Why does Surah An-Naba say the disbelievers were punished because they 'did not expect any reckoning'?
Answer
In An-Naba 78:27, the Qur'an names the root cause of the punishment with striking economy: 'Indeed, they were a people who did not expect any reckoning' (78:27). The phrase 'lā yarjūna ḥisāban' means they neither hoped for nor feared a Day when their deeds would be brought to account. According to al-Ṭabarī, this absence of expectation removed all restraint from their conduct, so they lived as though nothing they did would ever be weighed. Al-Saʿdī adds the consequence of that posture: because they never worked for such a Day, they arrived at it with nothing prepared, so the recompense that meets them is simple justice answering an empty account. Al-Qurṭubī notes that to disbelieve in the reckoning is, in effect, to disbelieve in the Resurrection itself — and that this is the foundation that led to the next sin, stated in the very next verse: 'And they denied Our signs with [emphatic] denial' (78:28). The order matters. First the inward shrug — none of this counts — and only then the outward rejection. The punishment, therefore, is not arbitrary; it answers a sustained posture, a life built on the assumption that there is no final accounting. But read this verse closely and it stops being only a verdict on people long gone, and becomes a quiet diagnostic question for the one reading it. Notice what the Qur'an does NOT say. It does not say they were punished merely for an opinion they happened to hold about the unseen. It says they 'did not expect any reckoning' — and then it shows that expectation, or its absence, governing how they actually lived. This is not belief downgraded into mere conduct: the lived expectation IS the belief, taking root in how a person carries themselves. Belief in a final reckoning is precisely what gives weight to right and wrong. Remove it, and good and evil flatten into the same thing: a matter of taste, of getting away with it, of whatever the moment allows. That is exactly the illusion the Qur'an elsewhere refuses: 'Or do those who commit evil deeds think that We will make them equal — in their life and after their death — to those who believe and do good? How wrong is their judgment!' (45:21). Your own heart already knows the kindness you showed and the cruelty you chose are not the same weight. That knowing IS the reckoning, felt in advance.
Qur’anic evidence — read the full study of 78:27 →
In more depth
So the honest question this verse lays at your feet is not whether you can recite 'I believe in a Day of Judgment' as a proposition — it is whether that belief has reached your hands: do you live as if your deeds matter? The two are not rivals; the second is what the first looks like once it is real. And something in you already answers yes. The pang after a wrong done, the steadiness after a kindness given, the refusal to believe that the tyrant and the merciful end in the same dust — that is not conditioning; it is the fitra, the recognition God placed in you that the books will, in the end, be balanced. The Qur'an does not impose that scale on a hostile creation; it confirms what the heart was made already to suspect. The same God 'created the heavens and the earth in truth, and so that every soul may be recompensed for what it has earned, and they will not be wronged' (45:22) — a reckoning is not a threat hung over the world but the guarantee that your life is not weightless, that no good of yours is lost and no wrong of yours is met with injustice. The verse describes the ones who expected nothing — who, in al-Saʿdī's words, prepared nothing for a Day they never thought would come — not to corner you among them, but to ask, gently, which you are: someone who has quietly decided the accounting will never arrive, or someone who can begin, even now, to live toward the Day when 'a man will see what his hands have sent forth' (78:40). That door is still open. It opens the moment you turn toward the One who set it there.