Amid its catalogue of Judgement scenes, Al-Mursalat pauses to ask the deniers directly, 'did We not create you from a fluid, despised?' (77:20), a blunt reminder of humble biological origin classical commentators read as a rhetorical strategy aimed specifically at arrogance, since a being whose own beginning was so unremarkable has little grounds, the surah implies, for the outright denial of a Creator's power to raise it again after death. The verse belongs to a small family of similarly worded Quranic reminders of humanity's modest physical starting point, deployed at points of argument against pride or denial rather than as biological description for its own sake.
Commentators read the placement of this brief aside within a surah otherwise dominated by cosmic imagery and a repeated refrain of warning as a deliberate change of register, shifting from the scale of creation and Judgement to the intimate, almost uncomfortable scale of individual human origin, before returning immediately to the same refrain, 'woe that Day to the deniers,' that structures the rest of the chapter. Some later commentators note the same rhetorical strategy, humbling reminder followed by renewed warning, recurs across several short surahs collected in this same late section of the Quran.