Sūrah 73 · Āyāt 11–14

Verses 11–14 — "Leave Me with the deniers": the turn to divine threat

After ten verses addressed to the Prophet's inner discipline, verse 11 pivots sharply: "Leave Me with the deniers, the possessors of ease (ūlī al‑naʿma), and give them a little respite." The Enlightening Commentary reads this as God telling the Prophet not to take on the affluent rejecters himself but to "leave their affair to Me," so that a brief respite lets them "reveal their nature and carry the burden of further sins." It dwells on the phrase ūlī al‑naʿma — "possessors of bounties" — observing from the careers of the prophets that "the affluent are the foremost enemies of the faith," though gratitude for bounty ought to make them the first to answer the call. al‑Burhān, citing Ibn Shahrāshūb from Abū Jaʿfar (al‑Bāqir), threads the rejection of the message to the rejection of ʿAlī's walāya — the distinctively Imāmī register of "the deniers."

Verses 12–13 name what waits with God: fetters (ankāl), a blazing Fire, food that chokes, and a painful punishment. The Enlightening Commentary explains ankāl as "heavy chains" — the root carries the sense of "shackles that bind and so weaken" — set in pointed contrast to the unrestrained worldly indulgence of "the affluent but disobedient." On the "food that chokes," al‑Qummī's tradition (via ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm, in al‑Burhān) is starkly concrete: "he is not able to swallow it down." The Enlightening Commentary matches it to the Qurʾān's other images of infernal food — the "poisonous thorny plant" and the tree of Zaqqūm — and recalls the report that a man (and, in another narration, the Prophet himself) cried out and lost consciousness on reciting this verse.

Verse 14 fixes the timing of that punishment: "the day the earth and the mountains quake, and the mountains become a heap of pouring sand (kathīban mahīlan)." Here all three present sources converge. al‑Qummī and al‑Burhān give the same vivid gloss — kathīban mahīlan is "like sand that slides down" — and al‑Burhān adds that "the earth and the mountains quake (tarjuf)" means "they move and cause terror." The Enlightening Commentary renders mahīl as something "never fixed and permanent," the mountains "disintegrating into soft sand in which the feet sink." An external cross‑check confirms the philology: kathīban mahīlan denotes a heap of sand poured out and flowing away — an image of the mountains' utter dissolution on the Day of Judgment.

(al‑Ṭabarsī's Majmaʿ al‑Bayān*, al‑Ṭūsī's* al‑Tibyān and al‑Ṭabāṭabāʾī's al‑Mīzān could not be retrieved for this surah and are recorded as silent — not paraphrased from memory.)