Surah Ha-Mim as-Sajdah, Footnote 25

The hadiths explain this as follows: when some hardened criminal keeps denying his crimes and insists on rejecting even all the testimony against him, then by God’s command the parts of his own body will testify, one by one, as to what deeds he committed with them. This account has been narrated from the Prophet (peace be upon him) by Anas, Abu Musa al-Ash’ari, Abu Sa’id al-Khudri, and Ibn Abbas, and has been recorded by Muslim, al-Nasa’i, Ibn Jarir, Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Bazzar, and other traditionists (for further explanation, see Tafhim al-Qur’an, vol. 4, Surah Ya-Sin, footnote 55).

This verse is among the many verses that establish that the Hereafter will not be a purely spiritual realm; rather, human beings will be brought back to life there with body and soul together, just as they exist now in this world. Not only that, they will be given the very same body they now inhabit. All the same particles and atoms of which their bodies were composed in this world will be gathered together on the Day of Judgment, and they will be raised with those very former bodies within which they carried out their deeds in the world. It is obvious that a person’s body parts can only testify there if they are the very same parts with which he committed some crime in his first life. The following verses of the Qur’an also serve as decisive proof of this theme: Bani Isra’il, verses 49–51, 98; al-Mu’minun, 35–38, 82–83; al-Nur, 24; al-Sajdah, 10; Ya-Sin, 65, 78–79; al-Saffat, 16–18; al-Waqi’ah, 47–50; al-Nazi’at, 10–14.