ٱلْقَمَر : ٢٠

  • تَنزِعُ Plucking out
  • ٱلنَّاسَ men
  • كَأَنَّهُمۡ as if they (were)
  • أَعۡجَازُ trunks
  • نَخۡلٖ (of) date-palms
  • مُّنقَعِرٖ uprooted
Extracting the people1 as if they were trunks of palm trees uprooted.
Footnotes
1 From their hiding places.
tearing people away, wrenching them from the holes in the ground in which they had been embedded and flinging them down [to the ground] head first, thereby crushing their necks and severing [their] heads from [their] bodies, as if they were, [while lying] in this mentioned state, trunks of uprooted palm-trees, severed and thrown on the ground - they are likened to palm-trees because of their tallness (nakhlun, 'palm-trees', is masculine here but feminine in [soorat] al-Haaqqa, nakhlun khaawiya, 'fallen down [or hollow] palm-trees', [Q. 69:7], in order to harmonise with the end-rhyme of the verses in both instances).