Al-Waqi'ah الواقعة

Makki · 96 ayat · 96 with pondering

• Ayah 1The surah opens with a name rather than a description: the Falling, already launched, and the sentence about its landing left unfinished.
• Ayah 2At its falling there is no denial left anywhere, not even the private kind that tells a man he can take whatever comes.
• Ayah 3Two words, two active participles, no subject named: lowering, raising, with every standing in the world read out again.
• Ayah 4The verb is passive and the earth is its object: the one thing we treat as the fixed point is shaken, with a shaking.
• Ayah 5The mountains are crumbled with a crumbling, and the Arabic word for it is a traveller's food, made by rubbing grain down and wetting it.
• Ayah 6The mountains end as the motes you only see in a shaft of sunlight: scattered, visible everywhere, and findable nowhere.
• Ayah 7With the scenery gone, people are told they are three sorts, and the word for sort is the word for a spouse.
• Ayah 8The first rank is named and then not described: the companions of the right, and what are the companions of the right.
• Ayah 9The second rank is named with a word that means ill luck, and then the same sentence refuses to describe them too.
• Ayah 10The third rank is named twice and asked about not at all: the foremost, the foremost, with no question left for anyone to answer.
• Ayah 11The first rank finally gets a statement, and it is one word: they are the ones who were brought near.
• Ayah 12Nearness came first, and only now a place: gardens that belong to bliss, named by a word that means covered.
• Ayah 13The first rank is counted, and the word for the count is a flock bunched close, or a hank of wool gathered in the hand.
• Ayah 14And a few of the latter: a single word of scarcity, applied only to the first rank, and only to the generations that come late.
• Ayah 15The first object named is a couch, made by the word used for the weave of a coat of mail.
• Ayah 16Settled on them, and turned towards one another: the first rank's posture is firmness, and the first thing in front of them is a face.
• Ayah 17The verb used of circling the Kaʿba is used here of servers going round the guests, and the direction of the circling is reversed.
• Ayah 18Three vessels are named, each with its own fittings, and the drink comes from a word that means an eye.
• Ayah 19The cup is handed over and then, in the same breath, everything that normally comes attached to one is taken away.
• Ayah 20The word for fruit here is also the word for good talk among friends, and the word for choosing means leaning towards the better.
• Ayah 21The word used here for desire is the word that names the struggle of a lifetime, and in this ayah it is simply answered.
• Ayah 22Two words, and both are about eyes: a word whose root is washing cloth white, and a word that means wide-eyed.
• Ayah 23The comparison is to a pearl still shut in its shell: not hidden away, but kept, with nothing having touched it.
• Ayah 24After nine gifts, one line gives the reason, and the word for it means a return that exactly matches what it answers.
• Ayah 25The last thing the passage removes is not a discomfort but a kind of talk: the weightless sort, and the sort that blames.
• Ayah 26The whole description of the highest rank ends on one word, said twice, which first meant: there is no war between us.
• Ayah 27The second rank is asked after in the same words as before, except that the name has quietly changed from a place to a hand.
• Ayah 28The first gift named to the second rank is a thorn tree with its thorns taken off, by a word that means bending.
• Ayah 29The second tree is stacked with fruit from the root up, so that no bare trunk shows, and even its name is disputed.
• Ayah 30Shade is one thing screening another, and the word for extended is the word for a river swelled by a second river.
• Ayah 31Water poured out, running over open ground, with nobody having dug a channel for it or lowered a bucket into it.
• Ayah 32The word for abundant here is the root of the river given to the Prophet and of the race to have more than everybody else.
• Ayah 33Two words remove the two things that spoil every good thing here: the season that ends it, and the price that keeps you from it.
• Ayah 34Of all the things that could be said about the bedding of that place, the word chosen first is not soft but raised.
• Ayah 35One verb is used twice over, so that nobody mistakes this for a repair job: a making, and truly a making.
• Ayah 36The word here belongs to the family of dawn, early rain and first fruit, and the whole ayah turns on who can assign a state.
• Ayah 37Two words, and both are about relationship rather than looks: love made plain, and nobody standing above anybody.
• Ayah 38Three words assign everything just described to one group, and the group is not the highest of the three the surah named.
• Ayah 39The word for this crowd is a shepherd's word: a flock bunched close, or a hank of wool gathered in one hand.
• Ayah 40The word for the latecomers is the back of the saddle, the part a rider leans against.
• Ayah 41A question with no answer in it, asked in exactly the words used of the saved, and the name means wrapped round from every side.
• Ayah 42The two coolest things we know are turned against them, so that the Fire itself is left to your reasoning.
• Ayah 43The word for protection and for a man's might is used of smoke, which is the cruellest word choice in the surah.
• Ayah 44Two words remove the only two reasons anyone ever seeks shade: it does not cool, and it does not honour.
• Ayah 45The word is passive: comfort was done to them, and it tipped them over.
• Ayah 46The verb is a knot pulled tight, and the noun is the breaking of an oath, which is a stranger charge than most readers notice.
• Ayah 47A transcript of mockery, built in three stages to sound impossible, and the verb it mocks means a kneeling animal told to rise.
