Al-Qiyamah · Makki · ayah 24 of 40

Al-Qiyamah 75:24

وَوُجُوهٌ يَوْمَئِذٍۭ بَاسِرَةٌ

“And [some] faces, that Day, will be contorted,”

Saheeh International

Essence

Other faces that Day will darken and knot, wearing the scowl some first wore in this world when the truth was put to them.

A reflection

A scowl we already know how to make

It is easy to picture the faces of this ayah as belonging to someone else. Monsters, villains, people from a horror film. Faces we could never wear.

The Quran does something unsettling with this word. The root of bāsira appears only twice in the whole Book. The other place is in al-Muddaththir, revealed years earlier. A man is given the Quran to judge. He thinks, and weighs, and looks again. 'Then he frowned, and scowled', ʿabasa wa basar (74:22). Then he turned away in arrogance and called it magic.

So the first time the Quran used this scowl, it was not on the Day of Rising. It was in an ordinary room in Makkah, on the face of a man hearing something true that he did not want to accept. The second time is here, on the faces of that Day.

The lexicons explain the word with care. One ladder of frowns runs like this. Knitting the brows is ʿabasa. Baring the teeth with it is kalaḥa. When the frown comes from brooding and worry, it is basara. Add anger, and it is basala.

A father reads an essay his sixteen-year-old daughter has written for school. It argues, carefully and fairly, that he has been unjust to her mother for years. His jaw sets before he reaches the second paragraph. He has not answered a single point. His face has already decided.

That is the scowl this ayah names, in its earliest form. Not the face of a demon. The face of an ordinary person meeting a truth that costs too much.

The ayah is therefore not only about others. It asks a quieter question of its reader. When truth reaches me, what does my face do before my mind has finished listening?

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.