1. Truth is revealed through God’s created world (10:2–6, 101).
2. Faith and goodness are the cornerstones of creation and success (10:4, 9–10).
3. Alteration of success and failure is the mechanism to test human beings (10:11–14, 21–24).
4. The Prophet does not control revelations, but God reveals as He wills (10:16, 31, 49).
5. God allows opportunities to people to correct themselves (10:11, 19, 30, 47).
6. Process of creation: first creation, reproduction, resurrection (10:34, 4).
7. The Qur’an cannot be fabricated or reproduced (10:37–38).
8. The Qur’an is a source of mercy, healing, warning, and guidance (10:57, 94).
9. God is actively engaged in our affairs (10:61).
10. Belief in God cannot be forced (10:99, 2:256, 18:6, 10:108).
11. God will deliver the faithful and those who do good (10:103).
1. Truth is revealed through God’s created world (10:2-6, 101).
In these few verses, several important indicators of the realities of the world and the presence of God are pushed in front of us to build our awareness of the world we live in and to bring clarity and immediacy to our faith in God. First and foremost, it should not come as a surprise that God sends human beings as prophets and people of goodwill to propagate truth and justice, as opposed to aliens or angels or other creations of God that we do not know of. The creation of the world and the earth is God’s work, and He controls their affairs—movement, stability, longevity of the planets and the stars, and the accountability of all His creation in them. His creative genius is manifest through the first instance of creation that could not witness but can see observing how plant seeds germinate, eggs turn into baby chicks—that is happening all around us. The evolutionary process of creation continues through procreation that we all witness, and as human beings we participate in that process as male and female come together to deliver a child, another human being who never existed before, nor will ever exist again until resurrection. Such resurrection is another manifestation of God’s creative genius that each one of us will witness and undergo.
It is important to understand the purpose of such creation, especially of human beings and our endowment of goodwill and affinity for seeking truth and justice on this planet. As God says in verse 4, such an arrangement is to treat each one of us with equity and reward for our faith and goodness that we do with our free will and pursuit of knowledge, both of which are gifts from God, the enormity of which few of us can fully comprehend and appreciate. Finally God asks us to reflect and observe the variations of day and night and all that is created in the universe and on this earth as manifestations of God’s presence, and makes the prediction that only people with a sense of responsibility and accountability will succeed in such cognitive, emotional, and spiritual affiliations with God and His vast creation. Then in verse 101, God comes back to remind us that we should stand in awe at nature and the world that God created and placed us in it so that we can fathom the essence of God and our own purposeful life.
2. Faith and goodness are the cornerstones of creation and success (10:4, 9–10).
Human creation as stated in verse 4 and the process of first creation, the reproduction, and the resurrection, all follow the plan of God to endow us with knowledge, wisdom, and freedom of choice to propagate the human race to sustain itself as a steward of this planet and then to bring them back through resurrection to take account of our faith and our goodness while alive on the planet. Our coming from God and our return to God are ordained by God to endow us with life and then to take accountability from us about our accomplishments or lack thereof of this gift of life. That faith and goodness are repeated always in pair throughout the Qur’an is a continuous affirmation of the fundamental truth that faith without goodness is no faith at all, and while goodness without faith may create temporary success and well-being on this earth, the true success with God after resurrection will always be a dual measure of the depth of our faith and the expansiveness of our goodness.
Real success in life will always be measured by peace achieved by the human race on this earth, peace that comes from alignment ourselves with our Creator and being faithful to the potential of goodness that God breathed into each one of us. Without such an alignment, real peace and harmony will elude us. This misalignment is evident in our world today, as unprecedented wealth and knowledge creation has failed to lift billions of people out of poverty and to protect us from widespread corruption, injustice, and immorality.
