Explanation of false attributes interpreted as belonging to the Dabbah.

The Shaykh : And of this nature is what many contemporary writers or exegetes lean toward, interpreting the Dabbah of the earth in a way that corresponds to their weak faith in the unseen matters. We have often drawn attention to the fact that faith in the unseen is the first condition of faith; it is the first thing that indicates that this Muslim truly believes in Allah, because he has submitted to the correct report about Him, whether from the Book or the Sunnah, and has not deified his intellect nor followed his desires, but rather followed the text that came to him from Allah and His Messenger. Many of these writers do not display this faith, unfortunately. Therefore, they always and forever lean toward interpreting the unseen texts that do not align with real-world events. They lean toward interpreting them as something ordinary. For example, this Dabbah this Dabbah, they said, is an expression for germs. What aided them in this was that in the previous verse, it mentions that it speaks to them. People interpreted "speaking" here as "injuring" (jarh), and this is correct linguistically. However, first, the scholars of tafsir, and second, the apparent meaning of the text, do not mean "injuring" but rather "addressing" or "conversing." It is worth noting that some traditional exegetes who rely on interpreting the Qur'an by the Qur'an and authentic athar, such as al-Hafiz Ibn Kathir al-Dimashqi, did not... this meaning that some contemporary writers relied upon and adopted, restricting the meaning to it. Their speaking means their injuring. This meaning was mentioned by al-Hafiz Ibn Kathir, but he said there is no objection to interpreting "speaking" in the verse with both meanings: it speaks to them in address and informs them, and at the same time, it injures them. They interpret the Dabbah here as a germ or microbe because this has become customary and known, and people believe in it. There is no difference in this between the believer and the disbeliever. As for leaving the verse and the hadiths that came regarding the signs of the Hour on their apparent meaning, this is something their hearts cannot accommodate to believe in. We point out that this is a deviation that has affected many of the earlier Muslims in their interpretation of the texts of the Book and the Sunnah, as long as they are far from their own logic. This is a departure from the basic description of the believer that Allah, Mighty and Majestic, described in the first verse of Surat al-Baqarah, where He said: Therefore, faith in the Dabbah of the earth, like all the signs of the Hour, must be believed in without any interpretation that leads its holder to denial (ta'til). Denial means negation. Germs have existed since before people knew of them, so how can our Lord, Mighty and Majestic, speak of Allah, Mighty and Majestic, bringing out a Dabbah for people that speaks to them, and this Dabbah means a microbe or germ that always injures people and harms them, and may even kill them? Therefore, this ambiguity mentioned in the verse and the hadith regarding the Dabbah must remain on its apparent meaning; it is a Dabbah that crawls on the earth. As for the attributes mentioned, as we noted in some books, they should not be attended to because there is no authentic athar regarding them.