Al-Ghashiya opens with a rhetorical question addressed to the Prophet, 'has there reached you the report of the Overwhelming?' (88:1), a form scholars of Quranic style note is shared by several other short surahs collected in this same part of the Quran, An-Naba asking what the deniers dispute about, Al-Qaria asking what the Calamity is, each posing a question about the Day before answering it at length across the rest of the chapter. Commentators read the device as a deliberate attention-getting technique suited to oral delivery, drawing a listener into active curiosity before the fuller description follows, rather than announcing the subject flatly at the outset.
The pattern is treated by scholars of Quranic rhetoric as one marker, among several, of a shared stylistic family among these short surahs, distinct from surahs that instead open directly with an oath cluster, as Ash-Shams and Al-Balad do, or with a narrative episode. Al-Ghashiya's own answer to its opening question, moving from the two contrasted faces of the Day to the closing appeal to observe the camel, sky, mountains and earth, is read as characteristic of how these question-led surahs typically resolve their opening curiosity through vivid image rather than abstract explanation.