Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 4 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:4

إِذَا رُجَّتِ ٱلْأَرْضُ رَجًّا

“When the earth is shaken with convulsion”

Saheeh International

Essence

The verb is passive and the earth is its object: the one thing we treat as the fixed point is shaken, with a shaking.

A reflection

The assumption under every measurement

In an old observatory, a transit telescope does not stand on the floor. It stands on its own pier of masonry, carried down to bedrock. A gap is left all round, so nothing in the structure can touch it. Footsteps must not reach it. Doors must not reach it. Every reading it has ever produced rests on one unexamined conviction: that the rock is still.

It is a beautiful piece of engineering, and it is built on a borrowed certainty.

This ayah takes the certainty back, and the grammar is where it does it. Rujjat is passive. The earth is not shaking. The earth is being shaken, and the one doing it is not named here, because the surah has not yet begun naming anybody.

The commentaries fill the agent in without hesitation. The earth is moved with a violent moving, so that it heaves and shudders along its whole length and breadth. One reading adds that when Allah sends His command to it, the earth trembles in dread of Him. Another says it is rocked as a child is rocked in a cradle, until every building standing on it comes down.

Now consider what this does to an ego, because it goes deeper than fear of destruction.

All of our confidence is relative confidence. We never check the reference. A man is proud of his house because the ground under it is assumed. Proud of his savings because the currency is assumed. Proud of his reputation because the people holding it are assumed to go on existing. Pride is always measured against something, and the arrogant man has simply never looked down at what he is measuring from.

The passive voice is the whole lesson. The earth does not shake itself. It is shaken, by One who does not appear in the sentence because He does not need to.

Someone will ask why God announces His power over the planet rather than simply telling us how to live. He is in no need of anyone (35:15), and the announcement is not for Him. The point of correcting a reference frame is not to humiliate the instrument. It is so that the readings mean something.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.