The alarm:
what's 'the alarm' going to be like?
What will explain 'the alarm' to you?
On that day people will behave like moths fluttering about.
Mountains will be like wool that is blown around.
And he whose morality weighs heavily in the balance will be in Paradise,
Whilst the one whose morality weighs lightly,
his home will be a bottomless pit.
And what will explain what that is like?
It will be a raging fire.
Commentary
'Alarm' seems a fair rendering of the more traditional 'striking calamity'. One might almost translate it as 'the wake up call'. The image seems to represent the Islamic equivalent of the Last Trump in the Christian Apocalypse and the theme is a similar urgent call to repentance lest one succumb to eternal punishment.
A number of words seem to me to deviate from standard Arabic orthography, perhaps in order to achieve the considerable rhyme-scheme.
'Fluttering about' and 'blown around' rhyme on suitably breezy -ooth sounds; 'paradise', 'pit' and 'fire' rhyme on -iya, interspersed by repeated -uh sounds for 'scales' and the penultimate interrogative question. This surah is clearly a single piece of text, finely crafted, designed for oral performance with repeated rhetorical questions.
No comments:
Post a Comment