The vocabulary used in Sūra 6 – “signs” of the Creator’s presence and power – appears strongly again in this sūra and is an interesting and important component of many sūras in the long series to follow.
The first part of the sūra mixes the content of the messenger’s preaching with a call for response to Allah and announcement of reward and punishment. The audience does not accept the preaching. They raise a number of objections (whether sincere or not), and the messenger answers back vigorously with speeches introduced by the word
say
.
The preaching is addressed to “people” (e.g., v. 23) rather than “People of the Book” or “Children of Israel.” There is little sense here of Jews and Christians in the audience, except possibly in the discussion of “Allah has taken a son” in verse 68.
Nevertheless, the tone is polemical, and the messenger probes the trust of the unbelievers in “associates” while making his case for Allah (e.g., vv. 34–36). At one point, the voice of the Quran comforts the messenger in the midst of the rejection of his message.
The sūra is named after Jonah, described here as history’s only successful preacher. Readers may be interested to read Sūras 10–15 closely in order to test a scholar’s recent argument that these six sūras share a unifying theme. See the discussion in the introduction to Sūra 15.

Creation in the Quran
Jon Hoover
Creation is at the core of the Quran’s theology. As in the Bible, God is the one, all-powerful Creator of everything (13.16). God created the heavens and the earth (14.19), the angels (43.19), the sun and the moon and the day and the night (41.37), the mountains and the rivers (13.3), trees, fruit, grain, and herbs (55.11–12), the animals (24.45), humankind (23.12–14), and the jinn, a world of invisible beings parallel to the human world (55.15). God did not just originate the world to let it run on its own but continuously sustains it: “Or (is He not better) who brings about the creation, (and) then restores it, and who provides for you from the sky and the earth?” (27.64). Moreover, everything that God creates is good (32.7), and he creates nothing in vain (3.191).
Creation in the Quran serves profoundly moral and religious purposes. God created the world as an arena to test humankind (18.7), and God’s original creation of the world is cited as proof establishing his ability to resurrect the dead for punishment (46.33). Every created thing is a sign pointing to God, and the Quran is full of exhortation to understand and think about these signs in order to remember God, believe in him, and worship him: “He is the Lord of the heavens and the earth and all that is between them. Worship Him and be steadfast in your worship of Him” (19.65, Muhammad Sarwar). While humans were created fretful, anxious, and grudging (70.19–21) and the angels questioned God’s wisdom in creating them because they would shed blood (2.30), their ultimate purpose, along with the jinn, is to worship God: “I did not create the jinn and humankind except to worship” (51.56; Droge has “serve me” instead of “worship”).
According to the Quran, God created the world in six days (11.7). The biblical notion that God rested on the seventh day is not mentioned. Instead, it is implicitly denied: “Certainly, We created the heavens and the earth, and whatever is between them, in six days. No weariness touched Us in (doing) that” (50.38). Sūra 41.9–12 appears to indicate that creation took eight days – two for the earth, four for the mountains and the earth’s nourishment, and two for the seven heavens – but commentators included the first two days within the four days mentioned immediately thereafter in order to bring the total back down to six. Otherwise, the Quran does not specify what God created on each of the six days, although such accounts are found in traditions ascribed to Muhammad.
Both Christian and Muslim theologians have pondered whether the world is eternal or had a beginning. Patristic theologians argued that the world had a beginning – God created it out of nothing (
ex nihilo
) in time – and the medieval church established this as Christian orthodoxy. Many Muslim theologians argued in similar fashion that God’s creation of the world had a beginning, and they found this affirmed in the Quran, “When [God] decrees something, He simply says to it, ‘Be!’ and it is” (2.117). This remains the most common Muslim view. However, Muslim philosophers influenced by Neoplatonism countered that the perfection of God entails his production of the world from eternity. If God had at some point begun to create, that would have subjected God to change. The theologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) argued that the Quran does not support one position or the other clearly and that rational arguments cannot decide the matter either. The only
thing that can be known is that the world depends on God for its existence. The Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) also took rational arguments to be inconclusive but held on the basis of faith that the world had a beginning. The Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, known in the west as Averroes (d. 1198), and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) argued that the Quran in fact supports creation out of preexisting matter. It affirms that God’s throne was on water prior to the creation of this world (11.7) and that God called forth the heaven and the earth from preexisting smoke (41.11). Both Muslim scholars thus concluded that God created the world continuously from eternity, and Ibn Taymiyya even appealed to the mention of preexisting water in Genesis 1:1–2 to add weight to his argument. Some modern biblical scholars have likewise claimed that Genesis does not necessarily support creation
ex nihilo
.

10.1 – Those are the signs of the wise Book
The sūra begins with seemingly self-conscious and “self-referential” claims for itself and for a man “among them” who preaches (v. 2). Notice that the following five sūras open with similar verses – as do many other sūras of the Quran. See “Different Kinds of Literature”.