3. The alteration of success and failure is the mechanism to test human beings (10:11–14, 21–24).
Every human being, male or female, is awarded success, however large or however small, throughout his or her life. Similarly, everyone is subjected to failure, difficulties, hard choices, large or small, and our conduct in each of these circumstances defines who we are and our relationship with God and with each other. God as our Creator understands our nature much better than any one of us, and the Qur’an provides vivid examples of how we fail to live up to our natural affinity with God and goodness. When success comes to us, we lay claim to it as if it is entirely our doing, become unmindful of God, and fail to thank those who contributed to that success. In a similar manner, when failure hits us, which inevitably will happen to each one of us, we blame others and even God, fail to be humble, and fail to inquire deeply into the nature of our failure to correct ourselves.
Similarly, when we become sick or are in danger, we instinctively turn to God; yet moments before, we were unmindful of God and, sometimes after such sickness or recovery from danger, again become unmindful of God and our vulnerabilities. God delays accountability to such lapses in our behavior and its consequences to allow us time to reflect and reshape our lives, unlike our haste to receive good always.
Similarly, for nations, communities, and individuals, we rejoice at good crops, better salaries, economic prosperity, unexpected windfalls, wins in battlefields, prevailing over one another in our competitive zeal, but then God reverses those favors into disfavor as storms destroy crops and earthquake destroy lives and dwellings to remind us that we need to be humble and mindful of each other and of God, our purpose in lives, and being keepers of one another. Verse 14 (and there are similar verses in many parts of the Qur’an) says that every generation for posterity will be tested and given an opportunity to prove its worth by doing good and repelling evils, making the world a better place, and improving human conditions and relationships with God and fellow human beings as well as the natural world.
4. The Prophet does not control revelations, but God reveals as He wills (10:16, 31, 49).
Every human being, every living creature, and the natural world are created, shaped, and maintained by God, while human beings are given the stewardship of the planet (Khalifa). Prophets had been sent to many generations and communities around the globe to inform and to warn about our responsibilities regarding our Creator, fellow living beings, and the sustaining world we are made part of and given supremacy over. Prophet Mohammad was challenged by those who deny God to change the Qur’an or bring another different set of revelations that suits their ego or their unjust ways of life. Prophet Mohammad persistently refused to entertain such ideas and also stated plainly that it was not up to him to reveal and recite but only according to the will of God as He reveals it to him. He also makes the point that he had already spent a lifetime (he was forty when he became a prophet) with this community and had never talked and preached any such revelations. Our sustenance, our hearing, our sight, the cycle of life and death and management of the natural world—these are all firmly controlled by God and as He wills.
Prophets were asked to say that they themselves control nothing of this world or even their own life, but as God pleases. Even the life of a community, a nation, and the life of the planet are all defined by a specific duration that God controls, and when such terms come to their end, no one can delay by an hour or hasten by an hour—as we see in our birth and death.
Such an understanding and awareness is fundamental to the Islamic faith and is part of this natural religion, a religion that conforms to the realities of life and this universe and strives for human goodness, which is also built into our natural composition as human beings.
5. God allows opportunities for people to correct themselves (10:11, 19, 30, 47).
For many of us, life seems short, and as we grow older, each year seems to pass with greater swiftness than the year before. Yet we live a day at a time, and there are times when each day seems like an eternity, especially when we are under distress or difficulty such as physical pain or illness, death of dear ones, loss of relationships, or mental anxiety for things we cannot correct or remove. The beauty of life is that we are afforded a day at a time to renew ourselves, to correct ourselves, and to do the right thing. As God said in the Qur’an: Reflect on the brightness of the day and the night when it covers (darken) itself (93:1–2), to remind us that good and evil, light and darkness, are part of our existence, but we have a choice to make each day: the choice to stay steeped in evil or come out of darkness to light, to seek knowledge or stay in ignorance, to acknowledge the truth or live in denial, to lighten our soul or keep it burdened with lack of faith and goodness in God and in our common humanity.
One such reality is that each one of us is part of a common human thread, a common nation. Yet we divide ourselves by race, ethnicity, religion, gender, social class, and many other artificial characteristics that we conjure up in our societies despite the common knowledge and our innate intuition that each human being is created equal and should be afforded equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty, and contentment. Such a difference is something that God allowed to humans despite His ability to unite us so that He can judge, and we can demonstrate our intention and deliberation to unite us despite efforts by others to the contrary.
