Sūrah 91 · Āyāt 1–7

The Sun, the Moon, and the Soul That Was Made (vv. 1–7)

Sūrat al-Shams opens with the densest cluster of oaths in the Qurʾān — by the sun and its forenoon brightness, the moon that follows it, the day that reveals, the night that veils, the heaven and its Builder, the earth and its Spreader, and finally the soul and the One who fashioned it. The present commentaries read these seven adjurations along two complementary registers: the cosmological and the moral-symbolic.

The plain cosmological reading. Al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) both begin from the settled principle that God may swear by whatever of His creation He wills, "to call attention to its great worth and the abundant benefit derived from it." They note that the world's animal and plant life subsists by the sun's rising and setting, so an oath by the sun and its ḍuḥā — glossed as the spreading of its light (Mujāhid, al-Kalbī), the whole day (Qatāda), or its heat (Muqātil) — is fitting. On the moon's "following" the sun both record the lunar options: the crescent trailing the setting sun in the month's first half (Ibn Zayd), the night of the new moon (al-Ḥasan), or the entire monthly cycle. For jallāhā and yaghshāhā they take the feminine pronoun to point to the unmentioned but obvious darkness, or to the sun: day uncovers it, night clothes it in blackness.

The grammar of mā. A shared crux is the mā in "that which built it / spread it / fashioned it." Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī register two faces — mā as a verbal-noun particle ("its building, its spreading, its proportioning") or as a relative pronoun meaning "Who," i.e. God. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) decisively prefers the relative reading: the Builder and Spreader is God, and the very choice of the vague mā over the personal man is deliberate — it "conveys magnification and the evoking of wonder," so the sense is "by the heaven and the Mighty, Wondrous Thing that built it." He reads the soul's "fashioning" (taswiya) as God ordering its creation, arranging its limbs, and "balancing its faculties," and rejects restricting nafs to Adam: the human soul as such is meant. Al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabarsī preserve the rival opinion of al-Ḥasan that the "soul" is Adam.

The symbolic register. Al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) carry a wholly different, esoteric line transmitted from the Imāms: the sun is the Messenger of God "by whom God made the religion plain," the moon is the Commander of the Faithful who "followed him and received his knowledge," the day-that-reveals is the Imām from Fāṭima's progeny who clarifies the religion to the questioner, and the night-that-veils is "the leaders of tyranny" whose oppression overspreads the daylight of true guidance. Al-Burhān adds parallel narrations (sun = Prophet, moon = ʿAlī, day = al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, night = Banū Umayya), an oath-reading keyed to al-Qāʾim, and the Prophet's saying: "My likeness among you is the sun, ʿAlī's the moon; when the sun sets, be guided by the moon." These are taʾwīl, not the literal sense, and carry sectarian-polemical names; they are recorded here as the sources give them.

Strikingly, al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī — reading soberly — also senses a real thread binding the oaths to their object: the present-tense "covers" (yaghshā), against the past-tense "reveals," hints at wickedness "overspreading the earth in the present age, the early days of the Islamic call." The Enlightening Commentary gathers both impulses pastorally: these are the most numerous oaths in the whole Qurʾān because the matter sworn to — the soul's salvation — is as weighty as "the heavens, earth, sun and moon," and every luminary named is "effective in the fate of man."