ثُمَّ أَمَاتَهُۥ فَأَقْبَرَهُۥ ثُمَّ إِذَا شَآءَ أَنشَرَهُۥ
Thumma amātahu fa-aqbarah Thumma idhā shāʾa ansharah "Then He made him die and had him put in a grave. Then when He wills He will raise him."
Root: ق-ب-ر. This root was treated in the section on al-Takāthur 102/2 (al-maqābir), and this verse was pointed to there; the finding there is opened out here.
- قَبَرَهُ (qabarahu) — he buried him. The doer of the act is the person who digs the earth and lays the body in it.
- أَقْبَرَهُ (aqbarahu) — he gave him a grave, provided for his burial, ordered his burial. Form IV here has the function of "making one possessed of a thing / giving the means for it".
The verse uses the second. That is, it is not said that God buried him; it is said that He established the order of burial. The difference looks small but it changes the verse entirely: the work of burying is done by people, but that there should be such a thing as burial is not man's invention.
Look at the other items of the sequence: he was created, he was given measure, his path was made easy, he was made to die, he was put in a grave, he will be raised. The list is a list of the operations performed on man. And being put in a grave stands in this list among the things counted as favours.
Why a favour? Because the alternative is plain to see: a living creature that dies is left in the open, rots, becomes food for beasts of prey. The human species is the only one that has made the giving of its dead to the earth a rule. This is less an operation performed on the dead than a declaration that the dead continues to count as a human being. The grave is not the place where the body is hidden but the place where the identity is kept.
The Qurʾān relates this in a scene. After the first murder the killer does not know what to do with his brother's body:
"Then God sent a crow scratching at the ground, to show him how to bury his brother's body." (al-Māʾida 5/31)
That is, the first burial had to be taught. This is exactly what the story records: man did not know of himself what to do with his dead. That the verb aqbara comes in Form IV agrees with this picture.
A connection with the social sciences. In archaeology, deliberate burial is counted among the strongest indicators that a community has developed symbolic behaviour — because burying produces no practical benefit; it costs labour, it has no return, and it is done only if the dead is believed to go on meaning something. I write this not as a claim of "miracle" but as a record that the place the verse gives to the grave agrees with observation.
Root: ن-ش-ر. Its concrete sense: to open out what has been folded, to spread, to lay out. Nashara'th-thawba — he unfolded the cloth. Its opposite is ṭayy (folding).
And from this root the sense of raising the dead comes out: nashara'l-mawtā — he raised the dead. Nushūr — resurrection: "And to Him is the rising" (al-Mulk 67/15: ilayhi'n-nushūr).
How do the two senses join? A dead man is a folded thing — closed, gathered up, wrapped in a shroud. To raise him is to unfold him. This is the picture in the word.
وَإِذَا ٱلصُّحُفُ نُشِرَتْ — "And when the pages are spread open" (al-Takwīr 81/10).
The same root. In ʿAbasa man is unfolded, in al-Takwīr the register. Both are the same verb. And this is the most concrete connection between the two sūras: resurrection and the opening of the file are, in the Qurʾān's lexicon, a single movement.
The Qurʾān establishes this pairing in another place too: "And on the day of resurrection We shall bring forth for him a book which he will find spread open" (al-Isrāʾ 17/13) — there too manshūrā, the same root.
All the items of the sequence were without qualification: He created, He gave measure, He made easy, He made him die, He had him put in a grave. Only the last comes with a qualification: when He wills.
Because the first five items are the working of an established order. They happen in every man, every time, in the same sequence. The sixth is not the working of an order but a decision — its time fixed but not announced.
And this distinction carries a hidden answer of the sūra's as well. When man denies the resurrection his ground is generally "no such thing has been seen". The verse builds the first five items of the sequence out of things that are seen and sets the sixth on top of them: the work of the same hand, only its time is with Him.
And there is this too: in the first ten verses man's own prediction was declared invalid ("what do you know"). Here as well the owner of the knowledge of the time is stated. The sūra says the same thing in two different places: knowledge has a limit, and what lies beyond the limit belongs to another.