10 Preface فَارتَقِب يَومَ تَأتِي السَّماءُ بِدُخانٍ مُبينٍYusuf AliThen watch thou for the Day1 that the sky will bring forth a kind of smoke (or mist)2 plainly visible,What Day is this? It obviously refers to a great calamity, and from the wording it is to be a great calamity in the future, seen with the prophetic eye. The word yaghsha in verse 11 may be compared to al-Ghāshiya in 88:1, which obviously refers to the final Day of Judgment. But verse 15 below (“We shall remove the Penalty for a while”) shows that it is not the final Judgment referred to here, but some calamity that was to happen soon afterwards. Perhaps it was a famine, about which see the next note.The “smoke” or “mist” is interpreted on good authority to refer to a severe famine in Mecca, in which men were so pinched with hunger that they saw mist before their eyes when they looked at the sky. Ibn Kathir in his Tarikh mentions two famines in Mecca, one in the 8th year of the Mission, say the fourth year before the Hijrat, and another about the 8th year after the Hijrat. But as either or both of these famines lasted as many as seven years, the dates are to be taken very roughly. It is even possible that the two famines were continuous, of varying severity from year to year. Bukhari mentions only the post-Hijrat famine, which was apparently so severe that men began to eat bones and carrion. Abū Sufyan (about 8 A.H.) approached the Prophet to intercede and pray for the removal of the famine, as the Pagans attributed it to the curse of the Prophet. Sūra 23, which is also Meccan, but of later date than the present Sūra, also refers to a famine: see 23:75, and n. 2921. As Sūras were not all revealed entire, but many came piecemeal, it is possible that particular verses in a given Sūra may be of different dates from the Sūra as a whole.