Sūrat al-Inshiqāq 1–5 — The Heaven Splits and the Earth is Emptied (Six-Source Triangulation)

Sources present (non-silent): al-Ṭabarsī, Majmaʿ al-Bayān [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan]; al-Ṭūsī, al-Tibyān [tusi_al_tibyan]; al-Baḥrānī, al-Burhān [bahrani_al_burhan]; al-Qummī, Tafsīr al-Qummī [qummi]; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī, al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan]; An Enlightening Commentary [enlightening_commentary]. All six comment on this passage.

What the passage says. The sūra opens with a double cosmic oath-scene: the sky is rent open and “gives ear to its Lord, and it must” (vv.1–2); the earth is flattened, throws out what it holds, empties itself, and likewise “gives ear to its Lord, and it must” (vv.3–5). The apodosis of “When…” is left unstated until v.6.

The cosmic upheaval as a sign of the Hour. All four classical sources read these verses as Resurrection imagery. [qummi] is the tersest: “When the heaven is split asunder” = “the Day of Resurrection,” and the earth “is stretched so that it splits and the people come forth from it.” [bahrani_al_burhan] reproduces precisely this Qummī gloss (citing Tafsīr al-Qummī 2:412) within narration 11490, framing the whole as the Day of Resurrection. [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] calls the splitting “among the portents of the Resurrection” and [tusi_al_tibyan] frames the opening as a warning to “all the morally accountable” that the Hour is near.

“Gives ear and it must” (adhinat / ḥuqqat). [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] agree, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, Saʿīd b. Jubayr, Mujāhid and Qatāda, that adhinat means “it heard and obeyed” — a figurative expansion in which the heaven, like an obedient servant, yields to God’s governance; ḥuqqat means “it is its due” to so obey its Creator. [tabatabai_al_mizan] grounds this lexically: idhn derives from udhun (“ear”) and is used figuratively for submission, while ḥuqqat means the sky “becomes capable and befitting to give ear.” [enlightening_commentary] adds the same point and notes the parallel of Fuṣṣilat 41:11 (“we come willingly”).

The earth “stretched” and “emptied.” On muddat (vv.3), [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] both transmit Ibn ʿAbbās’s simile of the earth drawn out like the ʿUkāẓī hide and enlarged, alongside the image of mountains crumbling until the ground is “like a smooth scroll” (Muqātil). [tabatabai_al_mizan] reads it as the earth “transformed into another earth” (Ibrāhīm 14:48). On takhallat (v.4), the classical sources gloss “casts out what is in it” as the dead and buried treasures (cf. al-Zalzala 99:2), and “empties itself” as becoming void; [qummi] and [bahrani_al_burhan] specify it “empties itself of the people” who emerge for the Gathering.

Non-repetition. [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] both stress that the second “gives ear to its Lord, and it must” (v.5) is no redundancy: the first describes the heaven, the second the earth. [enlightening_commentary] supplies a distinctive supplement — a narration from ʿAlī that “the skies will separate from the galaxy,” which the commentator reads as anticipating modern astronomy. All sources converge: the universe’s submission and dissolution sets the stage for v.6’s address to laboring humanity.