Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 8 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:8

يَوْمَ تَكُونُ ٱلسَّمَآءُ كَٱلْمُهْلِ

“On the Day the sky will be like murky oil,[1749]”

Saheeh International

Essence

The sky itself, the oldest symbol of a fixed, unmoving ceiling overhead, will run like something dark and molten.

A reflection

What the word actually pictures

The lexicons give this word two closely related pictures, and both repay sitting with. The first is the thick, dark sediment left at the bottom of a jar of oil, the residue nobody wants, viscous and foul rather than anything that pours cleanly. The second is metal in its molten state, copper or iron or lead, heated past the point where it holds any shape at all and reduced to something that only moves the way a liquid moves. Commentators cited across the generations reached for both images at different points, and some reported it changing colour entirely, turning a deep red as it melts, the way heated metal glows before it liquefies.

What both pictures share is the complete loss of the one quality a sky is supposed to have above every other: fixed, dependable shape. A sky is the one surface overhead nobody expects to move, let alone soften, let alone run. Rock can crumble and water can flood, but the sky, by definition, simply stays where it is, the backdrop against which every other change in a person's life gets measured.

This ayah removes even that one remaining reference point entirely. It does not describe one more object changing against a stable background. It describes the background itself beginning to run like the foulest residue at the bottom of a jar, which means there is nowhere left standing still for anything else to be measured against.

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.