Approaching the Qur'an by Sells MIchael;

Author:Sells, MIchael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: White Cloud Press
Published: 2011-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

99

THE QUAKING

In the Name of God the Compassionate the CaringWhen the earth is shaken, quaking

When the earth bears forth her burdens

And someone says “What is with her?”

At that time she will tell her news

As her lord revealed her

At that time people will straggle forth

to be shown what they have done

Whoever does a mote’s weight good will see it

Whoever does a mote’s weight wrong will see it

AS OPPOSED TO THE COSMIC apocalypse in which the sky is ripped apart, The Quaking (al-zalzala or al-zilzāl) presents what might be called a chthonic apocalypse, with the earth opening up to yield her secrets. The bearing forth of these secrets is conveyed through a birth metaphor, with the earth (al-arḍ) in the feminine gender governing a series of feminine grammatical constructions. She bears them forth as or how (the Arabic construction here is tantalizingly elusive) her lord revealed them to her.

This implied metaphor and partial personification resonates powerfully with the metaphor of creation (in which the deity breathes into Adam the spirit of life); Muhammad’s prophecy (where the spirit in a subtle undertone is depicted as inseminating the night of destiny, which is partially personified as female); and the conception of the prophet Jesus within Mary through the activity of the spirit. Thus, the implied personifications and sound figures that strengthen them bring together the three primordial moments of the Qur’an (creation, prophecy, and the day of reckoning) in undertones and intimations of an eternal moment in which the three moments fall into one another.

The ontological inversal here is most explicit. As the earth itself is shattered and gives forth its final secret, human beings will come forth in scattered groups to encounter what they have been and truly are. Whoever has done a “mote’s weight good” will “see it”; that is, the person will see, in all its momentous finality, the act that might have seemed small at the time. Similarly, whoever has done a “mote’s weight wrong,” an act of injustice or neglect that might have seemed insignificant at the time, will see it in its ultimacy. As with many of the shortest Suras concerning the day of reckoning, the recognition of what has been done, of good or evil—a recognition occurring at a moment when nothing can be changed, evaded, or rewritten—is the core of the reckoning.

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