Surah Al-Infitar, The Cleaving

Surah 82 · 19 verses · revealed at Mecca

Al-Infitar is nineteen short verses and opens, like its neighbours, with the world coming apart: the sky split, the stars scattered, the seas poured forth, the graves turned over.

Then it turns and speaks to the reader directly, and the question it asks is the one the surah is remembered for. What has deceived you about your generous Lord, who created you and shaped you and made you well proportioned, and assembled you in whatever form He willed.

It is a rebuke built out of kindness rather than threat, and commentators through the centuries have noticed that the word chosen for God there is the generous one. Several have said the verse is an answer as much as a question: what deceived the person was precisely how generous He is.

The surah mentions the honourable recorders who write down what a person does, and then says plainly that the righteous will be in bliss and the wicked in a blaze.

It ends by repeating the same line three times with a small change each time — and what will make you know what the day of judgement is, then again, and then the answer: a day when no soul will have power to do anything for another soul, and the command that day will belong to God.

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