Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 94 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:94

فَكُبْكِبُوا۟ فِيهَا هُمْ وَٱلْغَاوُۥنَ

“So they will be overturned into it [i.e., Hellfire], they and the deviators”

Saheeh International

Essence

The false gods and their strayers are tumbled into the Fire, face over face, in a fall that does not stop at the first blow.

A reflection

A fall that does not stop at the first blow

Say the word aloud: kubkibū. You can hear it tumble. The lexicons explain that the root kabb means to throw a thing on its face. Kabkaba doubles it. The sound repeats because the action repeats.

One rhetorical commentary puts it plainly. The repetition in the word points to repetition in the meaning. Whoever is thrown in is turned face over face, again and again, until he settles at the bottom. Another adds that the fall comes without order, one body upon another.

This is a picture worth sitting with, carefully and without drama. It is not one fall. It is a fall where every landing turns out not to be the floor.

Picture a walker who leaves the path to cut down a slope of loose scree. The first stones slide; she stops, relieved. Then the ground under her moves again. Each time she thinks she has found a footing, the slope carries her further. The danger of scree is not the first slip. It is that nothing stays where it seems to stop.

The Quran describes the Fire so that we never reach it. But the word also teaches something about the road there. Wrongdoing rarely arrives as one plunge. It comes as a slide. A small lie needs a second to cover it. A missed prayer makes the next one easier to miss. Each landing feels like the bottom, a place you can stay. It is not.

The mercy in this world is that you can stop at any ledge. Tawba, turning back, is that ledge. It is there at the first slip and at the twentieth. Plant your feet on it now, while the ground still holds.

One commentator, reaching this word, broke off his explanation to pray: O Allah, give us refuge from it. That is the right response to a description like this. Not fascination, and not despair, but a short, sincere request, and then a change of footing.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.