The Quran lists a whole life in five verses, from an extract of clay to the raising. Every stage carries an Arabic word, and the words are ordinary.
Pull a single hair out of a lump of dough. That is the picture al-Qurtubi reached for when he had to explain the first word the Quran uses for a human being. Sulala, he wrote, is built on al-sall, the drawing of one thing out of another, the way you draw a hair out of dough or a sword out of its scabbard and it slips free. So the opening line is not naming a material. It is naming a removal. And certainly did We create man from an extract of clay (23:12).
Then the passage begins counting, and it does not stop where we have been taught to stop. A drop in a firm lodging. A clinging thing. A chewed lump. Bones. Flesh laid over the bones. A creation altogether unlike any of that. Then indeed, after that you are to die. Then indeed you, on the Day of Resurrection, will be resurrected (23:15-16). Nine stages in five verses, no seam anywhere, and you are standing somewhere inside the list right now.
Then We placed him as a sperm-drop in a firm lodging. Then We made the sperm-drop into a clinging clot, and We made the clot into a lump of flesh, and We made from the lump, bones, and We covered the bones with flesh; then We developed him into another creation. So blessed is Allah, the best of creators (23:13-14).
That last sentence is where the quoting usually ends. Al-Razi did not end there. He walks the passage as seven numbered ranks, and his numbering runs straight on into the death and the raising, because the Arabic gives him nowhere to stop. The verses hang on two small joints, the fa that means and then, and the thumma that means after that. The joint that carries a drop into a clot is the same joint that carries a man out of his grave. And Ibn Kathir notes in al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya that the Quran moves here from the one man to the whole kind, and this is his example.
Each stage has a name. The names are the part almost nobody translates.
Ibn Manzur gives the word its ordinary life first. A nutfa is the little of water. It is the water still in the skin when the skin is nearly finished. It is what stays in the bottom of the bucket.
The root is dripping. Something coming down a drop at a time. Ibn Manzur records that pearls were called nutaf, after the look of a water drop.
That is the word for you at the second stage. Not a seed, not a beginning. The bit at the bottom of a bucket, in a place al-Tabari says was made firm for exactly this and readied for it, so that what is put there stays until its business is done.
If a garment catches on a thorn tree and stays hanging there, Ibn Manzur says, that is alaq. Anything that hangs is alaq, the strap a vessel hangs from, the strap of a whip. To fasten onto something and refuse to be shaken off is aliqtu bihi, I clung to it.
The same entry gives the other half of the word. Al-alaq is blood, and it is said thick congealed blood, and it is said congealed before it dries. A piece of it is an alaqa. And, Ibn Manzur adds, the small creature that lives in water is called an alaqa because it is red like blood, a worm in the water that sucks blood.
So the third word holds two things at once, blood and gripping. Al-Tabari glosses it in four words. The piece of blood.
The fourth word comes from chewing. Ibn Manzur says a mudgha is the piece of flesh, named for the chewing, and on the same page he notes that the sinew a bowyer wets and binds onto the tip of a bow limb is also called a mudgha, because it is chewed.
Al-Razi spells it out. A piece of flesh as though it were the measure of what gets chewed, the way a ghurfa is the measure of what a hand scoops up in one go. Both words measure by the body. A mouthful. A handful. Arabic reached for the units it uses at dinner.
The fifth word repays looking at hardest. Al-Zabidi opens the root with the flat statement that it means the opposite of smallness, and then quotes al-Isfahani. The origin of the word azuma is the largeness of a bone. From there it was borrowed for everything large, whether sensed or understood.
Which means the Arabic word for grandeur is built out of a bone. Azama, majesty. Azima, a crushing affair. Azim, immense. All of it grew from the name of the shaft in a leg that the flesh sits on.
And We made from the lump, bones. Then the verb turns into a tailor's verb. And We covered the bones with flesh. Al-Razi says the flesh covers the bone, so He made it a garment for it.
Then We developed him into another creation. Al-Razi's gloss on that seventh rank is the loudest line he writes on the passage. Living, when he had been inert. Speaking, when he had been mute. Hearing, when he had been deaf. Seeing, when he had been blind.
The Prophet ﷺ gave the same sequence in time. Ibn Mas'ud (RA) narrated it, prefacing it: the one telling them was the truthful and the trusted. Each one of you has his creation gathered in his mother's belly for forty days. Then he is an alaqa for the like of that. Then he is a mudgha for the like of that. Then an angel is sent, and is commanded with four words, and is told: write his deed, his provision, his term, and whether wretched or happy (Sahih al-Bukhari 3208).
Four lines written about someone who does not yet have a face. The stages are not only a run of shapes. Somewhere inside them, a record is opened.
Ibn Abbas (RA) read another creation as everything that comes after the womb. Al-Razi preserves the wording: the turning of a man through his states after birth, infancy, the filling out of his youth, the arrival of understanding, until he dies. Then Ibn Abbas (RA) gives his proof, and his proof is simply the next verse. Then indeed, after that you are to die.
Al-Qurtubi handles it the same way, without ceremony. After the creating and the living, he says, and then He informed of the raising after the death. Ibn Kathir names the two halves as the first bringing forth and the last.
The Quran runs this list twice more, and both times it runs long. Surah al-Hajj opens by stating why it is given at all. O people, if you should be in doubt about the Resurrection, then consider that indeed, We created you from dust, then from a sperm-drop (22:5). Surah Ghafir carries it past the child and past full strength to then that you become elders (40:67), and names the one taken in death before reaching any of it.
Surah al-Qiyama folds the whole thing into questions. Does man think that he will be left neglected? Had he not been a sperm from semen emitted? (75:36-37). And at the close: Is not that Creator Able to give life to the dead? (75:40).
There is a final stage, and it is the smallest. The Prophet ﷺ said that everything of a man decays except the tailbone, and from it the creation is assembled (Sahih al-Bukhari 4814).
So it closes where it opened. Something next to nothing, in a dark place, drawn out and built upon. A hair out of dough. A drop at the bottom of a bucket. A bone the earth will not eat.
Read the list once more and notice what is missing. Across nine stages there is not one you arranged, attended, or agreed to. You were drawn out, settled, turned, clothed, raised. Every verb in it belongs to someone else.
Silsila Research Desk
Grade: Sahih · 7 min read