وَإِذَا ٱلْجِبَالُ سُيِّرَتْ
Root: س-ي-ر. To walk, to move, to travel. Sayr — going, travel; sīra — the course a person takes, his way through life; sayyāra — a caravan, a company on the move. Tasyīr (Form II) — to set moving.
The choice of the word. The verse does not say "the mountains were shattered" or "collapsed". It says "were set moving". What is done to the mountains, then, is not breaking but being made to move.
Why is this the more shattering? Because in the Qurʾān's lexicon the mountain is the emblem of fixity:
Rawāsī (anchored, fixed) and awtād (pegs) — both convey immobility. The mountain, then, is by definition the thing that does not move. To say of it that it "moved" is to cancel the word's own definition.
The Qurʾān's other descriptions of the mountains give the same event in different images, and some of them were treated in this commentary:
| Place | Image |
|---|---|
| al-Takwīr 81/3 | Suyyirat — set moving |
| al-Qāriʿa 101/5 | Ka'l-ʿihni'l-manfūsh — like carded wool (treated in the section on al-Qāriʿa) |
| al-Muzzammil 73/14 | Kathīban mahīlā — a heap of sand pouring away |
| al-Wāqiʿa 56/5 | Bussat bassā — crumbled to powder |
| al-Naml 27/88 | Taḥsabuhā jāmidatan wa hiya tamurru marra's-saḥāb — you suppose them motionless, yet they pass by as the clouds pass |
al-Naml 27/88 is especially striking, because it says that the mountain's looking fixed is a mistake of ours. But to read this verse as "the Qurʾān is announcing the movements of the earth's crust" is a forcing of the kind the method (Method) forbids: the context of the verse is the Day of Resurrection, and the description belongs to that Day. I record it as a possible reading, not as a claim.