Sūrah 51 · Āyāt 1–19

al-Dhāriyāt 1-19 — the oaths, the deniers of the Day, and the portrait of the God-fearing

The passage opens with four oaths — by the scattering winds, the load-bearing clouds, the smoothly running ships, and the angels who apportion the Command — swearing that “what you are promised is truthful, and the Requital shall befall.” A second oath, “by the heaven of ḥubuk,” answers that the deniers are lost “in differing speech.” It curses the “conjecturers” who ask mockingly “When is the Day of Judgment?”, sets against them the Day they are “tried over the Fire,” and then paints the God-fearing in gardens and springs: sleeping little of the night, seeking forgiveness before dawn, giving the beggar and the deprived their due. It closes by turning the gaze to signs in the earth, in the self, and in the heaven where “your provision” lies.

On the opening oaths every present source converges on one tradition: Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, Qummī and Baḥrānī all transmit that Ibn al-Kawwāʾ questioned ʿAlī on the pulpit and was told the four are winds, clouds, ships and angels, and al-Mīzān confirms this comes by both Shīʿa and Sunnī routes, rejecting al-Rāzī’s reduction of all four to winds. Ṭūsī draws out the theological point — the wind’s rising and stilling bespeaks a Mover unlike bodies — while al-Mīzān reads the four as a panorama of God’s governance on land, sea, air and through the angelic intermediaries. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī note the juristic maxim, from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq, that a creature may swear only by God though God swears by what He wills.

On “the heaven of ḥubuk,” Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān gather the senses of beauty, ordered creation and fine tracks (al-Mīzān preferring “tracks” as matching the people’s “differing”), and Ṭabarsī, Qummī and Baḥrānī all cite al-Riḍā’s striking image of a heaven “woven to the earth” on unseen pillars. Here the Imāmī sources part from the plain sense: Qummī and Baḥrānī read “you are in differing speech” and “turned away is whoever is turned” as the community’s split over ʿAlī’s walāya, and Baḥrānī preserves narrations calling ʿAlī “the Religion” and “possessed of ḥubuk” — rendered here strictly as attributed reports, and flagged, since two of them claim “thus it was revealed.”

On the deniers, the sources agree that the “conjecturers” speak of the Resurrection without knowledge (al-Mīzān), that their mocking question is answered not with a date but with their state (al-Mīzān, Ṭabarsī), and that being “tried” evokes gold refined by fire (Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī) — while Baḥrānī uniquely folds this into the doctrine of the rajʿa, “broken in the Return as gold is broken.”

On the God-fearing, all six enrich the portrait with hadith: scarcely a night without prayer, and seventy pleas for forgiveness in the pre-dawn witr (Ṭabarsī, Baḥrānī, and al-Mīzān from al-Ṣādiq); the “deprived” as the disabled who cannot earn (Baḥrānī, Ṭabarsī); and the “signs in yourselves” as one’s own shifting states — hearing, sight, anger, hunger — from al-Ṣādiq, capped by al-Mīzān’s reflection on the single soul governing the many senses and by Baḥrānī’s long debate of al-Ṣādiq with Ibn Abī al-ʿAwjāʾ.