Synthesis: Sūrat al-Anbiyāʾ 11–29

Triangulating Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan], al-Qummī [qummi], al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) [tusi_al_tibyan], al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) [bahrani_al_burhan], and Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) [tabatabai_al_mizan] — all five present for this passage.

Human-review flags: al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] is flagged needs_human_review. Its coverage of 11–29 is split across two coarse units (1–15 and 16–33); only the in-passage spans were used, and its four long philosophical excursuses (the meaning of lahw; the wisdom of the divine act; the two objections to the tamānuʿ proof; "what is before and behind them") were faithfully condensed, not reproduced. The original_ar is the actual in-passage Arabic worked from; nothing was added.

What the passage says. Destroyed wrongdoing towns become an object lesson — fleeing the punishment, mockingly told to "return to your luxuries… that you may be questioned," reduced to a mown, stilled field (11–15). The discourse then pivots to purpose: the heavens and earth were not made "for play" (16–17); God hurls truth at falsehood and it vanishes (18); those near Him never disdain worship (19–20). Then a cascade of monotheistic proofs — do earthly gods raise the dead? (21); had there been gods besides God "they would surely have fallen apart" (22); He is not questioned, they are (23); "produce your evidence" (24); every messenger came with lā ilāha illā anā (25); the angels are honoured servants, not offspring (26–28); a self-styled god is requited with hell (29).

How the present sources read it. On 11–15 the divergence is immediate. Ṭabarsī [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and Ṭūsī [tusi_al_tibyan] carry the lexical-historical reading — a destroyed town (Nebuchadnezzar's slaughter; a Yemeni town that killed its prophet Ḥanẓala), "that you may be questioned" read as mockery, an appeal to believe, or interrogation of deeds. But al-Qummī [qummi] and al-Baḥrānī [bahrani_al_burhan] give a wholly eschatological taʾwīl: the fleeing people are the Umayyads fleeing al-Qāʾim to the Romans, the "questioning" over hoarded treasures — al-Qummī flagging it "past in wording, future in meaning," al-Baḥrānī stacking five chains from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq. Yet al-Baḥrānī also preserves the plain reading via Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn's Friday sermon — the same one al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] cites from Rawḍat al-Kāfī — as universal admonition: "by 'the town' He meant only its people."

On 16–18 they converge at different altitudes. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī gloss laʿb/lahw lexically (a wife, a child — refuting the consort-and-son and angel-daughters claims), Ṭūsī adding that play is impossible for the Eternal, "knowing by His essence, free of need." Al-Mīzān builds the architecture: 16–17 is a demonstration of the Return — creation is no aimless play, since self-diversion presupposes a need lifted while His act is external to Him; hence an aim, the maʿād, entailing prophethood. On 18 its metaphysics of ḥaqq (firmly-existent) versus bāṭil (a mirage perishing on contact) exceeds the others' "proofs nullify doubts," grounded narrationally by al-Baḥrānī (al-Ṣādiq: "no falsehood stands against truth but truth overcomes it").

The centrepiece is 21:22, the burhān al-tamānuʿ, where the three discursive sources align. Ṭabarsī names it "the proof of mutual prevention upon which the theologians built divine oneness," with the three-horned dilemma: two eternals, each able to will the other's opposite, yield the conjunction of opposites, the negation of both wills, or the negation of one's omnipotence. Ṭūsī gives the identical argument ("expounded in the books of uṣūl"), adding al-Rummānī's point that illā in illā Allāh is a description, not an exception. Al-Mīzān sharpens it to a true demonstrative proof (not the merely "persuasive" version some exegetes accepted): disparate gods entail disparate governance, yet the cosmic order is one. A shared narration corroborates all — Hishām b. al-Ḥakam ← al-Ṣādiq: the proof is "the continuity of governance and the completeness of the creative act." Al-Qummī compresses it to "a refutation of the Dualists."

On 23–29 they diverge again. For 23's non-questionability, Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī invoke His wisdom; al-Mīzān prefers His ownership (linking "Lord of the Throne"). On 24, al-Baḥrānī carries the Imāmī gloss that "the precept of those with me" is ʿAlī (al-Kāẓim), beside al-Ṣādiq's "what is to come… what has been," which Ṭabarsī also reports. On 26 al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī extend the rejected "offspring" to "what they said about the Imāms," reading 29 as "whoever claims to be an Imām while he is not." On 28's intercession all gather — strictly as attribution — to al-Riḍā: "they intercede only for one whose religion God has approved." The Enlightening Commentary [enlightening_commentary] frames the passage pastorally, calling 21:22 "a mutual hindering proof" and citing the same Hishām ḥadīth.

Sources present: tabarsi_majma_al_bayan, qummi, tusi_al_tibyan, bahrani_al_burhan, tabatabai_al_mizan, enlightening_commentary; silent: none.