Arabic · noun · Nature & the Garden

Barq

बर्क़
said barq
also written: barq, lightning
Meaning

Lightning, the sudden flash that splits the storm-cloud.

Literally: lightning

Usage & notes

Barq is the lightning-flash — sudden, dazzling and destructive, the bolt that falls on Moses' Sinai and on the harvest alike, classically the stroke of the beloved's beauty or of a calamity that ruins the nest and the gathered crop ('barq-e-tajalli,' the lightning of divine self-disclosure). It is beauty and ruin in one searing instant. Iqbal uses the bolt both as the flash of revelation that overwhelms and as the destructive force; he also urges the believer to carry lightning within, to be the storm rather than the threatened harvest.