• Ayah 48They put the ancestors last because they were the hardest case, and the reply puts them first.
• Ayah 49The first word is an instruction to publish, and what it publishes is that every human who ever lived is accounted for.
• Ayah 50An appointment that neither advances nor delays, and the word for it is a boundary line rather than a span of time.
• Ayah 51The surah has been speaking about them for ten ayat, and here it turns and says you.
• Ayah 52The name of this tree is not botany; it is the sound of swallowing something down whole because there is nothing else.
• Ayah 53The root that fills a belly here is the root that named the grandees who filled people's eyes.
• Ayah 54The Arabic for drinking is the word for cloth taking dye, and the relief they reach for is the next thing done to them.
• Ayah 55The comparison is not to a thirsty animal but to a named sickness: the thirst that drinking makes worse.
• Ayah 56The word used is the welcome a host sets out for an arriving guest, and the whole four ayat before it are called that.
• Ayah 57The verb for creating is a word about measuring before cutting, and the question that follows it is put in the present tense on purpose.
• Ayah 58The Arabic name for the fluid is a measuring word, from the same root as the appointed term of death and the act of wishing.
• Ayah 59A question with only one honest answer, asked about the one outcome in your life you had no hand in shaping.
• Ayah 60Two racing words in one ayah: a measure exact as a hoof in its own print, and a stake nobody takes ahead of Him.
• Ayah 61The verb is the one for melting a signet ring down and recasting it: the same gold, the seal gone.
• Ayah 62The verb is not recall but keeping present, and what you are asked to keep present is something you already know.
• Ayah 63The verb names only the beginnings of farming: breaking the ground, casting the seed, watering it, and nothing after that.
• Ayah 64One lexicon says plainly that this growing belongs to divine acts and not to human ones, which is the whole of the question.
• Ayah 65The threat is not a failed sowing but a ripe crop crumbled, and what it produces in these men is a day of talk.
• Ayah 66Their first sentence in the ruined field comes out of the counting house, by a word that pictures a creditor who will not leave.
• Ayah 67They correct themselves, and the correction is worse: not out of pocket but fenced out, a people with no luck.
• Ayah 68Of everything water does for a human being, the challenge names the one use in which you do nothing at all.
• Ayah 69The cloud is named by the word the Arabs used for an open-handed man, and whose child they called the new moon.
• Ayah 70The word for undrinkable water comes from the roar of flame in a bellows, and the only command in the four challenges follows it.
• Ayah 71The verb is not kindling but striking, and what it strikes fire out of is two green branches.
• Ayah 72Fire is given a parent, and the verb used of raising that parent is the one used for a cloud lifting and a child reared.
• Ayah 73The four questions end in a flat statement, and it gives the fire two jobs: to remind, and to be used.
• Ayah 74Four challenges end in one command, and the word for it does not mean praise: it means clearing Him of a charge.
• Ayah 75The oath is sworn by the places where the stars come down, and the word for those places is the word for where rain falls.
• Ayah 76Three words are dropped into the middle of the oath, and they do not flatter the hearer: they tell him he does not know.
• Ayah 77The word translated noble means a thing whose nature is to give freely, and whose first property is that it does not go stale.
• Ayah 78Everyone knows what the guarded Book is, and the commentaries give six different answers to it.
• Ayah 79The word is passive: not those who made themselves clean, but those who were purified by someone else.
• Ayah 80The Book is named after the way it arrived, and the name of its Sender means the Lord of everything He is known by.
• Ayah 81The charge is not denial but softness: the word comes from oil worked into a hide until it will take any shape.
• Ayah 82The oath seven ayat back was sworn by the positions of the stars, and here are the people who credited their rain to them.
• Ayah 83The subject of the sentence is never named, and the verb is the one used for a message carried all the way to its hearer.
• Ayah 84Three words put a room full of people into the scene, and the verb for what they are doing is looking, not seeing.
• Ayah 85The nearest person in the room is told he is not the nearest, and the word for nearness is also the word for kinship.
• Ayah 86The word usually rendered as not recompensed also means not owned, and the whole argument turns on that second sense.
• Ayah 87The sentence begun five ayat ago finishes here, and it finishes by handing the room one thing to do.
• Ayah 88The three ranks come back, and the first of them has been renamed: the Foremost are now the Brought Near.
• Ayah 89Three things are given, and the first is the word for a cool breeze found after the heat has been punishing.
• Ayah 90The second rank keeps the name it was given at the start, and it is the only one of the three that is not renamed.
• Ayah 91One reflective commentary argues that this is not a greeting at all, because the words for greeting a man are different ones.
• Ayah 92The same two words were used forty ayat earlier in the opposite order, and one commentary says the order is the point.
• Ayah 93The word is a host's word for the fare set out when a guest arrives, and it is served at the door rather than later.
• Ayah 94One root gives warming yourself at a fire and being held in one, and the surah has already shown you the first.
• Ayah 95The ayah joins a word to its own meaning, and one early authority says everybody reaches this certainty: the only question is when.
• Ayah 96The surah ends on the words it used twenty-two ayat earlier, so that its whole closing argument sits inside one repeated sentence.