Sūrah 95 · Āyāt 1–3

The Fourfold Oath: Fig, Olive, Sinai, and the Secure City (95:1–3)

The sūra opens with a chain of oaths — by the fig and the olive, by Mount Sinai, and by "this secure city" — sworn as a solemn prelude to the statement about man that follows. The six sources present here read the oath on two levels at once: a plain sense (real fruits and places) and, in the Imāmī narrations, a symbolic application to the Prophet and his House.

The plain sense. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) both record, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid, ʿIkrima and Qatāda, that "the fig" (al-tīn) is the fruit eaten and "the olive" (al-zaytūn) the fruit from which oil is pressed — and al-Ṭabarsī calls this "the apparent" (al-ẓāhir) reading, dwelling on the fig as a wholesome, stoneless morsel and citing a tradition of Abū Dharr likening it to the fruit of Paradise. Both then list the topographical readings: the fig and olive as the two mountains of Damascus and Jerusalem (Qatāda, ʿIkrima), or the mosque of Noah on al-Jūdī and Jerusalem (Ibn ʿAbbās), al-Ṭūsī adding al-Farrāʾ's report of a Syrian exegete who placed "the fig" in the mountains between Ḥulwān and Hamadān. For "Mount Sinai" (Ṭūr Sīnīn) the two agree it is the mountain where God spoke to Moses, glossing sīnīn as "blessed," "goodly," or "abounding in trees" — a reading my web cross-check confirms against al-Ṭabarī's linguistics. "This secure city" is, by the consensus they both report (Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda, Ibn Zayd, Ibrāhīm), Mecca, where even in pagan times the fearful found sanctuary; both cite Q 29:67 and the same verse of poetry to fix al-amīn as "secure."

al-Mīzān's synthesis. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī gathers these same possibilities — the two fruits, the two trees, the two mountains "because they are the sending-places of a great host of prophets" — and weighs the grammar of al-amīn as either "possessed of security" (faʿīl active) or "the city in which people are made secure" (faʿīl passive), noting "a kind of figurative usage" in ascribing security to a place. He alone frames the whole oath as the sūra's argumentative engine: it is preface to the thesis that man, created in the best form, divides into two destinies. He also weighs the sūra's Meccan provenance against the phrase "this secure city," judging it Meccan but not decisively so.

The Imāmī application. al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī's al-Burhān (segment type: ḥadīth) record narrations attributed to the Imams that read the four sworn things as persons and places of the Prophet's House: in one set (al-Qummī; ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm in al-Burhān) the fig is the Messenger of God, the olive the Commander of the Faithful ʿAlī, Mount Sinai al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, and the secure city the Imams; in another (al-Ṣādiq, al-Riḍā via al-Burhān) the fig and olive are al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn and Sinai is ʿAlī; and in a Prophetic report (via Mūsā b. Jaʿfar) the four are four sacred cities — Medina, Jerusalem, Kufa and Mecca. These are presented strictly as attributed taʾwīl, not as the verse's literal sense. Tellingly, al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī himself cites the Qummī narration in his baḥth riwāʾī and remarks that such readings are "nothing of [literal] tafsīr" — i.e. application (jary), not exegesis — a caution this synthesis preserves.