Sūrah 88 · Āyāt 1–7

Al-Ghāshiya 1–7 — The Overwhelming Event and the wretched faces

The sūra opens with a question meant to arrest and awe: "Has the account of the Overwhelming (al-Ghāshiya) reached you?" — then paints the first of the two groups the Day of Resurrection sorts humanity into: faces humbled, toiling and weary, roasting in a blazing Fire, given scalding water and a food, ḍarīʿ, that neither nourishes nor fills.

On the name al-Ghāshiya, the present sources converge. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) reads the opening interrogative as one of magnification and takes al-Ghāshiya as the Day of Resurrection, "so named because it overwhelms and encompasses people," and notes the sūra is Meccan by the flow of its verses. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) report the same from Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḥasan and Qatāda, adding Saʿīd b. Jubayr's alternative that al-Ghāshiya is the Fire itself, which "overwhelms the faces of the disbelievers with punishment" (cf. 14:50). The Enlightening Commentary likewise glosses it as a name of the Hereafter whose terrors "will suddenly cover everything."

On "toiling, weary" (ʿāmila nāṣiba) the sources preserve a spread of early views, and al-Mīzān adjudicates: reading it against its opposite in the Garden's people ("pleased with their striving"), he holds the intended sense is toil in this world and weariness in the Hereafter — deeds rendered vain and returning nothing but fatigue (citing 25:23). al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī catalogue the alternatives: toiling in the Fire struggling with chains (al-Ḥasan, Qatāda); toiling in worldly sin, wearied in the Fire (ʿIkrima, al-Suddī); and toiling in misguided worship — the monks, hermits and people of innovation whose works God scatters as dust.

A distinctively Imāmī layer enters through the phrase's application to the nāṣib (the sectarian opponent of the Ahl al-Bayt). al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān both cite al-Ṣādiq: "every nāṣib, though he worship and strive, comes under this verse." al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) and al-Qummī press the reading much further, and it is here that their material is flagged for human review: al-Burhān records al-Ṣādiq glossing the very words of the sūra so that al-Ghāshiya is "the Qāʾim [who] overwhelms them with the sword," ʿāmila is "they worked by other than what God revealed," and nāṣiba is "they set up [in authority] other than the rightful holders of the affair (wulāt al-amr)"; al-Riḍā is cited identifying the verse's referents as "the nawāṣib, the Zaydiyya and the Wāqifa." al-Qummī, quoted verbatim in both al-Burhān and here, adds that ḍarīʿ is "the sweat of the people of the Fire and what issues from the private parts of the fornicating women." These are rendered strictly as-attributed.

On the concrete images the sources are sober and agree: the boiling spring is water at the extremity of heat (Ibn ʿAbbās, Qatāda), and ḍarīʿ is al-shibriq, a thorn the Ḥijāzīs so name when it dries — "the foulest, most repugnant food, which no beast grazes," carrying a Prophetic description (via Ibn ʿAbbās) that it is "more bitter than aloes, more foul-smelling than carrion, hotter than fire." al-Ṭabarsī notes the occasion: when idolaters scoffed that "our camels fatten on ḍarīʿ," the closing words "it neither fattens nor avails against hunger" gave them the lie, since camels do not in fact graze it.