Az-Zumar · Makki · ayah 68 of 75

Az-Zumar 39:68

وَنُفِخَ فِى ٱلصُّورِ فَصَعِقَ مَن فِى ٱلسَّمَـٰوَٰتِ وَمَن فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ إِلَّا مَن شَآءَ ٱللَّهُ ۖ ثُمَّ نُفِخَ فِيهِ أُخْرَىٰ فَإِذَا هُمْ قِيَامٌ يَنظُرُونَ

“And the Horn will be blown, and whoever is in the heavens and whoever is on the earth will fall dead except whom Allāh wills. Then it will be blown again, and at once they will be standing, looking on.”

Saheeh International

Essence

One blast of the Horn and all fall senseless; a second, and everyone stands at once, looking, waiting to see what will be done.

A reflection

One crash, then one breath

The verb for the first blast's effect is ṣaʿiqa. One lexicon says its root is a single idea: a violent crash of sound. A ṣāʿiqa is the heavy crash of thunder. A man ṣaʿiqa when a terrible noise knocked him senseless, and the word came to mean dying, as if struck.

The verb for the Horn is nufikha: blown. Its root is breath sent into something. The Arabs blew on embers to wake a fire; the smith's bellows was named from it.

So the same breath does opposite things. The first blast strikes everything still. The second, in the same Horn, raises everything up. Several commentaries name them simply: the first blast, of death, and the second, of rising.

Picture a power cut across a whole city at night. Every light, every screen, every machine stops at once. Then, a moment later, the grid returns, and the entire skyline flickers back together. Nobody switched on their own lamp.

The Day is like that, on a scale beyond imagining. Nothing rises on its own initiative. Everything waits on one breath.

The full entry has 2 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.