is a repetition of the second step, which has already happened once. And the force of the argument lies in its using the addressee's own existence as evidence; it asks for no proof from outside.

Al-Qiyāma sets up the same proof, but on a different axis:

Both use the same method: making the addressee's own existence the proof. And neither asks for evidence from outside — no miracle, no witness, no book. All that is asked is that a person remember where he came from.

The difference is here: al-Baqara moves back and forth in time; al-Qiyāma descends in scale. One says "this happened before", the other says "this is what you began from".

And the Qurʾān joins these two proofs in a single sentence in another place:

وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِى يَبْدَؤُا۟ ٱلْخَلْقَ ثُمَّ يُعِيدُهُۥ وَهُوَ أَهْوَنُ عَلَيْهِ — "It is He who begins the creation, then repeats it; and that is easier for Him." (al-Rūm 30/27)

The sūra ends with the word "the dead".

And this crosses once more with the verse from Yāsīn cited at the thirteenth verse:

إِنَّا نَحْنُ نُحْىِ ٱلْمَوْتَىٰ وَنَكْتُبُ مَا قَدَّمُوا۟ وَءَاثَٰرَهُمْ (Yāsīn 36/12)

The same two elements — nuḥyi'l-mawtā (to give life to the dead) and mā qaddamū (what they sent ahead) — stand at the two ends of Sūrat al-Qiyāma: "what he sent ahead" in verse 13, "to give life to the dead" in verse 40. Yāsīn gathers them into a single sentence.

I record this as a crossing; the shared expressions of the two verses are data of the text.