Which snatched away men as though they were palm trees pulled out by the roots.
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Tafseer
'Abdullāh Ibn 'Abbās / Muḥammad al-Fīrūzabādī
تفسير : (sweeping men away as though they were uprooted trunks of palm-trees.
Jalāl al-Dīn al-Maḥallī
تفسير : 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 [sūrat] al-hāqqa, nakhlun khāwiya, ‘fallen down [or hollow] palm-trees’, [q. 69:7], in order to harmonise with the end-rhyme of the verses in both instances).