Al-Qari'ah القارعة

Makki · 11 ayat · 11 with pondering

• Ayah 1The surah's first word is a blow on the heart, struck now so that the blow of that Day finds you already awake.
• Ayah 2The name returns as a question, the way words fail anyone who has seen something too large for a sentence.
• Ayah 3The question takes away the picture you thought you had, so that the true one has room to land.
• Ayah 4On that Day people rise like moths stirred from hiding, weightless and scattered, and the one who warned us is the one who held us back from the flame.
• Ayah 5The mountains, the one thing no one can move, will drift apart like tufts of coloured wool: so what is the ego puffing itself up for?
• Ayah 6On that Day worth is weight: what counts is what made your scale sink, and some of the heaviest things are the lightest to carry now.
• Ayah 7The reward is not described by a single object, only by a life that is itself pleased: a life that no longer resists you, and never leaves.
• Ayah 8On a scale the light pan rises, so a life can look highest precisely because there is so little in it.
• Ayah 9What you run to in fear becomes a kind of mother to you; for the one whose scale is light, that mother is a fall with no floor.
• Ayah 10The question ends in a written breath and will not even say the name again: some realities are announced by the silence around them.
• Ayah 11The answer is two plain words, and beside this fire every other fire we have felt barely deserves the name.