Those Who Drag Forth: The Great Overwhelming

An-Naziat ('Those Who Drag Forth'), 46 Meccan verses, swears by the angels who draw out souls and recounts Moses before the tyrant Pharaoh who claimed 'I am your lord most high' (79:24). It pictures the 'great overwhelming' when people will feel they lingered but an evening in the world. The surah's telling of Moses before Pharaoh gives Pharaoh's claim to divinity a memorably compressed form, 'I am your Lord, most high' (79:24), a line commentators read as the definitive statement of the tyrant's self-deification against which Moses's prophetic mission is set. Its account of the 'great overwhelming' catastrophe closes with the observation that on that Day people will feel they had lingered in the world only an evening or a morning (79:46), an image of time's collapse in retrospect that later Islamic devotional poetry returned to repeatedly when meditating on the brevity of worldly life. Classical commentators generally read the surah's unnamed addressee, told to 'go to Pharaoh, he has transgressed' (79:17), as continuing the same Mosaic mission narrated more fully in Ta-Ha and Al-Qasas, part of a broader Quranic pattern of returning repeatedly to the same core prophetic episode with different selective emphasis depending on each surah's rhetorical purpose.

The surah's closing question, of when the Hour will occur, answered only that such knowledge belongs to God alone and that the Prophet's task is merely to warn (79:42-45), is read as a deliberate refusal to satisfy popular curiosity about eschatological timing, a stance repeated in similar terms in several other surahs.