Sūrah 106 · Āyāt 1–2

The verses. “For the īlāf of Quraysh — their īlāf with the journey of winter and summer.” The surah opens, grammatically, on a loose thread: a causal lām (“for…”) with no immediately stated main clause, naming a single favor — the īlāf of Quraysh, glossed and intensified by its own restatement, “their īlāf with the two journeys.”

What īlāf means. The present sources converge on the root sense while preserving a real lexical fork. Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) defines īlāf as “the bringing-about of attachment through good management and gentle handling,” the opposite of īḥāsh (estranging) and the analogue of īnās (putting at ease). al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) sharpens this through al-Rāghib — ilf is “a coming-together with harmonious union” — and notes the agent of the īlāf is Allah Himself: the verbal-noun construction means “Allah’s making Quraysh accustomed to the journey,” Quraysh the first object, the second elided. al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) preserves the divergent reading: al-Azharī takes īlāf from the sense of granting safe-conduct for a protection-fee (khafāra) — the lexical basis for the well-known view that the īlāf was Quraysh’s network of security pacts. The published Enlightening Commentary registers exactly this fork, naming “uniting together / a gathering with intimacy” as primary and the “agreement, compact” derivation as the alternative.

The grammar and the link to al-Fīl. Because the opening lām hangs, the sources rehearse what governs it. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī report three positions: (1) al-Akhfash and al-Zajjāj attach it back to al-Fīl’s “like eaten chaff” — We destroyed the elephant army so that Quraysh might remain secure in their journeys; (2) al-Khalīl and Sībawayh attach it forward to “let them worship” — worship as thanksgiving for this īlāf; (3) al-Farrāʾ reads the lām as ilā (“favor added to favor”), and recalls those who treat al-Fīl + Quraysh as one surah. al-Ṭūsī notes his Imāmī colleagues’ report that the two are recited as one (like al-Ḍuḥā with al-Sharḥ); al-Mīzān records this but firmly concludes that “nothing of what they relied upon establishes” a genuine single-surah unity — the reports at most permit reciting the pair together in one rakʿa.

The two journeys. All present sources give the concrete picture. al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī (citing Ibn Zayd and al-Kalbī) and al-Mīzān agree: Mecca’s Ḥaram is “a barren valley” with neither crop nor herd, so Quraysh lived by trade, running two caravans a year — winter to Yemen (a warm land) and summer to al-Shām/Syria (a cool land). al-Ṭabarsī adds a variant in which both ran to Syria (winter by sea, to Ayla; summer to Buṣrā and Adhriʿāt). The narration in Tafsīr al-Qummī, echoed verbatim in al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī, from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm), fills in the commerce: out of Mecca went hides, cloth, and sea-borne pepper; back from Syria came garments, fine flour (darmak), and grain — and on each trip Quraysh “kept together,” appointing a chief to lead the caravan. al-Ṭabarsī also preserves the lexicon of travel itself (riḥla, rāḥila, raḥl) and the four seasons. Across the panel the favor is one and indivisible: the security of the Sanctuary made the caravans possible, and the caravans made habitation of a barren Mecca possible.