al-Furqān 25:21-26

"Those who do not hope for the meeting with Us said: 'Should not angels have been sent down to us, or should we not see our Lord?' They have indeed made themselves great within themselves, and have gone very far in insolence."

In the seventh verse an angel's accompanying him was asked for; here the demand grows: aw narā rabbanā.

I record this as an observation: the demand moves from refusing the intermediary towards making the absence of an intermediary a condition.

ٱسْتَكْبَرُوا۟ فِىٓ أَنفُسِهِمْ — "they have made themselves great within themselves."

The qualifier must be recorded: fī anfusihim — the self-magnifying is named not as an outward behaviour but as something taking place inside. The same placement was treated at Ghāfir (al-Muʾmin) 40/56 (in fī ṣudūrihim illā kibr); I rely on that treatment.

عَتَوْ عُتُوًّا كَبِيرًا — root ع-ت-و: to overstep the limit; to dry out and harden. The lexicographers record for the root the sense of "a plant drying out and stiffening".

"We shall take up every deed they did and make of it scattered motes of dust."

هَبَآء — the fine dust that floats in the air and is seen in a shaft of sunlight.

The word had occurred at al-Wāqiʿa 56/6: fa-kānat habāʾan munbaththā — there it was used of the mountains. The two verses can be set side by side:

The same word, once for the heaviest body and once for the most abstract thing. This is an overlap that can be verified across the sūras, and I record it as my own reading thus: the word describes a thing that has not lost its visibility but has become impossible to hold — that is, not annihilation but not remaining in the hand.

أَصْحَٰبُ ٱلْجَنَّةِ يَوْمَئِذٍ خَيْرٌ مُّسْتَقَرًّا وَأَحْسَنُ مَقِيلًا (24) — maqīl: the place where one rests at midday. The word states the halt taken at the hottest hour of the day. For an addressee who lives in the desert, this is the most concrete description of ease there is.