The Quran and Mountains: Difference between revisions

The pre-Islamic poet commonly known as al-Muhalhil, "The poem weaver", whose name was Abu Layla Adi ibn Rabi'ah at-Taghlabi (d. 531 CE), composed a number of famous poems. While possibly post-Quranic, some lines from one poem attributed to al-Mulhalhil uses some of the same terminology as the Quranic verses in terms of mountains and the earth shifting/convulsing:

{{Quote|1=Some lines from a poem attributed to al-Mulhalhil about the death of his brother.<BR />Arabic of the full poem is avalable on the Poetsgate.com website<ref>https://poetsgate.com/poem.php?pm=27780</ref>. Translation is by D. S. Margoliouth<ref>See p. 438, D. S. Margoliouth (1925) [https://www.jstor.org/stable/25220762 The Origins of Arabic Poetry] The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 3 (Jul., 1925), pp. 417-449</ref><ref>See also the same poem by al-Muhalhil quoted and commented on in Abdullah al-Udhari (1991) [https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28750/1/10672918.pdf Jahili Poetry before Imru al-Qais (4000 BCE–500 CE)] ([https://web.archive.org/web/20230311152446/https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28750/1/10672918.pdf archive]), PhD thesis, London School of Oriental and African Studies, pp. 151-2 (his source for the poem, given in footnote 1, p. 255 with expanded reference on p. 296, is al-Balkhī (Abū Zaid Aḥmad b. Sahl), Kitāb al-Bad' wa al-Tārīkh, I) ed. Huart, Editions Earnest Leroux, 1899-1919 pp. 149-50)</ref>|2=

While it is common today to interpret the above verses as a reference to earthquakes, it is far more likely that they refer to the earth as a whole. Since the author of these verses would have known that earthquakes do in fact occur, including in Arabia itself, it is unlikely that he would have described mountains as being created lest people suffer earthquakes. The most natural reading is that "the earth" (al-ard) in these verses refer to the entire Earth, which fits with the verse discussed above in which mountains are described as pegs or stakes. The poem quoted above attributed to the pre-Islamic poet al-Muhalil links the mountains (rawāsiya, like in these verses of the Quran) to the shifting/convulsing (with the same verb as these verses) of the entire earth. Similarly, the myth of [[The Islamic Whale]] on which the Earth rests according to some hadiths was narrated in terms of mountains holding down the earth to stop it moving on the back of the whale.