Al-Mursalat · Makki · ayah 10 of 50

Al-Mursalat 77:10

وَإِذَا ٱلْجِبَالُ نُسِفَتْ

“And when the mountains are blown away”

Saheeh International

Essence

Mountains, the single most unmovable thing a person has ever stood before, will be blown away like dust, with the same word once used for an idol's scattered ashes.

A reflection

If a mountain is not permanent, what is?

No object in ordinary human experience argues for permanence as convincingly as a mountain. Rivers move, buildings fall, people age visibly within a single lifetime, but a mountain range looks, century after century, exactly as it looked to the grandparents of the people now living beside it. We reach for mountains as the natural metaphor whenever we want to describe something unshakeable: a mountain of debt, a mountain of evidence, moving mountains as the idiom for the practically impossible.

Nusifat, blown away, is the word this ayah uses to end that entire category of comparison. Not eroded slowly over millennia, which a mountain's own geology would make plausible, but blown away the way dust lifts off bare ground in a single gust, total and immediate. The one thing human language uses to mean "as permanent as anything gets" is named here as no more durable than the dirt a child brushes off a shoe.

Sit with how much smaller that makes every lesser claim to permanence look. If a mountain, the very unit we use to measure immovability, turns out to be dust waiting for its wind, then the career, the reputation, the sense of self-importance so many of us quietly build our identities on, structures nowhere near as solid as granite, were never serious candidates for permanence either. There is a pride specific to mistaking a mountain, literal or metaphorical, for something eternal simply because it has outlasted your own short memory of it, as though your own limited lifespan were the correct measure by which permanence ought to be judged. This ayah removes that excuse entirely, for mountains and for every smaller thing we have quietly modelled on them, every fortune and reputation we have built as though it were cut from the same rock.

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.