Al-Fajr الفجر

Makki · 30 ayat · 30 with pondering

• Ayah 1Allah swears by the dawn: the night's dam breached by a light no lamp can make, and a daily rehearsal of the Rising.
• Ayah 2Allah swears by ten nights He has singled out: we fill our own calendars, but the Owner of time chooses which days are great.
• Ayah 3By the even and the odd: everything made comes in pairs and needs its other, and only the One stands alone, needing nothing.
• Ayah 4By the night as it travels on: no one can hold it or hurry it, and the darkest night is already moving towards dawn.
• Ayah 5After the oaths, a question: is this enough for someone with ḥijr, a mind that can wall its owner in and hold him back?
• Ayah 6ʿĀd once asked who could be stronger than them; the ayah answers with a question: have you not seen how your Lord dealt with them?
• Ayah 7The Quran names ʿĀd by their pillars, what they stood on and leaned on; later storytellers built them a golden city the text never mentions.
• Ayah 8Nothing like them had been created in the lands, and the ayah says 'created', not 'made': even their greatness was given.
• Ayah 9Thamūd could cut through solid rock to carve their homes, yet never cut through to answer their prophet's call.
• Ayah 10Pharaoh is remembered by his pegs: the soldiers who held his rule in place, and the stakes that held his victims to the ground.
• Ayah 11Three different powers, one verb: each overflowed its banks like a torrent, and the flood ran out into the lands around it.
• Ayah 12Their overflow did not stay at the top: they made corruption plentiful, until spoiling became the way the land itself worked.
• Ayah 13Empires built over centuries were ended by what the ayah calls a single lash, poured down from above, and it was only one lash.
• Ayah 14One road runs through every life, and your Lord is at its watch-post, missing nothing, good or bad.
• Ayah 15When life is generous, a person says 'my Lord has honoured me', and mistakes an exam paper for a trophy.
• Ayah 16When provision is measured out tightly, he says 'my Lord has humiliated me', but Allah never says it; only the man does.
• Ayah 17No: he longed to be honoured by his Lord, yet would not honour the orphan, and the same word is turned back on him.
• Ayah 18The failure named is not only hunger left unfed, but a community in which nobody spurred anybody else to feed it.
• Ayah 19They ate the inheritance the way a greedy guest clears a tray, gathering their own share and everyone else's into one mouthful.
• Ayah 20Their love of money was like a well that refills as fast as it is drawn: never satisfied, and never once run dry.
• Ayah 21No: pillars, carved rock, pegs and piled-up wealth all wait for the Day the earth is pounded, and pounded, until nothing stands above it.
• Ayah 22The earth lies flat, the angels stand rank upon rank, and your Lord comes: nothing left to stand behind, no one ahead of anyone.
• Ayah 23Hell is brought near, and at last the human being remembers; then the ayah asks the most painful question: what good is remembering now?
• Ayah 24His last words are a wish: if only I had sent something ahead for my life, the only life that turned out to be real.
• Ayah 25The surah's tyrants built their fame on the pain they could inflict; on that Day, none punishes as He punishes.
• Ayah 26None binds as He binds: the one who slipped every covenant meets the one knot he cannot slip.
• Ayah 27After a whole surah of grasping and overflowing, a voice addresses one soul by the name it has earned: the one that is at rest.
• Ayah 28Return to your Lord, pleased and pleasing: a homecoming where the welcome runs both ways.
• Ayah 29The first thing offered to the soul at rest is not a place but a company: enter among My servants.
• Ayah 30The surah ends with two words: enter My garden, a garden He calls His own and opens to you as a host.