Ar-Rum · Makki · ayah 55 of 60

Ar-Rum 30:55

وَيَوْمَ تَقُومُ ٱلسَّاعَةُ يُقْسِمُ ٱلْمُجْرِمُونَ مَا لَبِثُوا۟ غَيْرَ سَاعَةٍ ۚ كَذَٰلِكَ كَانُوا۟ يُؤْفَكُونَ

“And the Day the Hour appears the criminals will swear they had remained but an hour. Thus they were deluded.”

Saheeh International

Essence

When the Hour stands, a wasted life will seem like an hour, and the habit of lying will still be on the tongue.

A reflection

The Hour, and an hour

Listen to the two ends of the first sentence. Yawma taqūmu al-Sāʿatu: the Day the Hour stands. Mā labithū ghayra sāʿatin: they stayed no more than an hour. The same word closes both halves.

The rhetoricians had a name for this: a perfect pun, the same word carrying two meanings. One commentator records the common view that this kind appears in the Quran only here. He adds that another scholar found a second example, in Surah An-Nur. Either way, the pairing is rare and deliberate.

Sāʿa was an ordinary word long before it named the end. The lexicons use it for a short stretch of time, a while. The commentators explain why the end took that name. Some say it comes in the last hour of the world's hours. Others say it arrives suddenly, all at once.

So the ayah holds two sizes of the same word side by side. One is the vast event that ends everything. The other is a small slice of an afternoon. And the people who denied the first now measure their whole lives with the second.

Picture a man reading the local paper. In the death notices he finds an old neighbour, married fifty years. The notice is twelve words long. A name, two dates, 'beloved husband', and the time of the funeral. Half a century, and it fits in the corner of a page.

That is the shrinking the ayah describes. The life they defended so fiercely, and preferred over the Hereafter, turns out to be the size of an ordinary word.

The pun is also a warning about which sāʿa you are living for. Everyone spends their hours. The question is whether they are spent towards the Hour, or simply against the clock.

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.