Sūrah 94 · Āyāt 1–4

Verses 1–4 — "Did We not expand your breast for you?"

The surah opens by counting out God's favors to the Prophet (ﷺ) in a tender, affectionate register. Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) agree on the lexicon: sharḥ means to open a thing by removing what blocks its apprehension, its root being "widening" (tawsiʿa); wizr is a heavy load (whence wazīr, "minister," one who bears the burdens of the realm); inqāḍ is the load under which the carried thing creaks. Both gloss "expanding the breast" as God's widening of the Prophet's heart "with prophethood and knowledge" so that he could deliver the Message and bear injury without being straitened — Ṭabarsī adds that God "filled it with knowledge and wisdom" and granted him the memorization of the Qurʾān.

On the burden (wizr), the two diverge from Sunnī exegetes by doctrine. Ṭūsī reports the readings of Mujāhid, Qatāda and others that wizr = "your sin," then rejects them outright: "the prophets commit nothing foul, neither before prophethood nor after, neither minor nor major." He and Ṭabarsī instead read the burden as the grief the Prophet carried from his people's hostility, which God lifted by making his cause prevail. Ṭabarsī cites al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā: a wizr is anything that weighs a person down, so here it denotes the Prophet's distress at his people's idolatry. Both pre-empt the objection that the surah is Meccan (so the triumph it implies came only after the Hijra) by arguing that the past tense announces a future certainty, citing 7:44 and 43:77 as parallels.

ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) sharpens this. He notes the surah's flow is "more consonant with its being Medinan," and refutes al-Rāzī's claim that al-Ḍuḥā and al-Sharḥ cannot be one surah: the "expansion of the breast," he insists, is not "gladness of heart" but the soul's being made "fully prepared to receive what is poured upon it from God." He surveys ten proposed meanings of the wizr and dismisses those implying sin as "feeble… not suiting the flow," settling on the carrying-through of the prophetic mission. On rafaʿnā laka dhikrak, all four sources converge: God joined the Prophet's name to His own in the shahāda, adhān, iqāma and tashahhud. Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān both cite the ḥadīth of Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī — Gabriel relaying, "When I am mentioned, you are mentioned with Me" — and Ṭabarsī adds Ḥassān ibn Thābit's couplets on the Prophet's name being derived from maḥmūd.

The two narrational sources read the verses through walāya. Qummī and al-Burhān (citing ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm, al-Riḍā, al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq, and Ibn Shahrāshūb) gloss "expanding the breast" as "by ʿAlī — We made him your successor," the wizr as "the weight of war" lifted through ʿAlī, and "We strengthened your back by ʿAlī." Al-Burhān further preserves al-Bursī's narration of a supplication at the Kaʿba answered by this surah — a report flagged here for human review, as it embeds a contested claim of a variant recitation ("by ʿAlī, your son-in-law"). These are presented as the Imāmī interpretive tradition, alongside (not in place of) the philological reading. The Enlightening Commentary frames all of this as three spiritual bounties — expansion, relief of the burden, exaltation of renown — and, like the classical sources, ties the surah closely to al-Ḍuḥā, noting the Ahl al-Bayt tradition of reciting the two as one in prayer.