The sun is rolled up, its light removed in their eyes, rising and setting upon the people of the Fire as it rises upon the people of this world during its eclipse. Likewise the moon: both swim, and all the shining stars follow the form of their swimming now within their spheres, but they are effaced in their eyes.
According to how the affair is in itself, they are the ones whose eyes God has effaced, when He willed, from perceiving the lights within luminous things. The veil is upon their eyes.
We know that here, during the sun’s eclipse, its light has not departed from it. The moon only veils it from us.
Were this not so, the practitioners of the mathematical sciences would not know when an eclipse occurs or how much of it disappears from our eyes during the eclipse, with events occurring as they state.
Were it among affairs that did not follow established measures and exact balances, of which God has acquainted those granted success in seeking such knowledge, one could not know it.
This does not detract from our saying that the sun has been eclipsed or that its light has departed from our eyes’ perception. None prevents us from agreeing to apply to this measure and form the names eclipse, obscuration, rolling up, and effacement.
The people of the Fire witness the bodies of the moving stars rising and setting upon them without witnessing any light in them, because of the dimming within the smoke.
As in this world they were blind to perceiving the lights of the truth brought by the Revealed Laws, so within the Fire they are blind to perceiving the lights of these moving stars and the other stars. ‘Whoever is blind in this is blind in the Hereafter and further astray from the way’ [al-Isra’ 17:72].
He is further astray from the way because in this world
