Sūrah 98 · Āyāt 1–3

"The clear proof had to come." The surah opens on a notoriously difficult sentence — al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) reports that some held it "among the most difficult of the Qurʾānic verses in composition and interpretation" — yet the sources converge on its drift. Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) and al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) lay out the readings of munfakkīn side by side: that the faithless of the People of the Book (Jews and Christians) and the idol-worshipping polytheists "were not desisting" from their unbelief (al-Ḥasan and Qatāda), or "were not separating" from it, or — the reading both favour — "were not to be left detached from God's proofs until the clear proof should come and the argument stand complete against them." al-Ṭūsī adds al-Farrāʾ's nuance: they were not cut off from God's evidence, since their own Books described the coming Prophet. Al-Mīzān reframes the whole sentence through the sunna ilāhiyya, the divine norm of guidance: the norm "had taken hold of them and would not release them until the clear proof came," after which it left them to their choice — exactly the logic of "God would not lead a people astray after guiding them until He had made clear to them what to guard against" [9:115].

The proof is a person. Every present source identifies al-bayyina with the Prophet himself. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī gloss "a Messenger from God" as the grammatical apposition that names the proof — "the Prophet is himself a proof and a clear sign." Tafsīr al-Qummī preserves the same identification as a narration: in Abū al-Jārūd's report from Imam al-Bāqir, "the clear proof is Muḥammad, the Messenger of God," while reading the disbelievers as Quraysh. The Enlightening Commentary agrees that the bayyinah "is the Messenger of Allah himself, who had at his disposal the Holy Qurʾān."

"Purified scriptures, wherein are upright writings." On ṣuḥufan muṭahharatan, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read "purified in heaven, touched only by the purified angels," citing al-Ḥasan and al-Jubbāʾī; Qatāda takes the purity to be from falsehood, the ṣuḥuf being the Qurʾān. Al-Mīzān sharpens this: the ṣuḥuf are "the revealed portions of the Qurʾān," and their being purified means "hallowed from the filth of falsehood through the touch of devils" — invoking "none touch it save the purified" [56:79] and the "honoured, exalted, purified scriptures" of [80:13–16]. The Enlightening Commentary notes a complementary point: since the unlettered Prophet "recited from memory, not from a book," the ṣuḥuf mean their contents, the original Word of God in its purity. On kutub qayyima, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī render the writings "straight, just, without crookedness, distinguishing truth from falsehood," qayyima being "that which is constant in the direction of rightness." Al-Mīzān presses the legal sense: the kutub are "the divine rulings and decrees pertaining to belief and conduct," and qayyima derives from al-qiyām bi-l-shayʾ — "preserving a thing, tending its welfare, guaranteeing its felicity" (compare "that is the upright religion" [12:40]). The Enlightening Commentary adds that the Qurʾān, containing "the right ordinances of the past," gathers what the former scriptures held.

A reading kept apart. Al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) records, on the authority of Imam al-Bāqir through Sharaf al-Dīn al-Najafī, a wholly esoteric taʾwīl: "the Book" is the divine signs and "the People of the Book" the Shīʿa, the "polytheists" the Murjiʾa, and the "purified scriptures" a pointer to the Imams as the holders of authority after the Prophet. This is preserved here as a transmitted interpretive narration, flagged for scholarly review, distinct from the plain sense the other five sources expound.