An-Naba النبإ

Makki · 40 ayat · 40 with pondering

• Ayah 1The surah opens with a question Allah already knows the answer to, asked to lift our eyes from the rumour to the news itself.
• Ayah 2The answer comes at once: they are asking about weighty, true news from beyond their sight, the frame on which every life hangs.
• Ayah 3Everyone agrees that we die; the whole quarrel is about what comes after, and the quarrel had hardened into who they were.
• Ayah 4One word stops the scoffing, and three more promise that the endless asking will soon give way to plain, unmissable knowing.
• Ayah 5The warning comes again, heavier, and the same three words can mean ruin for the scoffer and good news for the one who believed.
• Ayah 6Before you arrived, the ground was smoothed and spread for you like a cradle; the One who prepared it so carefully does nothing in vain.
• Ayah 7The mountains are pegs knocked into the ground so that the bed you live on does not sway; your steadiness was lent to you.
• Ayah 8You were made in pairs and kinds, each of you half of something; only the One who made you has no pair.
• Ayah 9Every night your striving is cut off and you lie still as the dead; every morning you are given back.
• Ayah 10Every evening Allah dresses the world in one dark garment that covers, warms and hides, so that you can rest unseen.
• Ayah 11The day opens the dark like a river cutting its channel, and hands you back your life and your living, both from Him.
• Ayah 12Over your head stands a sevenfold building, pitched like a tent and tied fast like a knot, that time has never worn.
• Ayah 13In the house He built, Allah hung a lamp that blazes with light and heat for everyone, without ceremony and without a bill.
• Ayah 14Allah wrings the heavy clouds like cloth and the water comes pouring, poured again and again, a gift that arrives in torrents.
• Ayah 15The rain was sent with a purpose: that Allah might bring grain for people and green growth for their animals out of the ground.
• Ayah 16The list of signs ends in gardens so thick they cover the ground, one rain giving a hundred tastes: a picture of the Garden promised.
• Ayah 17The Day that parts truth from falsehood at the joint is already fixed in His knowledge, an appointment no one can move.
• Ayah 18One breath into the Horn, and every buried human being rises and comes, wave after wave, each people behind the one they followed.
• Ayah 19The strong, seamless sky is opened as easily as a door and becomes nothing but gateways, for the angels descending on the Day.
• Ayah 20The mountains, the very picture of what never moves, are set travelling until they are a mirage: something that looks solid and is nothing.
• Ayah 21Hell stands like a watch-post on a road everyone must travel, already prepared, watching for those who are coming.
• Ayah 22Those who overflowed their bounds, like a river bursting its banks, have one place to return to; everyone returns somewhere.
• Ayah 23The tyrants stay put in the Fire for ages upon ages, each strapped behind the last like a rider's bag.
• Ayah 24In the Fire there is not even a taste of coolness or easing drink: every small relief we take for granted is gone.
• Ayah 25Instead of coolness and drink, only scalding water and a dark, foul flow: heat with no warmth in it at all.
• Ayah 26The recompense fits the deed the way a notch fits the bowstring: exactly, neither more nor less than what was earned.
• Ayah 27Their ruin began with one missing expectation: they never reckoned with a reckoning, so nothing they did seemed to count.
• Ayah 28They did not merely doubt the signs; they called them lies, again and again, with all their strength, until denial was who they were.
• Ayah 29Every single thing has been counted, pebble by pebble, and sewn into a record: what we forget, Allah has kept.
• Ayah 30The voice turns from speaking about them to speaking to them: taste it, for now there is only more of what they chose.
• Ayah 31After the Fire, the turn: for those who kept a shield between themselves and harm, a triumph beyond the desert.
• Ayah 32The triumph is pictured as treasured, walled gardens and vines heavy with fresh grapes: the best the first hearers knew, and only the beginning.
• Ayah 33The Garden holds companions in the first bloom of youth, peers of one age, where no one is older, lesser or left out.
• Ayah 34A cup that is never empty, filled to the brim and filled again, with none of the harm of this world's drink.
• Ayah 35Part of the Garden's joy is what you will never hear there: empty chatter, lies, or anyone calling you a liar.
• Ayah 36It is called a reward, and in the same breath a gift: from your own Lord, given until you say 'enough'.
• Ayah 37The Lord of everything, and of everything in between, is the Most Merciful, and before Him no one owns a single word.
• Ayah 38The Spirit and the angels stand in rows, silent; only those the Most Merciful permits will speak, and they will say only what is right.
• Ayah 39That Day is the real one, certain and wholly true; so whoever wishes, let them take a path of return to their Lord now.
• Ayah 40A warning in time: on a near Day each sees what their hands sent ahead, and the denier wishes to be dust.