Al-Qiyama ('The Resurrection'), 40 Meccan verses, swears by the Day of Resurrection and 'the self-reproaching soul,' arguing that God who first formed the human can gather even the fingertips again (75:3-4). It describes the moment of death and rebukes the love of the fleeting world. The surah's address to 'the self-reproaching soul' (75:2), al-nafs al-lawwama, became, alongside the Quran's other two Quranic classifications of the soul, the commanding soul (12:53) and the soul at peace (89:27), a standard threefold scheme later Islamic ethical and mystical writing used to describe stages of moral development, though the Quran itself never explicitly ranks the three together in a single passage. Its verse instructing the Prophet not to move his tongue hastily to memorise the revelation as it was being given (75:16-19) is read by classical commentators as addressing the mechanics of how Muhammad received and retained the Quran during recitation by Gabriel.
The surah's question, 'does man think We will not assemble his bones,' answered by the claim that God can restore even the fine print of his fingertips (75:3-4), is read by classical commentators as responding directly to a specific Meccan objection that scattered, decayed remains could not plausibly be reconstituted, framing bodily resurrection as a matter of divine power rather than of the corpse's physical state. Its closing image of faces radiant and looking upon their Lord on that Day (75:22-23) became, in later Islamic theological debate, a central proof-text for scholars who held that the righteous will directly see God in the afterlife, a doctrine other theological schools within Islam interpreted metaphorically rather than literally.