The Quran

243

۞ أَلَم تَرَ إِلَى الَّذينَ خَرَجوا مِن دِيارِهِم وَهُم أُلوفٌ حَذَرَ المَوتِ فَقالَ لَهُمُ اللَّهُ موتوا ثُمَّ أَحياهُم ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَذو فَضلٍ عَلَى النّاسِ وَلٰكِنَّ أَكثَرَ النّاسِ لا يَشكُرونَ

Muhammad Asad

ART THOU NOT aware of those who forsook their homelands in their thousands for fear of deathwhereupon God said unto them, "Die," and later brought them back to life?¹ Behold, God is indeed limitless in His bounty unto man - but most people are ungrateful.

After the conclusion of the injunctions relating to marital life, the Qur'an returns here to the problem of warfare in a just cause by alluding to people who - obviously under a hostile attack -"forsook their homelands for fear of death". Now, neither the Qur'an nor any authentic Tradition offers any indication as to who the people referred to in this verse may have been. The "historical" explanations given by some of the commentators are most contradictory; they seem to have been derived from Talmudic stories current at the time, and cannot be used in this context with any justification. We must, therefore, assume (as Muhammad 'Abduh does in Manar II, 455 ff.) that the above allusion is parabolically connected with the subsequent call to the faithful to be ready to lay down their lives in God's cause: an illustration of the fact that fear of physical death leads to the moral death of nations and communities, just as their regeneration (or "coming back to life") depends on their regaining their moral status through overcoming the fear of death. This is undoubtedly the purport of the elliptic story of Samuel, Saul and David told in verses 246-251.