al-Nabaʾ 78:19-20

Wa futiḥati'l-samāʾu fa-kānat abwābā · Wa suyyirati'l-jibālu fa-kānat sarābā "And the sky was opened and became doors. And the mountains were set moving and became a mirage."

The two verses are identical in grammar:

وَ + passive verb + definite subject + فَ + كَانَتْ + indefinite predicate.

And both verbs are passive: futiḥat (was opened), suyyirat (was set moving). Like the yunfakhu of the preceding verse — the agent again off the stage.

The verbs' coming in the perfect. The perfect is used for things that will happen in the future. This is an idiom the Qurʾān resorts to very often in its scenes of the last day: what is certain to happen is related as though it had happened. The same idiom is seen in Sūrat al-Zilzāl and Sūrat al-Takwīr.

But there is a fine point: the kāna of the seventeenth verse and the kānat here are the same verb. The sūra, that is, uses the perfect kāna three times in three verses. The scene is set up not as something that will happen but as something that has happened.

This expression needs attention, because English translations often soften it.

The verse does not say "the doors of the sky were opened". It says "the sky was opened and became doors".

The difference is great. In the first expression the sky stays in place and the doors on it are opened. In the second the sky turns into doors — that is, nothing is left of the sky but doors.

Another verse of the Qurʾān for comparison:

"So We opened the gates of the sky with water pouring down." (al-Qamar 54/11 — the flood of Noah)

There it says أَبْوَابَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ: "the gates of the sky". There is a construct; the sky stays in place.

Here there is no construct. Sky = doors.

And this directly contradicts the twelfth verse — deliberately:

• 78/12: "We built above you seven firm ones."
• 78/19: "The sky was opened and became doors."

What was firm is riddled through. What was tightly bound (shidād, root "to bind") is opened.

This is the confirmation in the text of the dwelling reading I set up above. What was built is dismantled; and the dismantling is related with the exact opposite of the word used in the building.

Root: س-ي-ر. To walk, to go, to travel. سَيْر — a walking. سَيَّرَ (Form II) — he made walk, he set in motion. سَيَّارَة — a caravan; in Arabic today, a motor car.

That the verb is in Form II is meaningful: the mountains do not walk of themselves, they are made to walk.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the Qurʾān's descriptions of mountains at the last day were given in a table. Al-Ṭūr 52/10 was named there: تَسِيرُ ٱلْجِبَالُ سَيْرًا — "the mountains walk with a walking". There the verb is active; here it is passive.

This difference is worth recording. In al-Ṭūr the mountains walk; in al-Nabaʾ they are made to walk. The two do not contradict — the Qurʾān sometimes relates the same event showing its agent and sometimes without showing it.

سَرَاب — Root: س-ر-ب. The concrete sense of the root is to flow, to go, to take a path.

Its derivatives:

• سَرَب — an underground passage, a tunnel, a hollow. In the Qurʾān: "He took his way in the sea like a tunnel" (al-Kahf 18/61).
• سَارِب — one who goes openly. "He who hides by night and he who goes openly by day" (al-Raʿd 13/10).
• سِرْب — a herd, a rush; and ease of heart.
• سَرَاب — a mirage: the appearance that looks like water from afar in the heat and vanishes when approached.

That the mirage comes from this root is meaningful: a mirage is what appears to be flowing. Seen from a distance it ripples like water; approached, it is not there.

The Qurʾān uses the mirage once more, in a very sharp place:

"The deeds of those who deny are like a mirage on flat ground: the thirsty man thinks it water; when he comes to it he finds nothing. And he finds God there, and He settles his account in full." (al-Nūr 24/39)

The link made between this verse and al-Nabaʾ 78/20 is something to be recorded as my own reading, but its ground is firm:

In al-Nūr it is deeds that are a mirage. In al-Nabaʾ it is mountains that become a mirage.

What emerges when the two verses are read together is this: on that day both the firmest work a human being does and the firmest body on earth come to the same state — present from afar, absent from close by.

And now to the sūra's harshest transformation.

• 78/7: The mountains are أَوْتَاد — pegs. Driven into the ground, holding, fixing.
• 78/20: The mountains are سَرَاب — a mirage. Visible from afar, not there when approached.

The most solid thing on earth becomes the most deceptive.

In the section on al-Qāriʿa the mountains had become "carded wool"; there the transformation was from weight to lightness. Here the transformation is on another axis: from being to appearance.

Wool is light but it exists; a mirage does not. Al-Nabaʾ, then, goes a step beyond al-Qāriʿa.

And this attaches to the sūra's argument. The sūra's addressee denies the resurrection because to him this world seems the real one and the hereafter the imaginary one. The twentieth verse reverses this distinction: the most solid body of this world will turn into a mirage.

I record this as a reading. Its ground is the opposition between the two words in the seventh and the twentieth verses — and that opposition is in the text.