Sūrah 87 · Āyāt 14–19

al-Aʿlā 87:14–19 — the felicity of self-purification, the lure of the world, and the witness of the ancient scrolls. The Enlightening Commentary notes that the sūra's close turns from the Prophet to "the humble believers and the wretched rejecters," and that al-Ṭabaṭabāʾī himself held the closing verses to be Medinan — a reading the sources tie to the ritual gloss of vv14–15.

"Felicitous is he who purifies himself… and prayed." Two layers run through every source. The first is moral-spiritual: al-Ṭabarsī gives tazakkā as purifying oneself of associationism (saying "there is no god but God") or becoming pure "through righteous deeds and scrupulousness"; al-Mīzān reads it as purification "of the filths of worldly attachments that turn one from the Hereafter" — proven, he argues, by the very next verse's rebuke of preferring the world — so that "even the ablution of prayer represents purifying from what the faces, hands and feet have earned." The second layer is ritual and, in these Shīʿī authorities, dominant: al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī (citing Ibn Masʿūd), Tafsīr al-Qummī, al-Burhān and al-Mīzān all transmit, from the Imāms of the People of the House and corroborated through Sunnī chains, that tazakkā is the alms of fast-breaking (zakāt al-fiṭr) "brought out before the festival prayer" and that dhakara isma rabbihi fa-ṣallā is the festival prayer (ṣalāt al-fiṭr wa-l-aḍḥā). al-Ṭabarsī candidly raises the objection — how, when the sūra is Meccan and there was then no ʿīd prayer or fiṭra? — and answers that "its beginning came down at Mecca and it was concluded at Medina," exactly the position al-Mīzān adopts ("the sūra's opening is Meccan and its close Medinan"). al-Burhān preserves two sharpening narrations: al-Riḍā's (ʿa) correction that "mentioning the Name of his Lord" means blessing Muḥammad and his Family at each remembrance, and al-Ṣādiq's (ʿa) pairing of the fiṭra-alms with the fast as the blessing on the Prophet is to the prayer.

"Nay, you prefer the life of this world." al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read the iḍrāb as an address (to the disbelievers, or generally) reproaching the choice of the immediate over the deferred — al-Ṭabarsī citing Ibn Masʿūd's lament that "this world was made green for us… so we took the immediate and left the deferred." al-Mīzān calls it a turn "to what human nature calls one to of complete attachment to the world," and explains wa-l-ākhiratu khayrun wa-abqā as a comparative weighing in which it suffices that the Hereafter be better and more lasting relative to this world. al-Burhān alone supplies the Imāmī taʾwīl — al-Mufaḍḍal's narration glossing "the life of this world" as the rival authority and "the Hereafter" as the wilāya of the Commander of the Faithful — recorded strictly as an attributed inner reading, not the verse's plain sense.

"The former scrolls — the scrolls of Abraham and Moses." al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān agree the demonstrative "this" points back to the four preceding verses (or, a minority view, to "the Hereafter is better"), now affirmed as already written in the pre-Qurʾānic Books; al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī draw the doctrinal corollary that "a Book was indeed sent down upon Abraham," against those (al-Ṭūsī names the Christians) who denied his prophethood. al-Burhān and al-Mīzān anchor the identity of the scrolls in the long Abū Dharr ḥadīth — the census of prophets (124,000) and messengers (313), the 104 Books, and the contents of the scrolls of Abraham ("all parables": the reproach of the deluded king, the four daily hours of the intelligent man) and of Moses ("all admonitions": "I marvel at one certain of death who yet rejoices") — closing with the Prophet's instruction to Abū Dharr to recite these very verses as what survives of those scrolls. al-Burhān further reports (Abū Baṣīr from al-Ṣādiq) that "with us are the scrolls… they are the Tablets," which al-Mīzān reads as the Torah. Tafsīr al-Qummī seals the passage with al-Aṣbagh's narration from the Commander of the Faithful: that sabbiḥ isma rabbika al-aʿlā was inscribed on a leg of the Throne, with the double testimony and the legateeship of ʿAlī, two thousand years before creation — again, an attributed report, not a lexical gloss.