Another such reality is the arrival of prophets and messengers of God who spoke of reality, of truth and human justice, to remove the shackle of superstition, false belief, and evils of human beings. In many aspects and interactions of life, we are messengers to each other in the way we interpret life, its purpose, and how we conduct ourselves so that we can remind and guide one another. This way our soul is forced to face itself each day and in each such event that we encounter so that we can exercise our God-given freedom to make the right choice, to exit from the highway of evil and to go on the ramp of goodness, to come together as human beings or divide us further, to insult our souls or dignify our beings.
6. Process of creation—first creation, reproduction, resurrection (10:34, 4).
In our world today, there are many controversies about creation and evolution, and we invent new terms such as “creative design” just to confuse the public and simmer the arguments and the counterarguments around creationism versus evolution. Some religious leaders, especially Catholics and modern-day Evangelists, are adamant about creationism and totally negate the notion that organisms do evolve over time, just like they refused to accept the fact that Earth is round and not flat and punished scientists for putting forth such ideas that Earth is round and revolves around the sun. On the other hand, we have scientists who are so blinded by the notion of evolution that they even refuse to accept the notion that God’s creative touch led to the development of first living organisms, and these organisms continue to evolve and eventually reproduce themselves according to processes and parameters defined by God and aided by resources placed on this planet by God.
The Qur’an is very clear regarding the notions of creation, evolution, and our eventual journey back to God as part of a process established by God. As God says, and as is a recurrent saying of Muslims when a person dies: “We all are from God and to God is our return.” In chapter 87, titled “The Most High,” God makes the process very clear: Glorify the Essence of God, the Most High; Who creates and then evolves (towards completion and perfections); Who continuously measures and then guides. (You see this process everyday) as new foliage are coming forth and then eventually dry up, turning brown (from green) (87:2–5).
The verses in discussion here make very clear not only the process of creation and evolution but also the purpose behind it. Verse 34 challenges anyone who denies God or worships other forms of deities: Who can create, evolve and reproduce other than God? Turning away from such truth and reality only affirms our lack of deeper understanding and appreciation of the world, as God says in verse 4 that such an evolution of organisms and for human beings specifically is also a process of accountability that unfolds as part of God’s plan and purpose in our existence and movement back to God. Our resurrection, which comes after our eventual death, is the final step in this process of creation and evolution that will put us face to face with God to account for our lives, which God will review for us with minute details and without any shred of injustice.
The Qur’an states in Chapter 36 that all of our activities and conducts are recorded in books that God will give to us on the day of resurrection, and even our hands and legs will provide witnesses in the event we attempt to contradict ourselves on that day of judgment before God. The revelations of the Qur’an are labeled as a “reminder,” implying that these are realities that we already know, and God is not telling us anything new that our inner consciousness (soul) does not already understand, yearn for, and is intuitively aware of.
7. The Qur’an cannot be fabricated or reproduced (10:37–38).
In various places in the Qur’an, God repeats this fact: that the Qur’an is sourced from God, and no human being is capable of forging or reproducing the Qur’an other than in the form and content in which Angel Gabriel revealed it to Prophet Mohammad. There is only one version of the Qur’an that every Muslim reads throughout the world, unlike any other religious books that exist today. For example, there are four different versions of the Bible that exists today, sanctioned by Catholic Church and the pope; for the Jewish faith, there is the Torah and a number of other books that Jewish rabbis, scholars, and other legal experts have prepared over the centuries. The further you go back into various religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, there are more books that claim to have equal status of the books pertaining to that religion.
