Animals of the Signs · Reassembled before its rider's eyes
حمار المئة عام
The Donkey of the Hundred Years
Its rider slept a century; his food stayed fresh and his mount was rebuilt bone by bone as he watched.
The account
A man, Uzayr in the dominant tafsir reading, passed a town fallen in on its roofs and asked the scholar's version of despair: "How will Allah give life to this after its death?" (2:259). The answer was a demonstration with himself as the specimen: "So Allah caused him to die for a hundred years, then raised him." The questioning on waking is the Qur'an's gentlest irony: how long did you remain? A day, or part of a day. "Rather, you remained a hundred years."
Then the evidence, split with a scientist's care into a control and an experiment: "look at your food and your drink, they have not spoiled; and look at your donkey." The perishables were preserved; the durable skeleton had gone to scattered bone. "And look at the bones, how We raise them, then clothe them with flesh." Before the rider's eyes his mount was reassembled, joint by joint, hide and breath returned: the Ba'ath performed on one beast for an audience of one. "So when it became clear to him, he said: I know that Allah is over all things competent." The donkey's seal stands for the verse's method: heaven does not always argue with doubt; sometimes it schedules a demonstration.
The facts
- The sleeper100 years, felt as a day
- ControlFood and drink, unspoiled
- ExperimentThe donkey, rebuilt watching
- Verdict“Allah is over all things competent”
The Qur'an on it
وَانظُرْ إِلَى الْعِظَامِ كَيْفَ نُنشِزُهَا ثُمَّ نَكْسُوهَا لَحْمًا
And look at the bones, how We raise them, then clothe them with flesh.
Read beside it
The words
On the Path