Sūrah 96 · Āyāt 1–5

The first light of revelation. These five verses are, by the agreement of most exegetes, the very first of the Qur'an to descend. Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) and al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) both report the dominant view — narrated from ʿĀʾisha, Mujāhid, ʿAṭāʾ and Ibn Yasār — that "Read in the name of your Lord who created" was the opening of revelation, while noting the minority opinions that placed al-Muddaththir or even al-Fātiḥa first. Al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) agrees the surah is "definitively Meccan" and the first revealed, and adds a precise reading of iqraʾ: the command is to receive what the angel conveys — the sentence orders the reading of the Book and is itself part of the Book, like an opening line that says "read this letter and act by it."

"In the Name of your Lord": Lordship and the proof of creation. All the English and Arabic sources converge on the centrality of rabb. The Enlightening Commentary stresses that rabb means a "reformer Lord," master and cherisher at once, and that the verse answers the pagan Arabs who conceded God's creative power yet assigned lordship to their idols. Al-Mīzān sharpens this into a formal argument for tawḥīd al-rubūbiyya: the polytheists granted God creation but reserved governance (tadbīr) for angels, jinn and men, and "your Lord who created" refutes them by binding Lordship and creation together in God alone. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī both add that to magnify the name is to magnify the Named, so only one who truly knows God can honour His name as it deserves.

Man "from a clot." Al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān agree that ʿalaq is congealed blood — what the sperm-drop becomes in the womb — and that the human genus is singled out, after the general "who created," as an honour. The Enlightening Commentary surveys four readings of ʿalaq (clinging clot, the clay of Adam, a being of affection, the leech-like seed) and judges the first the clearest, noting the contrast the verse draws between man's lowly origin and his lofty destiny. Al-Mīzān reads the same movement — from clot to "a complete, perfect human" — as itself the proof of a Lord who governs man at every stage.

The pen, and what man did not know. The sources read "who taught by the pen" as God's bestowal of writing, "by which the affairs of this world are completed in the easts and wests of the earth" (so al-Ṭabarsī and ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm, cited in both al-Qummī and al-Burhān). Al-Ṭabarsī cites Qatāda that "without the pen no religion would stand nor any livelihood be set right," and both he and al-Ṭūsī close on "taught man what he did not know" as proof that God is Knowing, "for knowledge issues only from a knower." Al-Mīzān hears in these verses a reassurance to the unlettered Prophet: the God who taught mankind to read by the pen can surely teach His Messenger to read His Book.

The Shīʿī narrations. Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) preserve a distinctive narration from Abū Jaʿfar al-Bāqir reading the verses through the Prophet and ʿAlī: "your Lord who created" as the creation of the Prophet's "most ancient light," "from a clot" as "He created you… and split off ʿAlī from you," and "taught by the pen" as the teaching of ʿAlī. Al-Burhān frames the whole within the cave narration of Khadīja and Waraqa. These are recorded here as transmitted reports, flagged for scholarly review, not as the plain sense the other sources expound.