Islam as a formal religion is the youngest, and there are adequate historical records to ensure that the Qur’an has been in its original form and content as maintained by the Prophet himself and his closest contemporary followers. In contrast, when Prophet Jesus died, his followers were persecuted and had moved far and wide, each with his own recollection of the Bible, to be formally compiled generations later and adopted by the papal institution, after injecting their own version of Jesus, the concept of the Trinity, and the negation of any other faith or religion that is acceptable to Christians and by implication to God.
In Verse 38 here, and in other places, people opposed to truth and justice and faith in God and His prophets have been challenged time and again to either reproduce a chapter in the Qur’an or a few verses. Such challenges even stand today, and no one has succeeded. The Qur’an in verses 2:23–24 also warns that even if one tries, he or she will never be able to do this.
Having one version of the Qur’an does not necessarily mean that all will interpret its messages in unison, and there will be differences of opinion, as we have seen in the emergence of different schools of thought and some major sects such as Shia and Sunni. Most of these differences are cultural and political in nature and lack deeper discussion, introspections, and fuller accounts of collective human knowledge at the time and do not necessarily comes from ambiguity in the texts of the Qur’an.
8. The Qur’an is a source of mercy, healing, warning, and guidance (10:57, 94).
Like all previous books of revelations, especially those mentioned in the Qur’an—the Bible and the Torah—the Qur’an declared itself as a book that is a source of mercy, a source of guidance and criteria for decision making, a book that heals and brings hearts together, and also a cautionary reminder that truth and justice are intertwined, and a life without truth will lead to injustice, and injustice is the recipe for God’s displeasure.
Verse 57 is addressed to mankind that all of humanity needs to be mindful of the truth and the warning that comes from God in this book and to be mindful of the fact that real healing and reconciliation of hearts comes with truth and justice and can only be enabled by God as He wills. The statement then moves onto the believers, that those who accept such a reality will find guidance in the book, and it will become a source of contentment, mercy, and real spiritual and physical well-being for such believers.
Verse 94 goes back to the followers of previous books such as the Bible and the Torah, that they could certainly confirm such a state of mind and God’s guidance if anyone doubts the veracity of the statements made in the Qur’an in this regard. Such reinforcements of ideals and truth are by themselves proof that it is the same God Who revealed the various books of revelations, and all people of faith who believe in God should unite and follow the essence of what God had revealed and not create division among themselves based on religious divide and rituals.
9. God is actively engaged in our affairs (10:61).
Two different statements are made here with respect individuals like the Prophet and each one of us, and then with respect to all that is in the entire universe: that nothing is hidden from God, and He is actively engaged in all that we do during our lifetime.
The Prophet is reminded that he is always in the company of God as he carries on his mission of disseminating God’s guidance and persuading people to seek truth and justice such that all his affairs, his reading of the Qur’an, all work that he does day in and day out are all within the purview of God. The same is true of each one of us. God is with us, whether we admit it or not, whether we realize it or not, or whether we aspire for it or not. As our Creator and Protector, he is engaged with every part of His creation, even if someone denies God. There is no object in this universe, large or small, that is not accounted for but documented and taken care of as God sees it. Those who acknowledge such truth and conform to its implications are considered the true friends of God and are given the assurance of no fear or no regret.
Verse 63 that follows again reiterates the implications: the drive to develop strong faith and reliance on God and the pursuit of good conduct are the foundation of good human character and the solid foundation on which human societies can achieve lasting success in this world and in the life to come. God’s active involvement is mentioned in many places in the Qur’an in verses that allude to facts such as these: He is never touched by sleep or fatigue; the maintenance of the universe does not exhaust Him or His resources; not a leaf falls but God knows about it, and it is recorded; rain comes in measured quantities when and where He desires; the precise growth of the fetus is known to Him; what is hidden in our breast is not hidden from Him; every bird that flies on two wings or animal that walks on four feet is aided and enabled by Him; the love and compassion that originates and resides in people originates from Him; so on and so forth.
This level of intimacy with God and with our own beings is what makes us truly mindful and protects us from committing injustice to ourselves and to our fellow travelers in life. As God said He is closer to us than our jugular vein and His spirit that He breathed into us is the seat of our soul. So we have the privilege to be in God’s constant company and His guidance should always be in our purview, as we navigate this life.
