Qāf 50:3

A-idhā mitnā wa kunnā turābā? Dhālika rajʿun baʿīd

"When we are dead and have become dust? That is a far return."

The question is not completed. "When we are dead and have become dust — what?" There is no answer to it. In Arabic this is called ḥadhf, and its function here is plain: the rest of the sentence (are we to be raised?) is not thought worth saying.

The objector, that is, will not put into words the thing he objects to. He stops halfway through the sentence and passes straight to the verdict: dhālika rajʿun baʿīd.

This is one of the most economical forms mockery and belittlement take in language, and the Qurʾān transmits this objection with a similar incompleteness in many places.

The objection rests not on death itself but on the state that follows death: dispersal. While a corpse remains, being raised may perhaps be imagined; for what has mixed with the soil and become indistinguishable, imagining it grows hard.

And the fourth verse will answer exactly this point: "We know what the earth diminishes of them." The ground the objection rests on — indistinguishability — is aimed at directly.

Root: ر-ج-ع. To return, to turn back. Rajʿ, as a verbal noun, is "a return". The word comes indefinite: rajʿun — "a return".

The Qurʾān uses this root often for the resurrection: ilayhi turjaʿūn (to Him you will be returned), al-marjiʿ (the place of return). The objector, that is, is using the other side's own word and putting an adjective in front of it.

Root: ب-ع-د. To be far. The concrete sense of the root is distance; buʿd — the gap between two points.

Now we come to the real point of the verse.

Which word does the objector choose to say that the resurrection will not happen? Not "impossible". Not "absurd". Not "contrary to reason".

He says "far".

This is a word of distance. And to express impossibility with a word of distance is a settled usage in Arabic (and in English): "a remote possibility", "a far-fetched view". But even in its figurative use the word goes on carrying its concrete sense.

And the sūra behaves as though it has noticed this. Because:

The sūra takes the word the objector chose and spreads it through the whole text. And each time it turns its direction: what they call far turns out to be near; what is far turns out to be something else.

I present this as my own reading, but all five occurrences in the table stand in the text and can be counted. What is interpretation is the claim that they form an order of reply.

This verse was mentioned in the treatment of al-Maʿārij, and the sense given to the word there was: "a return that will not happen". There too, that is, the word of distance was read as meaning impossibility. In Qāf the sūra itself keeps the sense of distance alive.