Al-Qiyamah · Makki · ayah 7 of 40

Al-Qiyamah 75:7

فَإِذَا بَرِقَ ٱلْبَصَرُ

“So when vision is dazzled”

Saheeh International

Essence

The first answer to 'When?' is in the asker's own eyes, stunned like a man who has looked straight into lightning.

A reflection

A man looking straight into lightning

Picture a desert night storm. A man looks up at the exact moment the sky splits with lightning. For a few seconds he sees nothing at all. The flash has burned the world out of his eyes.

That is the picture inside bariqa. The classical commentators explain that the Arabs said bariqa of a man who looked at lightning and was dazzled. From there the word spread to any bewilderment so total that the eyes cannot settle. One lexicon describes it as the eye darting and shaking from fear.

There are two readings of the verb, and they give two halves of one face. Read bariqa, it means stunned, bewildered, struck with terror, unable to fix on anything. One of the major readers recited baraqa. That means glinting: the eye wide open and shining, staring so hard that it does not blink. One is a gaze that cannot land. The other is a gaze that cannot leave.

The first hearers knew the word from their own poetry. One poet tells a wounded man to treat his wounds and not to stand there stunned, lā tabraq, at the sight of them. Another, describing a beautiful woman unveiling her face, says that even Luqman the wise would almost have been dazzled. The word carried shock and overwhelm, the moment a person is undone by what he sees.

Now place it where the surah puts it. A man has just asked, mockingly, 'When is the Day of Resurrection?' The answer begins with his own eyes. The sight he trusted, the sight he used to say there was nothing to see, is the first thing to fail him.

He wanted the Day shown to him. He will see it, and it will be like staring into lightning.

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.