10. Belief in God cannot be forced (10:99, 108).
Freedom of choice is a God-given gift that cannot and should not be taken away by human folly or coercion. Verse 99 here and many others that appear in the Qur’an at different times during the Prophet’s mission, such as 2:256, 18:6, et cetera, had laid a firm foundation that each human being should be allowed to make free choices in matters of faith as well as in other matters pertaining to life. Such choices have consequences, and the natural laws of action and reaction comes into play in such choices that one makes. Forced conversions had been practiced by early Christians, against African slaves and American Indians in the American continent, Communist rulers in modern-day Communist countries, and parents against the wishes of their own children in forcing their faith on their own children without allowing them to make informed and free choices.
The Qur’an is very emphatic that no one should be forced against their free will, even in matter of believing in God to Whom true allegiance belongs. This is the foundation of human rights, human freedom, and human dignity. When someone is forced to believe, it is never a true belief and when someone is forced to act against their free will, it is never done with their whole heart or with their dedication to the task.
Leaving people no choices is also tantamount to coercion, which has become commonplace in the world of commerce and businesses, corrupt government, and modern warfare. Paying labor less than living wages, leaving people uninsured for preconditions, forced labor in Communist countries, forcing people to believe by religious fanatics, modern warfare that does not discriminate between hostile enemies and innocent bystanders, air and water pollution by businesses, and lack of government oversight that forces people to breathe and drink man-made pollution—these are all example of such coercion as well that individuals and societies need to realize and act on to correct. Quality of life and the human condition on this planet degrades as people are forced against their free will. The wide practice of nondisclosure in American business is another example of coercion to hide the sins of wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations.
11. God will deliver the faithful and those who do good (10:103).
There are many places in the Qur’an in which God provides assurance to those who believe and who do good so that they will have no fear or regrets. Fear of the future or regrets for the past are two most debilitating conditions of human beings that rob them of their dignity, destroy their self-assurance, and question the very purpose of life. The very foundation of life decides the physical aspect of our existence and is defined by our faith in God, Who created us in the first place, and when such faith shapes our purpose in life to be His steward on this planet and the actions or conducts that follow from such faith, which results in positive impacts on everyone whom we come in touch with, including our own selves. The duality of faith and goodness has been repeated at least sixty-plus times in the Qur’an to remind us time and again that faith cannot be expressed without good work, and good work alone without faith is not sufficient to define a good human being in the eye of God and fellow believers.
This verse is very emphatic that God made it binding on Him to protect the believers in the long run, thought there may be temporary difficulties due to their own doings. As we search through the Qur’an, we come across a variety of statements from God that reinforce His assurance under various pretexts and with various characteristics that we need to establish in our own lives. Here is a sample of few such verses:
29:69: Those who strive hard with Us (God and the believers), We will inspire them towards Our Guidance and God is always with those who do good.
30:47: To help the believers is ever binding on US (God)
9:33: He (God) is the One Who has sent His Messengers with guidance and religion of truth so that He may make it prevail over all other religions, though the polytheists may dislike
5:105: O you who believe, take care of your souls; those who are steeped in evil cannot harm you if you follow the right way.
20:2: We (God) did not reveal this Qur’an to you to make you unsuccessful!
Here is a further list of many other verses that you can search and reflect on, knowing that God’s help and support are conditional. Mere belief or claiming to be faithful without corresponding character, actions, and hard work is not sufficient to demand God’s favor and help.
24:55; 21:10; 21:105; 22:38; 19:76, 96; 20:82; 20:123; 15:95; 16:97; 13:11; 9:71; 9:88; 7:96; 7:170; 8:18; 6:155; 6:82; 4:175; 5:9; 5:56; 4:31, 40, 68, 141, 100, 124, 147; 3:111,120, 139, 31; 2:150, 152, 189, 195, 212, 82, 38, 143, 150, 152, 186