Sūrah 32 · Āyāt 1–10

al-Sajda 1–10 — The Book from the Lord of the Worlds, and the proof of Origin and Return

What the passage says. The sūra opens with the disconnected letters Alif, Lām, Mīm, then declares the Qurʾān a “sending down… from the Lord of all the worlds” in which there is no doubt (vv. 1–2). It rebuts the charge of forgery — “rather it is the truth from your Lord” — and states its purpose: to warn a people who had received no warner before, that they may be guided (v. 3). The argument then turns to God’s exclusive Lordship: He created the heavens, the earth and all between them in six days and “mounted the Throne”; besides Him there is no protector or intercessor (v. 4); He directs the cosmic affair, which ascends to Him “in a day whose measure is a thousand years” (v. 5). He is the Knower of the unseen and the witnessed, who “perfected everything He created” and “commenced man’s creation from clay,” then his progeny from a despised fluid, then proportioned him, breathed His spirit into him, and gave hearing, sight and hearts — “little do you thank” (vv. 6–9). The passage ends with the deniers’ objection: once “lost in the earth,” shall we be created anew? — which the verse diagnoses as disbelief in the meeting with their Lord (v. 10).

How the present sources read it. On the disconnected letters and “no doubt in it,” al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī agree that the doubt negated is doubt for the rightly-guided — the Qurʾān is no place for doubt, though falsifiers have doubted — and both note the alternative that the declarative carries a prohibitive force (“do not doubt it”). al-Ṭūsī draws an anti-determinist (anti-Mujbira) lesson from “it is the truth from your Lord”: the Book was sent down to guide, not to misguide. On “a people to whom no warner came,” al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī all weigh two identifications — Quraysh specifically, or the people of the interval (fatra) between Jesus and Muḥammad — with al-Mīzān refining that the “interval” means the absence of a law-bearing prophet, not the total absence of prophethood.

On v. 4, the four Arabic sources read “six days” as a measured span (there being no sun, hence no night or day, beforehand), and refer the “mounting of the Throne” to earlier discussions. al-Mīzān makes the structural point that creation alone does not refute idolatry — the idolaters conceded that God creates but assigned directing (Lordship) to their gods — so the verse couples creation with directing, protection and intercession to prove sole Lordship; his analysis of shafāʿa concludes that God is the only real Intercessor, the Names mediating His grace. On v. 5, al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī carry the same gloss (the “thousand-year day” is the manifesting of the servants’ deeds at the Resurrection), while al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī report the older spatial reading (500 years’ descent and 500 years’ ascent) and al-Mīzān reads “heaven” as the station of nearness beyond time.

On the creation of man (vv. 7–9), al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī identify the one “commenced… from clay” as Adam and the “extract” as the choice part of food and drink, the “base fluid” as semen, with proportioning as the embryo’s transformation (sperm-drop → clot → lump) until the spirit is breathed in. al-Baḥrānī adds al-Kulaynī’s tradition from al-Ṣādiq on the days of creation, and a report glossing “the unseen” as “what has not yet been.” al-Mīzān argues from the contrast between “beginning” and “progeny” that the one created from clay is specifically Adam, created without parents, and appends his major excursus weighing — and rejecting on Qurʾānic grounds (chiefly “the likeness of Jesus is as the likeness of Adam”) — the generic-Adam, numbered-ancestors, and evolutionary accounts of human origin, judging species-transformation a conjectural hypothesis the evidence does not establish. The traditions he cites include ʿAlī’s listing of the four obligatory-prostration chapters (al-Sajda, Fuṣṣilat, al-Najm, al-ʿAlaq), the gentleness of the angel of death with the believer, and the angel’s helpers who seize souls. The published Enlightening Commentary supplies the framing reflections — the abbreviated letters as among the allegorical verses, the natural-versus-artificial-flower image for the Qurʾān’s self-evidencing truth, and the favours of hearing, sight and heart that summon man to gratitude.