Sūrah 90 · Āyāt 11–16

al-Balad 90:11–16 — "the steep ascent" he has failed to climb, and the costly deeds that are its rungs. The passage hinges on fa-lā iqtaḥama al-ʿaqaba, and the present sources first settle its grammar. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) lays out three readings: that lā means simple negation — "this man did not scale the ascent" (as in fa-lā ṣaddaqa wa-lā ṣallā, 75:31); that it is an imprecation; or that it means "why has he not scaled it?" — the last attributed to Ibn Zayd, al-Jubbāʾī and Abū Muslim and "deemed weak by al-Murtaḍā." al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) prefers the negation, explaining that lā is not repeated because the following "then he was of those who believed" shows "he neither scaled [the ascent] nor believed"; he also records the variant readings fakka raqabatan (a past verb) versus fakku raqabatin (a construct).

What is "the ascent"? al-Ṭabarsī gathers three senses: a parable "for the struggle against the self, caprice and Satan in deeds of good," like "the burden of climbing an arduous mountain pass"; a literal steep pass in the Fire; or the Bridge (al-ṣirāṭ) laid over Hell. al-Ṭūsī foregrounds the moral reading through al-Ḥasan — "the ascent — by God, it is severe — is a person's striving against his own self, his caprice, his enemy and Satan" — adding the lexical point that iqtiḥām is "entering upon hardship" and the ʿaqaba "the path climbed with difficulty," and Qatāda's "scale it by obeying God." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) makes the metaphor precise: scaling the ascent "is an allusion to the kind of spending that is burdensome to the one who spends," so that the ʿaqaba may be read as "the very act of freeing" itself.

The Imami reading. Two sources lift the ascent to taʾwīl. Tafsīr al-Qummī states it flatly: "the ascent is the Imams; whoever ascends it has freed his neck from the Fire" — and adds the lexical aside that mā adrāka mā throughout the Qurʾān means "what will inform you." al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) supplies the narrational scaffolding, citing a chain through al-Kulaynī (Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb… Yūnus, raised to Imam al-Ṣādiq, ʿa) on fa-lā iqtaḥama al-ʿaqaba… fakku raqaba, with further chains to al-Ṣādiq and al-Bāqir (ʿalayhimā al-salām) on the ascent, the freeing of the slave and the feeding.

The deeds named. All sources read verses 13–16 as the ascent's content. On fakku raqaba, al-Ṭabarsī preserves the Prophetic distinction that "freeing a soul is to free it singly, while fakk al-raqaba is to assist in its price," and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī glosses it as "manumitting and liberating." For the feeding, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī agree masghaba is famine; al-Ṭabarsī reads yatīman dhā maqraba as an "urging to give precedence to needy kin," and miskīnan dhā matraba as one "who clings to the dust from the severity of his poverty" — al-Ṭūsī deriving matraba from tariba, "when he became poor." The image is unanimous: the road to salvation runs uphill, through the hard expenditure of freeing the enslaved and feeding the hungry.

The Enlightening Commentary (Imani) reads the "uphill road" as "a collection of good deeds [that] pivots on helping people, especially the poor." It records the same spread of senses as the classical sources — ʿaqaba as the inner struggle against "low desire" ("the Inner Warfare"), and as "an arduous uphill road in the Hereafter," citing the Prophet's saying, "There is an arduous uphill road in front of you; those whose load is heavy cannot pass it. I try to lighten your load." It glosses iqtaḥama (from iqtiḥām) as undertaking "a task which is frightful," reinforcing the surah's thesis that "man [was] created to be in distress," and supplies the lexical notes on masghaba ("famine"), maqraba (nearness of kin) and matraba (the poor one "intimately acquainted with his mother Earth"). It seals the point with ʿAlī's (as) word: "Paradise is surrounded by unpleasantness while Hell is surrounded by desires."