The 365 · Verses · Day 271 · Justice
They fed the poor for one reason: dread of a Day that glares and scowls.
إِنَّا نَخَافُ مِن رَّبِّنَا يَوْمًا عَبُوسًا قَمْطَرِيرًا
“We fear the Day of our Lord, a woefully grim Day. (Quran 76:10)”
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The story
This āyah gives the believers' own explanation for their generosity two verses earlier: 'we fear from our Lord a Day that is ʿabūs qamṭarīr.' Ibn Kathīr gathers the early glosses on those two rare words. From Ibn ʿAbbās: ʿabūs means 'difficult,' qamṭarīr means 'long.' In another report through ʿIkrimah, the pairing describes a Day 'hard and distressful, that makes faces contort in dread' - and he transmits the vivid image that the disbeliever will frown that Day until sweat runs between his eyes like tar. Mujāhid parsed it physically: ʿabūs is the scowl of the two lips, qamṭarīr the knotting-up of the whole face. Saʿīd b. Jubayr and Qatādah agreed it is the contraction of the brow and the space between the eyes out of anguish; Ibn Zayd read ʿabūs as the Day's evil and qamṭarīr as its severity. Al-Saʿdī sums both words tightly: intensely grim and evil (ʿabūs), and constricting, narrow, distressing (qamṭarīr). Notice what the mufassirūn are doing: nearly every one takes a description of a Day and cashes it out as a description of faces. The Day does not literally frown; the frown belongs to those who meet it unprepared. And that is the engine of justice in the verse. The believers give because they have already pictured the reckoning - a Day so severe it leaves its mark on the very features - and they would rather send relief ahead than arrive empty-handed before it. Fear of that Day is not morbidity here; it is the moral clarity that makes them just to the weak while there is still time.
In the language
Al-Zamakhsharī flags that calling a Day ʿabūs ('frowning') is a metaphor (majāz), and he lays out two routes to it. The first: the Day is described by the trait of its people, the way Arabic says nahāruka ṣāʾim, 'your daytime is fasting,' when it is really you who fast. So the wretched are the ones who scowl, and their scowl is lent to the Day itself. The second route likens the Day, in its harm and severity, to a scowling lion or a fierce warrior. As for qamṭarīr, he takes it as intensely frowning, the face gathered tight between the eyes, and reports al-Zajjāj's derivation from iqmaṭarrat al-nāqa - said of a she-camel when she raises her tail and draws herself together - so the root carries the sense of everything contracting and bracing at once. Two ordinary human faces, in other words, are pressed into service to convey the pressure of a cosmic Day.
Why this verse
The believers do not credit their charity to soft-heartedness. They credit it to fear - a clear-eyed picture of a Day so severe it contorts faces. That dread is exactly what keeps them just to the powerless while there is still time to act.
Bring it into today
Modern piety is shy about fear. We prefer to speak of love and gratitude, and this āyah honours those - but it puts fear of the Last Day at the centre of why these people acted. Try reclaiming it as a tool, not a mood. Before a decision where you could cut a corner, underpay someone, ghost an obligation, or keep what you should give, pause and do what the verse does: picture the Day that 'scowls,' the reckoning where every deed is seen. Let that image, not your convenience, cast the deciding vote. And pair it with action the way the āyah does - the fear is immediately spent on feeding the poor, the orphan, the captive. Fear that never moves the hands is just anxiety. Fear that reaches into your wallet and your calendar, and pushes you to give someone their due today, is the beginning of justice.
A reflection to carry
There is something bracing about how literally the early scholars read these two words. ʿAbūs and qamṭarīr are not abstractions to them; they are a scowl of the lips, a knot between the eyebrows, sweat running like tar. Yet, as al-Zamakhsharī notes, the Day itself does not frown - the frown is borrowed from those who face it unprepared. So the same Day is grim for one person and radiant for another; the difference is what you carried into it. The believers here decided the outcome in advance by feeding others out of their own need - fear that was not paralysing but productive, converting into justice for the poor and the captive.
Sources: Ibn Kathīr, al-Saʿdī, al-Zamakhsharī (al-Kashshāf). The Qur'an and its translation are verified; the scholarship is retold faithfully in our own words and credited to its sources, never reproduced verbatim.
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