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. 69:7], in order to harmonise with the end-rhyme of the verses in both instances).