Created from a drop, then a clear disputant
خَلَقَ ٱلْإِنسَٰنَ مِن نُّطْفَةٍ فَإِذَا هُوَ خَصِيمٌ مُّبِينٌ
khalaqa l-insāna min nuṭfatin fa-idhā huwa khaṣīmun mubīn — He created the human being from a drop, then suddenly he is a clear disputant.
The same clause appears once as a third-person report about what 'He' did (16:4) and once inside a first-person question, 'We created him' (36:77), where it is turned into a rebuke of a human who disputes the One who made him.
The two verses share the words 'from a drop, then suddenly he is a clear disputant'; the creation statement differs—'He created the human being' (16:4) versus 'We created him' (36:77)—and in 36:77 it sits inside the question 'Has the human not seen'. In (16:4) the clause stands as a statement: a third-person masculine singular verb, 'He created', with 'the human being' as its accusative object. Its context is a sequence of creative acts—'He created the heavens and the earth with the truth' (16:3) before it, and 'the livestock—He created them for you' (16:5) after it—so the human's creation from a drop is listed among them, and the pointed ending, 'then suddenly he is a clear disputant', marks the human as the one item in the list that turns disputatious against its Maker. In (36:77) the same clause is embedded in a rhetorical question, 'Has the human not seen that We created him from a drop...?' The verb shifts to the first person plural, 'We created', with the human as subject of 'has...not seen' and object pronoun '-him' of the creation verb. The surrounding verses identify the addressee's opponents: 'let not their saying grieve you' (36:76) and the one who 'strikes for Us a likeness and forgets his own creation', asking 'Who will give life to the bones when they are decayed?' (36:78). Here the clause is aimed directly at that disputant: the question confronts him with the fact that the One he disputes with is the One who made him from a drop, and the following verse names his dispute—denial of the revival of decayed bones.
Where it occurs
- 16:4 A third-person statement ('He created') listing the human's creation from a drop among other creative acts, ending on the human's sudden disputatiousness.
- 36:77 A first-person rhetorical question ('Has the human not seen that We created him...') that confronts a disputant with his own origin.
All Qur'anic expressions