Hûd
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[11:82]
And so, when Our judgment came to pass, We turned those [sinful towns] upside down, and rained down upon them stone-hard blows of chastisement pre-ordained, one upon another,

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* v.82 : Lit., “stones of sijjīl,” which latter noun is regarded by some philologists as the Arabicized form of the Persian sang-i-gil (“clay-stone” or “petrified clay”): cf. Qāmūs and Tāj al-‘Arūs. If this supposition is correct, the “stones of petrified clay” would be more or less synonymous with “brimstones,” which in its turn would point to a volcanic eruption, probably in conjunction with a severe earthquake (alluded to in the preceding phrase, “We turned those [sinful towns] upside down”). But there is also a strong probability, pointed out by Zamakhsharī and Rāzī, that the term sijjīl is of purely Arabic origin – namely, a synonym of sijill, which primarily signifies “a writing,” and secondarily, “something that has been decreed”: in which case the expression hijārah min sijjīl can be understood in a metaphorical sense, namely, as “stones of all the chastisement laid down in God’s decree” (Zamakhsharī and Rāzī, both in conjunction with the above verse and in their commentaries on 105:4). It is, I believe, this metaphorical meaning of “stone-hard blows of chastisement pre-ordained,” i.e., of God-willed doom, that the concluding sentence of the next verse alludes to.