Al-Ma'arij · Makki · ayah 9 of 44

Al-Ma'arij 70:9

وَتَكُونُ ٱلْجِبَالُ كَٱلْعِهْنِ

“And the mountains will be like wool,[1750]”

Saheeh International

Essence

Mountains, the oldest picture of something too massive to move, will scatter like carded, dyed wool in the wind.

A reflection

Wool that has already been softened once

The word chosen here is not simply wool; the lexicons are specific that it names wool already dyed, already combed loose and fluffed apart, the kind that has been worked until it holds no firm shape at all and drifts rather than sits. A mountain is the opposite of every one of those qualities: unworked, undyed stone, holding exactly one shape for as long as anyone has ever lived to watch it, heavy enough that nothing short of catastrophe moves it an inch.

The ayah does not simply say mountains will crumble, which would already be dramatic enough. It says they will become this specific, soft, scattered, brightly coloured material, the kind a light breeze carries across a room. Commentators note that mountains show different colours from a distance, pale here, reddish there, deep black elsewhere, and this verse pictures that very same range of colour, once fixed in solid rock, suddenly loosened into something that blows apart exactly the way dyed wool does once it has been carded.

That is a strange, almost gentle image to deliberately reach for when describing something this catastrophic, softness quietly standing in for total, final devastation. But it is precisely that gentleness that makes the scale land: a mountain reduced to something as light and scattered as wool is not merely destroyed, it is rendered weightless, the single heaviest thing most people will ever see becoming, for a moment, the lightest.

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.