How do you cover truth (takfurun) regarding The God, while you were in a state of lifelessness; then He gave you life; then He brings you into death; then He gives you life again; then to Him you are returned?
After verses 26 and 27, where the subject was the reception of meaning, the response to divine parables, and then the structural departure of the human being from divine bonds, breaking covenant, cutting connection, and causing corruption, this verse now returns to an even more foundational root: the structure of human existence itself, and the sequence of states through which the human being passes.
A question may arise: why translate the verse in a way that preserves the Qur’anic idea of mawt, rather than reducing it simply to “death” or “deadness”? The reason is that, in common English usage, “death” often suggests final biological termination. But mawt in the Qur’anic language has a wider range. It can refer to a state, a transition, the suspension of active life, or a change of existential phase.
The verse begins with a question: “How do you cover truth regarding the One God?” This is not merely an expression of moral surprise. It is a structural question: how can denial of the One God arise when the whole path of human existence is defined in His hand?
The sequence of the verse shows four movements:
amwat → life → mawt → life → return
The important point at the beginning of the sequence is that the Qur’an does not say, “you were nothing.” It says, “you were amwat.” This expression indicates a state of being, not absolute nonexistence. “Amwat” appears as a noun, describing an existential condition. The later stages, however, are expressed through verbs: “He gave you life,” “He brings you into mawt,” and “He gives you life.” This difference may matter: the first state points to a prior and stable condition, while the later stages describe dynamic phase changes in the human path.
In this interpretive model, “amwat” can point to the human being’s pre-individual and pre-biological state: a condition in which the human being has not yet appeared in the form of body, worldly memory, personal experience, and historical responsibility. Then “He gave you life” is entry into biological and individual life: the stage in which the human being experiences, chooses, acts, and builds an existential record.
At this point, the link with the verse of covenant in Al-A'raf 7:172 becomes very important. In that verse, the children of Adam are made to bear witness to the Lordship of their Lord before their individual and worldly presence in history: “Am I not your Lord? They said: Yes.” This witnessing is collective, comprehensive, and centered on the reality of Lordship. When that verse is placed beside “you were amwat, then He gave you life,” an interpretive model becomes possible in which the human being, before biological individuation, was in a collective or pre-individual state of fitrah and awareness of Lordship. This model does not claim that the literal translation of “amwat” is “collective awareness.” Rather, it says that the Qur’an’s internal clues make such an interpretation possible and coherent.
After the first life, the verse says: “then He brings you into mawt.” This time, the speech is not about the nominal state “amwat,” but about the act of causing mawt. This shows that after the human being enters life, mawt is no longer simply the same as the initial state. Now an act occurs upon a human being who has gained individuality, experience, action, and responsibility. The person is no longer merely in a pre-individual state; the person has passed through the world and enters the next stage carrying their existential data.
Ghafir 40:11 strengthens this structure: “You caused us to die twice and gave us life twice.” If the first mawt meant absolute nothingness, the expression “You caused us to die” would become difficult, because causing mawt is an act that occurs upon something within the order of existence, not upon sheer nothing. That verse shows that mawt and life in the Qur’an can be understood as countable stages within a multi-state system.
Then comes “then He gives you life”: life again. This second life is not a simple repetition of the first life, because the human being has now passed through the world, choice, action, experience, and mawt. If the first life was the field in which individuality and responsibility were built, the second life is the field in which the truth of that path is faced.
The ending, “then to Him you are returned,” locks the whole sequence together. In Arabic, ruju' means return, not merely going to some new destination. The human being is returned to the same origin in whose encompassing authority the entire existential path had been defined. If the beginning of the human being were only absolute, unrelated nonexistence, the language of return would not carry this much meaning. Return shows that the whole path, from beginning to end, is defined in relation to the same source.
Therefore verse 28 presents the human being within a multi-state ontology: the state of amwat, individual life, mawt after experience, life again, and return to the origin. This model is not a claim of final translation. It is an interpretation built by placing together the Qur’an’s internal clues: Al-Baqarah 2:28, the verse of covenant in Al-A'raf, the verse of two deaths and two lives in Ghafir, and the concept of fitrah in Ar-Rum. In this view, the human being is not merely a creature who begins with biological birth and ends with physical death. The human being passes through different states of existence and finally returns to the One God.