Ar-Room (The Romans)

55. “And on the Day that the Hour (of Judgment) will be established, the guilty will swear that they tarried not but an hour; thus were they used to being deluded.”

He who is accustomed to perjure in this world, will use it in the Hereafter, too.

We formerly said that the discussions around ‘Origin’ and ‘Resurrection’ are said close to each other in this Surah. In the above verse, following the former discussions about Origin and Resurrection, again the Qur’an speaks about the subject of Resurrection and illustrates another painful scene of the state of the guilty on that Day.

It says:

“And on the Day that the Hour (of Judgment) will be established, the guilty will swear that they tarried not but an hour…”

Yes, in the past, too, the guilty were wholly deprived from understanding the reality in such a way. The verse continues saying:

“…thus were they used to being deluded.”

The application of the Qur’anic word /sa‘ah/ (hour) instead of ‘the Day of Hereafter’, as we have formerly pointed out, is either for the sake that the Hereafter will be set in a sudden moment, or because the men’s deeds will quickly be reckoned because Allah, the Aware, is swift at reckoning. And we know that the word /sa‘ah/ in the Arabic language means a very small part of time.

Since there is no word mentioned about the place of this establishment in the verse, some commentators have said that it may refer to the time of staying in the world, which is, in fact, no more than a fleet moment.

But the next verse is a clear evidence that the purpose of it is staying in the purgatory world, or the world after death and before Resurrection, because the Qur’anic sentence:

“…Certainly you have tarried according to Allah’s Book till the Day of Resurrection…”

concludes the end of these two to the Hereafter, and this is not correct but concerning the purgatory world.

We also know this fact that the quality of purgatory is not the same for all. Some people have an aware life in purgatory (intermediate world), while there is another group who are like ones who go asleep deeply as if they would awake from their sleep on the Hereafter Day and consider thousands of days as one hour.

There will remain two matters here to be discussed. The first is that how can the guilty make such a wrong oath?

The answer to this question is clear. They truly think such that the purgatory term is a very short course, because they have had a state similar to sleep.

Did not ‘the people of the cave’, who were some believing righteous people, consider that they had slept for a day or a part of a day after awakening from their very long sleeping?

Or one of the Divine prophets, whose story is mentioned in Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 259, after one hundred years that he had passed away; returned to life again and he did not say that the gap between two kinds of life was one day or a part of a day.

What is the problem that, regarding to the particular state of the people of the Hell, the guilty have such a consideration because of unawareness?

That is why, as the next verse announces, the aware believers will tell them that they are wrong and they have tarried in the purgatory world until the Day of Hereafter and they are in the Day of Resurrection.

By this statement, the second matter i.e., the commentary of the Qur’anic sentence:

“…thus were they used to being deluded”

is made clear, for the Arabic word: originally means: ‘the change of real feature and declining from Truth, and because of their peculiar condition in purgatory, this group have naturally remained far from realities and cannot discriminate the length of the time of their staying in purgatory.

Regarding to what was said in the above, there seems no need to pose the long discussions of a group of commentators who explain why the guilty ones tell intentionally lies on the Hereafter Day, since, in this stage, there is no reference of their intentional falsehood in the verse.

Of course, in other verses of the holy Qur’an, there are seen some examples concerning the lie and falsehood of the guilty on the Day of Resurrection the answer of which has been given in detail when commenting on Surah Al-’An‘am, No. 6, verse 187, but this discussion does not relate to the subject of the discussion concerning these verses.