Wafee anfusikum afala tubsiroon (surah zariyat: 21)

Tafseer Tafheem-ul-Quran by Syed Abu-al-A'la Maududi

(51:21) and also in your own selves. *19 Do you not see?

Wa feee anfusikum; afalaa tubsiroon

*19) That is, "You may not look outside yourself; look within your own self, and you will find countless signs testifying to the same truth. You will see how your creation was begun by combining a microscopic sperm with a microscopic egg in a corner of the mother's body; how you were blessed with a body of unique structure and a self endowed with wonderful powers and abilities; how you were brought out from the dark world of your mother's womb, as soon as your structure became complete, into this vast world, equipped with an automate machine within yourself, which goes on functioning by itself from the day you take birth till your maturity and old age, to assimilate food, produce blood and circulate it in the veins, discharge waste matter, prepare new parts in place of the wasted and worn out parts of the body, resisting the internal and the external hazards to the body and compensating for the losses, even for sending you to peaceful sleep after exhaustion, without any effort required to be made by you towards these basic needs of life. A wonderful brain has been placed under your skull in whose complicated layers lies filled an invaluable wealth of intellect, thought, imagination, consciousness, discrimination, will, memory, desire, feeling and emotions. Inclinations and trends, and other mental abilities. You have been provided with numerous means of knowledge which supply you with every kind of informational through the eye, nose, cars and skin. You have been given the tongue and the power of speech by which you can express your thoughts and feelings. And then your ego has been placed as a ruler over the entire kingdom of your body so that it may employ aII the powers and abilities and form opinions and decide as in what ways ,you have to expend and employ your time and labor and efforts, what you have to reject and what you have to accept, what should be your objective in life and what you should shun and avoid. O C
Thus equipped when you were brought into the world, you saw what provisions had been made ready here for your nourishment, development and the progress and perfection of your self by virtue of which you reached a particular stage of lift when you became able to use the powers and authority you had been endowed with.
For using these powers you were given means in the earth, provided with opportunities, and given ability to control and employ many of the things as you pleased. You had all the ways of disbelief and faith, sin and obedience, justice and injustice, good and evil, truth and falsehood, open before you; there were those who invited to each of these ways and there were the means to lead to each one of them. Whoever among you selected one particular way did so on his own responsibility, for he had the power to decide and choose endowed in himself. Depending on the choice made by each one and taking advantage of the opportunities thus afforded of employing his powers of will and intention some one became a good man and another a bad man; some one adopted the way of belief and faith and another the way of disbelief, polytheism or atheism; some one withheld himself from unlawful desires, and another did whatever he wanted in obedience to his self; some one became an oppressor and another the oppressed; some one carved out his duties and another usurped the rights of others; some one continued to do good till his last breath, another went on committing evil till his last moment of lift; some one exerted himself to raise the word of the truth, another went on oppressing the followers of the truth in order to cause falsehood to flourish.
Now can a person, unless he is absolutely blind and senseless, say that a being such as this has appeared on the earth just by an accident? that there is no wisdom and no plan working behind his creation? that the storms that he is raising on the earth are without a purpose and will end up without entailing any consequence ? that there will be no reward for a good act and no punishment for an evil act? and that injustice will not be redressed and the unjust will not be brought to book? Such things may be said by a person who has lost his reason, or by the one who is resolved not to acknowledge at all the wisdom of a Wise Being working behind the creation of man. But an un-prejudiced, sensible person cannot help but admit that the creation of man, the powers and abilities he has been given, and the position he has been granted here, is certainly a grand, wise plan, and the wisdom of the God Whose plan it is, inevitably demands that man should be questioned about his actions and deeds; and it cannot be right to entertain the doubt about the powers of God that He will not be able to recreate man whom He has brought up to this noble position of honor from a mere microscopic cell.