Sūrah 101 · Āyāt 1–5

The Striking Calamity, and the Day it falls (101:1-5)

The surah opens with a single dread word hurled three times — al-Qāriʿa, "what is the Calamity," "and what will make you know what the Calamity is" — and every source present reads the triple repetition as deliberate magnification rather than ordinary question. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) both root the noun in qarʿ, "to strike with forceful pressure," so that al-Qāriʿa is "the calamity that strikes the heart with intense terror"; al-Ṭabarsī adds that it strikes not only the believer's heart with dread but "the enemies of God with chastisement." Both name it among the proper names of the Resurrection — al-Ṭūsī cites Wakīʿ that al-Qāriʿa, al-Wāqiʿa and al-Ḥāqqa are one and the same Day. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) frames the whole surah as "a warning and a glad-tiding in which warning predominates," classes it as Meccan, and explains the redundant question {What is the Calamity?} as signalling that the event "cannot be fathomed by knowledge" — an unknowability underscored, not relieved, by {what will make you know}. al-Qummī, echoed verbatim in al-Baḥrānī's al-Burhān through ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm, gives the terse gloss that "God repeats it on account of its terror and the people's dread of it."

The sources then turn to the two cosmic similes. For {men like scattered moths (farāsh mabthūth)}, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all transmit al-Farrāʾ's lexical note that farāsh are swarming locusts that "spread out and mount one upon another," and Qatāda's image of the moth that pitches itself into a flame. The interpretive payoff is shared: al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān explain that the moth, once stirred, "does not head in a single direction," so the simile captures resurrected humanity surging in panic toward scattered ends — al-Mīzān adding "or toward their differing abodes of felicity and wretchedness." al-Ṭabarsī ties it to the parallel {as though they were locusts spreading abroad} (al-Qamar 54:7).

For {mountains like carded wool (ʿihn manfūsh)}, all five Arabic-tradition witnesses agree ʿihn is wool — al-Qummī and al-Burhān reduce the verse to exactly that gloss ("al-ʿihn is wool"), while al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī (citing Abū ʿUbayda and a verse of Zuhayr) and al-Mīzān specify colored wool that has been teased apart. al-Mīzān draws the doctrinal point: carded, multi-hued wool pictures "the disintegration of the mountains, with their varying colors, by the earthquake of the Hour," and al-Ṭabarsī that the mountains "depart from their places and become light in motion."

The English Enlightening Commentary (Imani) tracks the same exegesis for the lay reader: qāriʿah from qarʿ ("to strike so a sound is heard," hence "hammer"), farāsh as moths likened to the locusts of Sūrat al-Qamar, and ʿihn as colored wool, manfūš as carded — concluding that verses 4-5 depict "the first stage of the Hereafter, the stage of destruction and the end of this world," before the surah pivots to resurrection and reckoning.