Sūrah 72 · Āyāt 11–19

Verses 11–19 — the jinn's moral diversity, the test of the "way," and worship owed to God alone. Having recounted what they heard, the jinn now describe themselves — "among us are the righteous and among us are below that; we were of divergent ways" — and then the sūra turns from their report to God's own address: keeping to "the way" brings abundant water and a test, turning from His remembrance brings a mounting punishment, and "the mosques are for God, so call upon none besides Him."

What the passage says. The jinn confess their plurality (believers and deviators, "sects" of every kind), their certainty that none escapes God, and their immediate faith on hearing "the guidance," since "whoever believes in his Lord fears neither loss nor oppression." They sort themselves into muslimūn (who "sought rectitude") and qāsiṭūn (deviators who are "firewood for Hell"). Then come three divine declarations: had they kept to the way, abundant water would flow "to test them"; whoever turns from God's remembrance is driven to a harsh punishment; and the places/acts of prostration belong to God alone.

How the present sources read it. On the jinn's diversity, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read "divergent ways" as differing creeds and schools, al-Ṭabarsī preserving al-Suddī's striking remark that "the jinn are like you — among them Qadariyya, Murjiʾa, Rāfiḍa and Shīʿa," while al-Mīzān carefully argues that "the righteous" here are the righteous by natural disposition, since their faith is mentioned only afterward. All four mainstream-leaning treatments share a tight lexicon — ṣāliḥ versus muṣliḥ, qāsiṭ (deviator) versus muqsiṭ (the just), bakhs and rahaq, ghadaq (abundant) and ṣaʿad (mounting).

The verse "had they kept to the way, We would give them abundant water" is the passage's great divider. al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān take "the way" as the way of faith/Islam and "abundant water" as a figure for ample provision (with al-Mīzān citing Q 7:96 and al-Ṭabarsī ʿUmar's adage that "where there is water there is wealth, and where there is wealth there is trial"). But al-Qummī and al-Burhān carry it wholly onto walāya: "the Way is the walāya of ʿAlī," "abundant water" is the sweet Euphrates of the primordial covenant of the shadows or "abundant knowledge to learn from the Imams," and "to test them therein" is read as "the killing of al-Ḥusayn." Even al-Ṭabarsī records the Ahl al-Bayt gloss (Abū Baṣīr, Burayd) of "abundant water" as knowledge from the Imams. Decisively, al-Mīzān supplies the controlling principle: such walāya readings are jary (the verse's living application), and "are not tafsīr at all" — a frame within which the Imāmī material can be received without collapsing the plain sense.

On "the mosques are for God" (v. 18), the sources converge remarkably: alongside the readings "the Kaʿba / the whole earth / the prayers," all of al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī, al-Qummī, al-Burhān and al-Mīzān record — and al-Mīzān prefers — the reading of Imam al-Jawād that the masājid are the seven bodily limbs of prostration; al-Burhān anchors this in the celebrated prayer-instruction ḥadīth of Ḥammād b. ʿĪsā, where al-Ṣādiq names exactly those seven as the obligatory points "God mentioned in His Book." Finally, on "when the servant of God stood" (v. 19), the sources offer the same three candidates for the crowding throng — the jinn pressing to hear, the Companions ranked behind him, or (al-Mīzān's preference, fitting what follows) the mocking polytheists — before the Prophet is told to answer, "I only call upon my Lord."