Sūrah 86 · Āyāt 1–4

al-Ṭāriq 86:1–4 — the oath by the night-comer, and the keeper over every soul. The passage opens, as the Enlightening Commentary notes, in the manner of the short Meccan sūras: "beautiful oaths to reflect upon which express a great fact." God swears "by the heaven and the night-comer (al-ṭāriq)," then heightens the suspense — "what will make you know what the night-comer is?" — before answering Himself: "the piercing star (al-najm al-thāqib)."

On the lexicon the four classical authorities converge. al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) and al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) both root ṭarq in al-daqq, "striking" — whence the hammer (miṭraqa) and the road (ṭarīq, beaten by feet) — so al-ṭāriq is the one who arrives by night and must knock to be known. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) gives the same derivation and adds the second sense of thāqib: not only "radiant, piercing the dark with its light," but "lofty," as when "the bird pierced" the high air. On the star's identity the sources preserve a spread of views that all four record without forcing: al-Ḥasan reads al-najm generically (the whole body of stars), Ibn Zayd says Saturn (Zuḥal) "which towers over the stars," others the Pleiades or the moon (al-Farrāʾ). The Enlightening Commentary foregrounds the narration from Imām al-Ṣādiq (ʿa) that the thāqib is Saturn, "which appears in the seventh sky, but its light passes the skies and reaches the first" — a reading carried in fuller narrative form by al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān): when a Yemeni astronomer calls Saturn an "inauspicious star," al-Ṣādiq corrects him — "it is the star of the Commander of the Faithful and of the Awṣiyāʾ … its rising-place is in the seventh heaven, and it pierced with its light until it shone in the lowest heaven." al-Burhān adds al-Ḍaḥḥāk's narration from ʿAlī (ʿa): al-ṭāriq is "the most beautiful star … its light strikes heaven after heaven up to the seven, then strikes returning until it returns to its place."

al-Qummī supplies the boldest Imāmī taʾwīl, shared verbatim by al-Burhān: through Abū Baṣīr from al-Ṣādiq (ʿa), "the heaven in this place is the Commander of the Faithful, the night-comer is the Spirit (al-Rūḥ) that comes to the Imams from their Lord and sets them aright, and the piercing star is the Messenger of God." The synthesis records this strictly as an attributed esoteric reading, alongside the plain astronomical sense the other sources expound.

The oath's answer is 86:4: "there is over every soul a keeper (ḥāfiẓ)." al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Qummī agree the keeper is an angel — recording, in Qatāda's words, "its deed, its provision and its term." The Enlightening Commentary ties this to al-Infiṭār 10–12 ("noble scribes … they know whatever you do"): you are never alone. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī presses further: the "keeper" may guard the self and not merely the record, so that souls are kept — not annihilated at death — and this very preservation is what makes the coming argument for resurrection sound. The grammarians' point (recorded by both al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabarsī) that lammā may be read as the doubled "except" — "there is no soul but over it is a keeper" — only sharpens the universality: not one soul is unguarded.