Tafseer Week 7 - Surah Al-An'am

Why does a person continuously reject the signs of God?

Surah al-An'am is an early Meccan chapter that sets out a Surah long dialogue between the Prophet Muhammad (s) and the Quraysh, quoting a plethora of reasons for their rejecting the Prophet (s) and his plethora of answers to them, at times theological, at times logical and at others natural.

The theme denotes why a people, who receive every type of sign cannot climb out of the pit of darkness they find themselves it; this is because they have changed the order and creation of things to such an extent, it is unrecognisable and so they even Truth is unrecognisable to them.

They change creation, they change divine laws, they belittle history and as such live a skewed existence. Everything is distorted and so the sign will be rejected due to their practise of distortion. The central verses are of how they forbid the cattle on themselves and even nutrition on their women. Examples of such superstitions and bastardisations of laws would be in all remits of the Meccan practises as demonstrated by this Surah.

The central lesson for the Muslim community was to not mix truth and falsehood lest they too mix signs of God with falsehood and find themselves unable to recognise Ayaat from Allah (swt)