Ad-Dukhan ('The Smoke'), 59 Meccan verses, warns of a day when a visible smoke will cover the people (44:10), and speaks of the 'blessed night' in which the Quran was sent down (44:3), associated with the Night of Decree. It recalls the deliverance of Moses and the drowning of Pharaoh.
The 'blessed night' in which the Quran was sent down (44:3) is identified by the overwhelming majority of classical commentators with Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Decree named explicitly in surah 97, rather than a separate occasion, and al-Qurtubi's commentary treats the two passages as referring to the same event described from different angles, one naming the night's blessedness, the other its precise standing above a thousand months. The smoke that will visibly cover the people (44:10-16) is read in two distinct exegetical traditions, some classical commentators describing it as an eschatological sign preceding the Day of Judgement, others, including a report tracing to the companion Ibn Mas'ud, connecting it instead to a severe famine and haze that afflicted Mecca during a period of drought in Muhammad's own lifetime, understood as a partial, this-worldly instance of the fuller sign to come. The drowning of Pharaoh, recounted briefly here as elsewhere in the Quran, is followed by the statement that 'the heavens and earth did not weep for them' (44:29), a vivid image commentators read as expressing the utter insignificance of the destroyed in contrast to the cosmic weight attached to the righteous elsewhere in the Quran.