Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 43 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:43

يَوْمَ يَخْرُجُونَ مِنَ ٱلْأَجْدَاثِ سِرَاعًا كَأَنَّهُمْ إِلَىٰ نُصُبٍ يُوفِضُونَ

“The Day they will emerge from the graves rapidly as if they were, toward an erected idol, hastening.[1759]”

Saheeh International

Essence

On the promised Day, the mockers rush out from their own graves with exactly the eager haste they once reserved only for racing toward an idol.

A reflection

The same sprint, aimed at a different finish

The word for the thing they race toward, nuṣub, names something planted upright, a standing stone or waymark, here understood as an idol the pagan Arabs used to compete over, hurrying to be among the first to reach and touch a newly set-up one. The word for their hurrying itself, yūfiḍūn, pictures a runner moving fast enough that his quiver clatters audibly against his back with every stride, speed loud enough to be heard before it is even seen.

The comparison this ayah draws is exact and, on reflection, devastating. These are the same people whose feet once carried them eagerly toward a lifeless stone they had set up themselves. On this Day, that exact posture, the clattering, headlong rush, returns, except now it carries them out of their own graves toward a reckoning they spent a lifetime mocking. The muscle memory of their old eagerness has not left them. Only its destination has changed completely.

This detail does more than describe motion. It indicts the direction that motion had always been pointed in. A people capable of this much genuine urgency, when something mattered enough to them, were never actually incapable of urgency itself. They simply spent it, for an entire lifetime, on exactly the wrong object, and this Day reveals, almost cruelly, that the capacity for real haste was there all along.

There is no gentler way to read this particular comparison, and the text does not seem to want one. It is not simply noting that they move quickly now. It is holding up the specific memory of what they used to move quickly toward, forcing a comparison between an eagerness once given freely to something worthless and an eagerness now forced from them by something they can no longer avoid. The two kinds of speed look identical from the outside. Only their origin, chosen devotion against sheer inescapability, tells the true story.

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.