Al-Mulk · Makki · ayah 27 of 30

Al-Mulk 67:27

فَلَمَّا رَأَوْهُ زُلْفَةً سِيٓـَٔتْ وُجُوهُ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ وَقِيلَ هَـٰذَا ٱلَّذِى كُنتُم بِهِۦ تَدَّعُونَ

“But when they see it[1720] approaching, the faces of those who disbelieve will be distressed, and it will be said, "This is that for which you used to call."[1721]”

Saheeh International

Essence

A future scene is reported in the past tense, and it closes by telling the faces in it: this is what you kept calling for.

A reflection

It is not a prediction, it is a report

The usual reading of this line is horror scenery. Faces blackening, a terrible day, other people. It gets filed with the warnings, and a reader who has recited it two hundred times feels nothing in particular.

There is a grammatical fact in it that no translation can carry, and one commentary states it in a single clause. This is an account of a state that is yet to come, expressed by way of the past, because of the certainty of its occurrence.

So the verbs are finished verbs. They saw. Their faces were made foul. It was said. Another commentary works the same problem. The conditions of the Resurrection are future, not past, so the wording must be read as whenever they see it. Both are describing the same oddity: the sentence is written as though it had already happened.

A newspaper keeps standing obituaries. A compositor sets the type for a living person, in the past tense, years in advance. He was born in. He is survived by. The man is alive in the office next door. A column about his death sits in metal in a drawer, waiting for one line and a date.

Anyone who has seen that drawer never looks at the subject the same way again. Nothing about the person has changed. What has changed is the tense he exists in.

That is what this ayah does to the reader, and it is why the familiar reading misses it. The line is not warning you that something might happen. It is reporting, in finished verbs, an event that already has its type set. The only part not yet composed is the date, and the surah has just said who holds that.

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.