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. 697 in order to harmonise with the end-rhyme of the verses in both instances.
