Sūrah 83 · Āyāt 1–6

The passage (83:1-6). The Surah of "The Defrauders" opens with a thunderclap of menace — {Woe to the defrauders} — and at once defines them: those who, {when they take by measure from people, take in full, but when they measure or weigh for them, give less}. It then pivots from the marketplace to the Resurrection: {Do they not suppose that they will be raised for a tremendous Day, the Day mankind will stand before the Lord of the Worlds?} The present sources read the passage as a single moral argument: the petty cheat at the scales is, at root, a man who has forgotten the Day of Reckoning.

The sin defined. All four classical sources converge on the lexicon. Al-Tusi (al-Tibyan) and al-Tabarsi (Majma' al-Bayan) derive al-tatfif from "taff al-shay'" — the trifling edge of a thing — so the "defrauder" is named for stealing only the scant little, yet the threat covers everyone who diminishes another's measured or weighed right. Al-Tabarsi cites al-Zajjaj to the same effect and records Ibn Mas'ud's striking analogy that "the prayer is a measure — whoever fills it, God fills for him." Al-Mizan (al-Tabataba'i) sharpens the indictment morally: the two verses are "a single dispraise" — that they observe the right for themselves but not for others — and this corrupts "human society, which is built upon the balance of mutually opposed rights," tying it to Shu'ayb's words at Hud 85 that short-measuring is "corruption in the earth."

The occasion. Al-Tabarsi, al-Tusi, al-Qummi, and al-Burhan (Bahrani) all transmit the Medinan occasion (via Abu al-Jarud from Imam al-Baqir, and 'Ikrima from Ibn 'Abbas): the verse came down when the Prophet reached Medina, where the people were "the worst in measuring," after which they reformed — al-Tabarsi adding al-Suddi's report of "Abu Juhayna" with his two measuring-scoops. Al-Mizan accordingly judges the Surah's opening to be Medinan while the rest fits either context. On {Woe} itself, al-Tusi and al-Qummi report the tradition that it is "a well (or valley) in Gehenna."

The turn to the Reckoning. On {Do they not suppose...}, al-Tusi and al-Tabarsi give zann a double force: either "do they not know" they will be raised (zann = certain knowledge), or genuine supposition — for even the mere suspicion of danger obliges one to take precaution, "as one who suspects ruin on a road must avoid it." Al-Mizan reads the demonstrative {ula'ika} ("those") as marking the defrauders' remoteness from God's mercy, and explains that supposition of the rising suffices to deter, "even if there is no certainty." Al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi gloss {the Day mankind will stand before the Lord of the Worlds} as the rising from the graves to the Gathering, citing the hadith (Muslim) that the sun is brought within a mile and people stand drowning in their sweat "by the measure of their deeds," and the report that Ibn 'Umar wept until he collapsed at this verse. Al-Burhan and al-Qummi alone carry a distinctively Imami re-reading attributed to Imam al-Sadiq (via Sharaf al-Din al-Najafi): that the "defrauders" are, esoterically, "those who diminish your fifth (khums), O Muhammad" — taking the spoils in full but shortchanging the Family of Muhammad — rendered here strictly as-attributed, alongside the plain commercial sense which these same sources affirm.