The Criterion
IN THE NAME OF GOD, THE MOST GRACIOUS, THE DISPENSER OF GRACE[25:12]
when it shall face them from afar, they will hear its angry roar and its hiss;

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* v.12 : Lit., “When it shall see them from a far-off place”: a metaphorical allusion, it would seem, to the moment of their death on earth. As in many other instances, we are given here a subtle verbal hint of the allegorical nature of the Qur’anic descriptions of conditions in the life to come by a rhetorical “transfer” of man’s faculty of seeing to the object of his seeing: a usage which Zamakhsharī explicitly characterizes as metaphorical (‘alā sabīl al-majāz).