فَكَيْفَ تَتَّقُونَ إِن كَفَرْتُمْ يَوْمًا يَجْعَلُ ٱلْوِلْدَٰنَ شِيبًا
Fa-kayfa tattaqūna in kafartum yawman yajʿalu'l-wildāna shībā "Then how will you guard yourselves, if you disbelieve, against a day that turns children into grey-haired old men?"
It is the pattern called the interrogative of denial: a sentence given in the form of a question but whose answer conveys impossibility. "How will you guard yourselves?" — that is, "you cannot."
And the form of the question does one thing more: it calls the addressee to answer. He is expected to notice for himself that he cannot answer. It is the reverse of the technique of taqrīr (eliciting assent) recorded in al-Inshirāḥ: there the addressee was made to say "yes", here he is silenced.
Root: و-ق-ي. Its concrete sense is to protect, to be a shield, to place an obstacle in front of something.
- وِقَايَة (wiqāya) — protection, a shield.
- تَقْوَى (taqwā) — guarding oneself. It is usually rendered "fear of God"; but at the centre of the root is not fear but guarding.
- مُتَّقِى (muttaqī) — one who guards himself.
And the choice of this root builds the logic of the verse: taqwā is the work of a shield. The verse asks: what shield will you set against this day?
The particle إِنْ, as recorded in al-Inshirāḥ, conveys possibility: "if it happens." Its occurrence is not certain.
This is a particle that leaves the door open. And two verses later the door will open wider still: "Whoever wills takes a path to his Lord" (73/19).
ٱلْوِلْدَٰن — from the root و-ل-د, the plural of وَلِيد (walīd): newborn, small child. From the root come walad (child), wālid (father), wālida (mother), mawlid (birth).
Shayba — the whitening of the hair. In the Qurʾān: "Then it is He who gives, after strength, weakness and old age (shayba)" (al-Rūm 30/54). And in the prayer of Zechariah: "My head has flared up with grey" (Maryam 19/4) — wa'shtaʿala'l-raʾsu shaybā.
That is, a day is described which joins the two ends of a lifetime in a single moment. The normal flow of time — to be born, to grow, to grow old — collapses.
The verse does not say "it kills children", it does not say "it frightens children". It says "it turns children grey" — that is, a visible, bodily, measurable mark.
The whitening of the hair is the most visible record of time upon a human being. How long a person has lived is estimated by looking at it.
| View | What it means | Ground | Its weak side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Literal | On that day children's hair actually turns white | The wording of the verse; extraordinary events are described in the resurrection scenes in any case | Whether the category "child" will exist on that day is a separate matter |
| Figurative | An expression conveying the magnitude of the terror | To say of a violent event that it "turns the hair white" is a known usage in Arabic | There is no indication in the verse pointing to a figure of speech |
I do not impose a preference. Neither reading runs against the text, and the practical outcome is the same: what is described stands at the limit of what can be endured.
This much I can say: in both readings what works is the same image. Even on the figurative reading, the picture the figure builds is preserved — and the work the verse does is that picture.
The same word, at two extremes: the place where time does not work at all, and the place where time is gathered into a single moment.