al-Qāriʿa 101:4

Yawma yakūnu'n-nāsu ka'l-farāshi'l-mabthūth "On that day people will be like scattered moths."

The answer to the question begins. And the answer is not a definition but a date and a picture.

This is a choice that deserves attention: the sūra does not say "al-Qāriʿa is such and such". It says "al-Qāriʿa is the day on which people are like such and such". That is, it describes the event not by itself but by its effect. The way to describe a blow is to show what the blow does.

Yawma is an adverb of time in the accusative. The grammarians differ over what it attaches to: to an elided verb ("al-Qāriʿa comes to pass on the day when…"), or to the verbal sense carried by the word qāriʿa before it, or to the sentence of judgement in the verses that follow.

It makes no practical difference to the meaning; I content myself with recording it.

The verse does not say "the disbelievers" or "the wrongdoers". ٱلنَّاس — people, all of them.

This detail matters, because the sūra makes no distinction whatever until the sixth verse. The simile takes in everyone. The distinction will come later, when the balance is set up.

So the order the sūra builds is this: first everyone becomes the same, then they are divided. What lies beneath the simile of the moth is not a belittling but a levelling: in that scene no one has any weight.

Root: ف-ر-ش. The concrete sense of the root is to spread, to lay out. And this root has already been treated in this commentary — but in a quite different sense.

At al-Baqara 2/22 the same root occurred thus:

"He who made the earth a bed (فِرَاش) for you."

What was recorded there was this: firāsh is the thing that is spread out; farsh (a spread, a carpet) is from the same root; and what the word says is not the shape of the earth but its function — that it has been made something that can be stood on, that can be lived on.

Here the same root now comes in the sense of an insect.

How do the two senses meet? The common core is spreading:

• فِرَاش (firāsh) — the thing that is spread. Spread out, flat, stood upon.
• فَرَاش (farāsh) — a swarm of insects that spreads and scatters as it flies. It is a collective noun; its singular is farāsha.

The same root, with two different vowellings, gives two different words. In the one the spreading is deliberate and ordered: a covering is laid out. In the other the spreading is uncontrolled and scattered: the insects fly off in every direction.

And when you set the two words side by side within the Qurʾān, the picture that comes out is this:

In al-Baqara the earth was a bed spread out for man. In al-Qāriʿa it is people themselves who turn into a scattered swarm. A spreading that could be stood upon turns into a spreading that cannot.

I record this as a reading I have drawn from comparing two verses and a single root. The sharing of the root, on the other hand, is an uncontested datum of the language.

A problem of translation. English renderings give farāsh as "butterflies", as "moths", or as "like scattered butterflies". The Arabic word is a collective noun that covers both: small winged creatures that fly about a light, throw themselves into a fire, and are swept along in swarms. Because the English word "butterfly" calls up a coloured creature that flies by day, the rendering "moth" may stay closer to what the verse suggests. This is a matter of translation preference; the range of the word in Arabic includes them both.

The aspects the exegetes bring forward in this simile:

The last item calls for a pause. In this verse the sūra does not mention fire at all — the fire will come in the eleventh verse. But the word chosen is the name of the insect that throws itself into fire. That is, the last verse of the sūra is already hidden inside the word used in the fourth.

I record this as a reading. The word's association with fire is a known one in the Arabic language; but I do not claim that the sūra intended it.

Root: ب-ث-ث. To spread, to strew, to disperse. The passive participle: mabthūth — strewn, dispersed.

The occurrences of the root in the Qurʾān:

• "…and from the two of them He spread abroad many men and women." (al-Nisāʾ 4/1). The dispersal of the human race across the earth.
• "I lay my anguish and my grief before God alone." (Yūsuf 12/86). The بَثّ (bathth) here means a grief that cannot be held within and spills out. An interesting branch of the root: something that has gathered inside spreading outwards.
• "…and scattered cushions." (al-Ghāshiya 88/16). In a description of the Garden, cushions laid out here and there. The same passive participle pattern, in an entirely positive scene.

The last example is striking: the same word qualifies the cushions of the Garden in one sūra and people at the resurrection in another. The word is not negative in itself; it conveys being scattered. Whether being scattered is good or bad depends on what it is that has been scattered.

The same scene is told in the Qurʾān with another insect as well:

"With their eyes downcast they come out of the graves as though they were locusts spread abroad." (al-Qamar 54/7)

The difference between the two similes is worth recording:

• A swarm of locusts goes in one shared direction. It has a direction, it has an order; what is frightening about it is its numbers and its destructiveness.
• A swarm of moths has no direction. Each one goes somewhere different.

Al-Qāriʿa has chosen the second. The emphasis of the sūra is not on the crowd but on the loss of direction.

And this connects with al-Zalzala, the neighbour of the preceding sūra: there people came out "ashtātan" — in separate groups, scattered. Both sūras tell of the same dispersal with two different words.