The Verse That Reportedly Moved an Opponent to Faith

At-Tur poses a compact cosmological challenge to the deniers: 'were they created by nothing, or were they themselves the creators? Or did they create the heavens and earth? Rather, they are not certain' (52:35-36). A widely transmitted early account holds that Jubayr ibn Mutim, a Meccan pagan who had not yet accepted Islam, heard Muhammad recite this passage during the evening prayer and reported that his heart nearly took flight toward belief on the spot, an episode biographical sources cite as an example of the surah's argument working precisely as intended, on a hearer with no prior inclination to accept it.

Classical commentators read the argument as a closed logical set of alternatives, that something exists, and its existence must be explained either by self-creation, which is incoherent, by chance from nothing, which explains nothing, or by an eternal Creator, leaving the last as the only remaining possibility once the others are set aside; later Islamic theology developed this compact Quranic argument at much greater length in formal works of kalam addressing the existence of God through cosmological reasoning of a similar basic shape. The report is cited in later biographical literature as an example of the argument working precisely as the surah frames it, addressed to genuine uncertainty rather than settled hostility.