بِسمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحمٰنِ الرَّحيمِ
الحاقَّةُ
مَا الحاقَّةُ
وَما أَدراكَ مَا الحاقَّةُ
The inevitable reality!
What is the inevitable reality?!
What will show you what is the inevitable reality?!
EXEGESIS
The term al-ḥāqqah, as the emphatic form of al-ḥaqq (reality, truth), has been understood by most translators and exegetes as the inevitable or the undeniable reality, and one of many names found in the Quran for the Day of Judgement.
The surah commences with a mention of Judgement Day, establishing the surah’s primary theme and focus, as explained in the Introduction.
The rhetorical questions in the second and third verses, What is the inevitable reality?! And what will show you what is the inevitable reality?! is a style the Quran employs to express amazement and wonder at something beyond human comprehension. To magnify the matter further, the noun (al-ḥāqqah) is repeated in each of these verses without being substituted by a pronoun.
One might argue that whenever the Quran asks, what will show you what is …? it immediately addresses the matter it is asking about in the verses that follow the question (see 74:27, 82:17, 83:8, 83:19, 90:12, 97:2, 101:3, and 104:5), and in this case also, the next verses address the destruction of past nations; however, the very next verse (verse 4) also alludes to the Day of Resurrection as the catastrophe. There is also a relationship between the mention of past nations and the resurrection which is explained under the Exposition of verse 4.
Several exegetes opine that when the Quran employs this method of questioning, it is asking about incorporeal matters and of the unseen. And when using adrāka to ask such questions, it refers to matters of which the Prophet had some realisation and understanding, whereas verses that use yudrīka discuss matters that were kept hidden from him. This view is perhaps held because most verses using adrāka (including this one) discuss the Day of Resurrection (69:3, 77:14, 82:17-18, 101:3) and hellfire (74:27, 101:10, 104:5), whereas verses with yudrīka are mostly regarding the hour (the end of the world) (33:63, 42:17), whose precise moment is unknown to anyone but God Himself (31:34). Both these verb forms (yudrīka and adrāka) are said with a singular pronoun, so the immediate addressee is always the Prophet himself.
The use of adrāka here, therefore, highlights the fact that given the Prophet was the most knowledgeable of all men and would have the most realisation of what awaits mankind on Judgement Day, him being personally asked: ‘Then what will make even you, O Muhammad, realise what is …?’ magnifies further how incomprehensible and beyond anyone’s imagination the reality of the Day of Judgement is. Or as Ṭūsī notes, it amplifies to its listener that you will never fully realise the magnitude of that day and its affairs until you witness the horrors it will unfold.
For more on adrāka and its etymology, see verse 26 of this surah.
EXPOSITION
Belief in the hereafter (maʿād) is one of the three main pillars of Islamic theology, the other two being the belief in God’s unicity (tawḥīd) and the prophethood (nubuwwah) of Muhammad (s), as a culmination of all prophets sent, starting with Adam (a). The Quran repeatedly speaks of these three beliefs, refuting the arguments against them and emphasising the need to acknowledge them, whilst defending and asserting its own integrity.
If the faithless ask: Who shall revive the bones when they have decayed? (36:78), the Quran replies: He will revive them who produced them the first time (36:79), noting that creation from nothing is a greater feat in human comprehension then restoring what has decayed. The faithless claim that they will not be resurrected. Say: ‘Yes, by my Lord, you will surely be resurrected’ (64:7). Does man suppose We shall not put together his bones? (75:3). Why, in fact, Yes indeed, We are able to proportion [even] his fingertips! (75:4). So though the faithless keep asking if they and their forefathers will be brought back to life after their bodies have disintegrated (27:67, 37:16-17, 56:47-48), the Quran keeps asserting that God is capable, and will make this happen. We shall muster them, and We will not leave out anyone of them (18:47). The wrongdoers deny the Day of Retribution (82:9) though there is no denying it will befall (56:2), on the day it becomes manifest and all are resurrected, all falsehood will vanish and the reality or absolute truth of God and His dominion over all His creation will be starkly evident and undeniable, even to the most ardent and stubborn of atheists. Hence it is the inevitable reality.
In the Islamic understanding, the world’s creation and human life are meaningless if there is no Day of Judgement on which all deeds are accounted for and their doers recompensed.
It would however be a mistake to confine one’s understanding of this day within the context of what man knows as ‘reality’ in this world. The Quran is replete with references to a more real, unseen world – a world in which angels and demons exist – that becomes visible and ‘real’ to humans when they transcend the narrow confines of the corporeal realm and especially when they are resurrected with a new physical form. Nothing of the real world, including paradise and hellfire, is even close to what humans imagine them to be whilst in this world.
Muslim mystics describe our ability to know the hereafter like that of a foetus to know this world whilst in the womb, regardless of how intelligent it may be; and our emergence to a much vaster world on the Day of Judgement as comparable to our emergence into this world from the dark, limited world of the womb. And just as a foetus is already in this world yet incapable of witnessing the universe that surrounds it, because of its weak senses and being veiled by the womb, similarly, the ‘veil’ of the physical body and its limited senses prevent man from witnessing the real, unseen world that he is already part of.
Man must rely on his intellect, imagination, and life experiences to gain some realisation of all such matters of the unseen. And to aid this process, the Quran typically follows such rhetorical questions with an explanation as if to steer man toward making the right choices in this world that will, in turn, directly affect him in the hereafter when reality comes into full view.
[1] Nasr, Introduction to Sūrat al-Ḥāqqah.
[2] Alusi, 15/271; Qurtubi, 20/249; Tabrisi, 10/516 (from al-Thawrī).
[3] Nemuneh, 26/235.
[4] Tibyan, 10/94.
[5] And this is especially true for Meccan surahs whose first audience were mostly the polytheist Quraysh.
[6] See also the Exposition of 82:9 on the Quran’s emphatic assertion of a resurrection and the pre-Islamic disbelief of the Meccans in an afterlife.