Weather · a Light

Clouds joined, then heaped, then hail out of mountains

A verse in Surah al-Nur describes God driving clouds, then joining them together, then piling them into a heap, with rain coming out from the middle of it, and hail sent down from mountains in the sky. Meteorologists describe a thunderstorm in a similar order. Small cumulus cells merge, the merged cell grows vertically into a tower that can reach twelve kilometres, and hailstones form inside that tower, carried up and down through freezing layers until they are heavy enough to fall. The word in the verse for the heaped cloud, rukam, is an ordinary word for a pile. Anyone standing in Arabia in a summer storm could watch this happen. The verse is pointing at what is already visible.

Surah al-Nur 24:43

Source · Qur'an 24:43