Sūrah 107 · Āyāt 1–3

The verses. “Have you seen him who denies the Religion (al-dīn)? That is the one who drives away the orphan, and does not urge the feeding of the needy.” The surah opens with a rhetorical question that turns at once from creed to conduct: a denial of the Hereafter is exposed not by argument but by two reflexes of cruelty toward the powerless.

What “al-dīn” means. The present sources converge: dīn here is al-jazāʾ, the Requital on the Day of Judgment. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) glosses the denier as one “who denies the Requital and the Reckoning and rejects the Resurrection,” the interrogative form used “only to intensify the making-understood.” al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) reads araʾayta as an address to the Prophet “by way of making him marvel” at such a man, and fixes dīn as “the Requital of reward and punishment.” al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) notes that the “seeing” may be ocular or cognitive (“knowing”), that the address, though to the Prophet, reaches “every hearer,” and that dīn means the Requital — “the denier of al-dīn is the rejecter of the Return (maʿād)” — while registering the minority reading of dīn as “the [whole] creed (milla).” The published Enlightening Commentary agrees that “the first meaning seems more appropriate,” cross-referencing al-Infiṭār 82:9 and al-Tīn 95:7, where dīn likewise denotes the Day of Judgment.

A distinctively Imāmī reading. al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) preserves narrations absent from the others: from al-Riḍā (from his forefathers) and from al-Ṣādiq, denying al-dīn is glossed as denying the wilāya of the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī — the rejection of right religion located in the rejection of divinely-appointed guardianship.

The orphan and the needy. On yaduʿʿu al-yatīm the panel is unanimous: al-daʿʿ is “pushing with force.” al-Ṭabarsī even records the anomalous reading yadaʿu (un-doubled, “abandons/turns away”), noting it “comes back to” the standard sense; and he, al-Ṭūsī, Tafsīr al-Qummī, and al-Burhān all transmit Ibn ʿAbbās and Mujāhid: he “pushes the orphan away from his right.” The shared logic, stated most sharply by al-Mīzān, is causal: “had he not denied [the Requital] he would have feared it, and had he feared it he would have shown the orphan mercy.” On lā yaḥuḍḍ (“does not urge”), al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī stress that the man neither feeds nor prompts others to feed; al-Ṭūsī adds the legal nicety that blame attaches only where the act is obligatory or wrongful. al-Mīzān offers the finest point: the verse says ṭaʿām (“food”), not iṭʿām (“feeding”), “to intimate that the needy is, as it were, an owner of what is given to him” — citing “in their wealth was a right for the beggar and the deprived” (al-Dhāriyāt 51:19) — and chooses ḥaḍḍ (“urging”) precisely because it is broader than feeding itself.

Occasion of revelation. The sources offer a spread of named occasions without forcing one: al-Ṭabarsī lists al-ʿĀṣ ibn Wāʾil (al-Kalbī), al-Walīd ibn al-Mughīra (al-Suddī, Muqātil), Abū Sufyān (Ibn Jurayj — who struck a begging orphan with his staff, a story the Enlightening Commentary repeats), and “a man among the hypocrites” (Ibn ʿAbbās); al-Qummī and al-Burhān name Abū Jahl and the disbelievers of Quraysh. The Enlightening Commentary draws the pastoral conclusion the verses imply — that for the orphan, “affection and humane treatment is more significant than food.”