Sūrah 30 · Āyāt 11–20

Synthesis — Sūrat al-Rūm 11–20 (Origination, the Two Parties, and the First Sign)

The passage states the engine of the whole argument: "God originates the creation, then repeats it, then to Him you are returned" (11). It then pictures Judgment Day — the guilty despairing, their "partners" failing them as intercessors (12–13); humanity split into two parties, the believers "delighted in a meadow," the deniers "arraigned in the punishment" (14–16); a command to glorify and praise God across the day's turning-points (17–18); the cycle of life-from-death in nature as a token of resurrection (19); and the first of the "signs," the creation of humankind from dust (20).

Convergence — resurrection by repetition. All sources read v.11 as God's power to re-create after death, the rational hinge of the maʿād. [tabatabai_al_mizan] makes it the "summed result" of the preceding proof; [tusi_al_tibyan] spells out the sequence (origination from nothing → death → second creation → return for requital). On v.12 all agree iblās is the guilty's despair; [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] add the lexical nuance of "perplexity when the proof becomes binding," each citing the same verse of al-ʿAjjāj. On v.13 all converge that the idols worshipped as intercessors will fail, and the polytheists will "disown their partners" — a point [qummi] states tersely and [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] attributes to al-Jubbāʾī and Abū Muslim. On v.14 the "separation" is glossed identically by [qummi] ("to the Garden and the Fire") and expanded by [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] into the People of the Right and Left, with al-Ḥasan's image of the worldly-gathered being split forever.

Divergence — the meadow's "delight." On yuḥbarūn (16) the sources spread out: [qummi] and Ibn ʿAbbās (via [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan]) gloss it simply "honored"; but [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] preserve a second tradition — joy expressed as listening/song — and al-Ṭabarsī uniquely banks a cluster of four ḥadīths on the music of Paradise (the singing houris "not by Satan's pipe but by the glorification of God," the river-bank maidens, the silver-belled trees stirred by a wind from beneath the Throne, and God's inspiring a tree to sing His praise to the devout). This homiletic expansion is absent from the austere [tabatabai_al_mizan] and the brief [qummi].

The glorification verses (17–18). All five present commentaries note the "statement intending a command," and [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan], [tusi_al_tibyan], and [qummi] all carry the reading that the four time-markers encode the five daily prayers (evening = maghrib + ʿishāʾ, morning = fajr, ʿashiyyan = ʿaṣr, noon = ẓuhr), attributed to Ibn ʿAbbās and Mujāhid — al-Ṭabarsī calling it "best." Here [tabatabai_al_mizan] sharply dissents (in his unit reaching back over these verses): he argues the tasbīḥ and taḥmīd are God's own act of transcendence-and-praise, in their absolute sense, not the prescribed prayers — and that "to Him is praise in the heavens and the earth" is parenthetical, the times being for glorification and the places for praise. This is the passage's clearest exegetical fault-line.

Nature as proof, against the materialists. On v.19 [bahrani_al_burhan] and [qummi] read "He revives the earth after its death" as a deliberate radd (refutation) of the Dahriyya (materialist eternalists) — and the later "call from the earth" as a refutation of the zanādiqa; [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] instead foreground the twin readings of "living from dead" (man from sperm-drop / believer from disbeliever). al-Ṭūsī alone closes with a methodological claim: these verses validate rational reasoning (qiyās ʿaqlī) against those who deem reasoning void — while explicitly denying that they support juristic analogy (qiyās sharʿī) [tusi_al_tibyan].

The signs begin (20). All read v.20 as the first "sign," the creation of humankind from dust — [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] via Adam as "your origin." [tabatabai_al_mizan] opens his "signs" unit (20–26) here with his governing thesis: the signs display the interpenetration of creation and management, so that Lordship and worship belong to the Creator alone — refuting the idolater's split of creation (God's) from management (the idols').

Coverage note: al-Mīzān treats vv.20–26 as one "signs" unit, so its commentary on the spouses, the diversity of tongues and colors, sleep, and lightning (vv.21–25) appears here though those verses fall in the next passage; al-Burhān's block likewise runs to v.21.