Earth · a Light

Mountains are called pegs, and a peg is a tent peg

Surah al-Naba pairs the earth as a resting place with the mountains as awtad, pegs. The image is a tent peg, an object every listener owned and hammered into the ground each evening. It is often claimed that this predicts isostasy, the fact that a mountain range floats on a deep root of lighter crust, which under the Himalaya reaches more than seventy kilometres down. The geology is real, and it was worked out from survey measurements in India in the 1850s. The verse is not doing geology. Mountains do not stop continents moving, and peg imagery for hills is common in older Arabic poetry. Read as it stands, the verse is about a world made steady enough to live on.

Surah al-Naba 78:6-7

Source · Qur'an 78:6-7