the restoration of the original. The second body is not different from the first in every respect, as some have claimed, nor is the second creation like the first in every respect, as others have supposed. Just as He, glorified be He, created man when he was nothing, so He restores him after he has become nothing.
Accordingly, consider a person who has turned to dust, from which plants then grow and are eaten by another person, and so on; or a person who is eaten by another person or an animal, and that animal eats yet another person. In all these cases, this person and that person have ceased to exist, and each has become dust, “just as he was before he was created. Then each is restored from the dust. Only the tailbone remains: from it he was created, and from it he will be reassembled. As for the rest of him, it no longer exists.”
He is thus restored from the material into which he was transformed. If a thousand dead people decompose in a single grave and all become dust, they will be restored and rise from that grave. Allah Most High will bring them into being after they had been utterly nonexistent, just as He first brought them into being after they had been utterly nonexistent.
If a thousand people become dust in one grave, He brings them into being from that grave without needing to create them as He did in the first creation: from a drop of fluid, then a clinging clot, then a lump of flesh. He made their growth depend on food and drink being transformed into their bodies, just as the plants and animals a person eats are transformed into his body. The same applies if he eats a human being, or eats an animal that has eaten a human being. Thus, the creation