Surah Az-Zalzalah, The Earthquake

Surah 99 · 8 verses · classification disputed

Az-Zalzalah describes the end of the world in eight verses, and does it almost entirely from the ground's point of view.

The earth is shaken with its shaking. It throws out its burdens. And then it does something no other passage in the Qur'an describes: it speaks. The earth reports its news — and the surah explains that it does so because its Lord instructed it to. Everything that ever happened, happened on it.

People then come out in scattered groups to be shown their own deeds. The word used is "shown", not told. It is a surah about seeing.

And then the last two verses, which are among the most frequently quoted in the entire Qur'an and are known to enormous numbers of people who know very little else of it: whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it.

The Arabic word rendered "atom" is dharrah, which classically meant the smallest thing imaginable — a mote of dust in a sunbeam, or the smallest ant. It was not a scientific term and does not need to be one. The force of the line is in the symmetry: the same measure applies in both directions, and nothing is too small to be counted either way.

Like several of the short surahs, its placement is disputed; it is most often listed as Medinan, though a number of authorities held it Meccan.

Surah Az-Zalzalah on this site

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Surah Az-Zalzalah, The Earthquake

Surah Az-Zalzalah on this site

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