Al-Buruj · Makki · ayah 6 of 22

Al-Buruj 85:6

إِذْ هُمْ عَلَيْهَا قُعُودٌ

“When they were sitting near it.”

Saheeh International

Essence

The most chilling word here is not 'fire' but 'sitting': they watched believers burn from a comfortable seat.

A reflection

The posture of cruelty

Quʿūd is sitting down from standing. One view distinguishes it from julūs, sitting up from lying down. What sits holds its place; it has settled in. The Arabs called one month Dhu al-Qaʿda, the month of sitting, because they stayed at home from raids and travel. The building's foundations are its qawāʿid, what it sits on.

The ayah could have said the persecutors stood round the trench, or ran about feeding it. It says they sat at its edges. One early explanation adds that they sat on chairs. The word is a verbal noun, quʿūd, so the sitting is the whole picture: settled, unhurried, at ease. Cruelty had become something you could watch in comfort.

That is the horror. Not rage, but ease. People can do terrible things in a frenzy, and the frenzy passes. It takes something colder to pull up a seat.

Picture an open-plan office at lunchtime. Behind the glass wall of a meeting room, a colleague is being dismissed, loudly and humiliatingly. Out on the floor, twenty people keep eating at their desks. Some glance over; most do not. Nobody stands. By two o'clock, it has become a story told in the kitchen.

Nobody in that office lit a fire. But the ayah is not only describing arsonists. It is describing a posture, and the posture is familiar. When someone else's suffering has become something we can watch while we eat, the seat is already ours.

The cure is not to carry every sorrow in the world. It is smaller and harder: to notice when we have sat down. Standing up does not always mean charging in. Sometimes it means a question asked, a hand offered afterwards, a refusal to repeat the story in the kitchen.

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.