Sūrah 92 · Āyāt 1–4

The passage (92:1–4). The sūra opens with three oaths — by the night when it envelops (yaghshā), by the day when it brightens (tajallā), and by Him who created the male and the female — sealed by the response to the oath: "Indeed your endeavours are diverse" (inna saʿyakum la-shattā). The point of the oaths is to set the stage for the sūra's whole argument: that human striving splits into radically opposed paths with opposed ends.

The oaths. Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) read the night as covering the day with its darkness and the day as emerging from that darkness, and both stress that God repeated the night-and-day oath across the two adjacent sūras (al-Shams and al-Layl) precisely because of their worth as signs of His wisdom — were all time dark, livelihoods could not be sought; were it all light, there would be no rest. On "who created the male and the female," Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, Qummī and Baḥrānī agree the apparent sense is "the One who created" (taking mā as "who," i.e. God), and all note the variant reading "wa-l-dhakara wa-l-untha" — Ṭūsī attributes it to the reading of Ibn Masʿūd (ʿAbd Allāh). Ṭabataba'i (al-Mīzān) is the most precise here: mā rather than man is deliberately used to convey an awe-inspiring vagueness — "I swear by the wondrous Being who brought the two sexes into existence, differing yet of one kind" — and he rejects the grammatical alternative (that mā is maṣdariyya, "the creation of…") as weak. On the identity of "male and female," the sources offer a spread: Adam and Eve (Muqātil and al-Kalbī, cited by Ṭabarsī; "it is said," in Ṭūsī), or every male and female absolutely — which al-Mīzān judges the soundest.

The response to the oath. All five present commentaries gloss shattā as "scattered, divergent." Ṭabarsī (from Ibn ʿAbbās) and Qummī and Baḥrānī (from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm) put it concretely: "among you is one who strives in good and one who strives in evil" — a work for the Garden and a work for the Fire. Al-Mīzān frames the whole sūra around this verse: its aim is warning (indhār), and its special concern is financial spending, the very axis on which the two endeavours will divide in the next passage.

The occasion of revelation. Ṭabarsī gives the fullest narrative (al-Wāḥidī ← ʿIkrima ← Ibn ʿAbbās): a man's palm branch overhung a poor family's yard, and he would snatch back fallen dates even from the children's mouths; the Prophet offered the owner a palm in Paradise in exchange, was refused, and a generous man — Abū al-Daḥdāḥ (named via ʿAṭāʾ) — bought the tree for forty palms and gave it to the Prophet, who gave it to the poor household. Then the sūra came down. The Enlightening Commentary reproduces this same Tabarsī narration in English.

The Imāmī esoteric layer. Qummī and Baḥrānī add a taʾwīl narration from Imām al-Bāqir: "the night" symbolizes the one (fulān) who overshadowed the Commander of the Faithful during a reign that ran against him, and "the day" the Qāʾim, whose rising overcomes the reign of falsehood — "none knows it but we." Baḥrānī additionally anchors the literal oaths in a principle (from al-Bāqir and al-Jawād): God may swear by whatever He wills of His creation, "but it is not for His creatures to swear by any but Him." These symbolic identifications are recorded as the sources give them, not endorsed.