Al-Qiyamah · Makki · ayah 26 of 40

Al-Qiyamah 75:26

كَلَّآ إِذَا بَلَغَتِ ٱلتَّرَاقِىَ

“No! When it [i.e., the soul] has reached the collar bones[1806]”

Saheeh International

Essence

No: the love of the hasty world ends at the collarbones, where the last breath rises and every postponed good deed meets its deadline.

A reflection

Not a change of subject

Many readers feel the surah change direction here. It has been speaking of the Day of Rising, the shining faces and the scowling ones. Now, suddenly, it is at a deathbed. It is easy to hear this as a new topic: a general reminder that everyone dies.

The first word says otherwise. Kallā is a word of rebuke, and it is pointing back. Several commentators explain it the same way. Stop preferring this world over the next, it says. Wake up to what lies right in front of you. At death the hasty one is cut away from you, and you move on to the later one.

So this is not a new subject. It is the end of the same argument. A few lines earlier the surah said: you love the hasty one, and you leave the Hereafter. Here is where that love runs out. Not in theory, but in a particular place in the body, the collarbones.

Another commentator reads kallā as 'truly'. Either way the link holds. Having shown the faces of the Day, the surah now shows the door everyone passes through to reach it.

At a property seminar, a speaker tells the room that every investment needs an exit strategy. People nod and take notes. Not one of them, filling in the worksheet, writes down the only exit that is certain.

The worn reading treats death as a separate sermon, gloomy and general. The surah treats it as the final page of a very specific mistake. Everything that was loved because it was quick ends here, at once. Everything that was built for later is just beginning.

That is why the word is kallā, and not a soft introduction. It is a hand on the shoulder of someone running in the wrong direction.

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.