Sūrah 43 · Āyāt 15–25

Al-Zukhruf 15–25 — Daughters for God, and the Prison of Imitation

What the passage says. The passage exposes two roots of the idolaters’ error. First, they “assigned Him a portion of His servants” (v. 15), claiming the angels are God’s daughters — even as the birth of a daughter darkens their own faces with suppressed rage (vv. 16–17), and even as they assign to God one “reared amid ornaments and inconspicuous in dispute” (v. 18). They made the angels female without having witnessed their creation, so “their testimony shall be written down and they shall be questioned” (v. 19). Second, when they plead “Had the All-Merciful willed, we would not have worshipped them” (v. 20) and “We found our fathers upon a creed” (vv. 21–23), the Qurʾān strips both defenses: they have neither a revealed Book nor anything but blind imitation, the same plea by which the affluent of every doomed town rejected their warners (vv. 24–25).

How the present sources read it. The four Arabic sources converge tightly on the argument’s logic and diverge only in emphasis. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī work the philology (the variants yunashshaʾu / yanshaʾu, ʿibād / ʿinda al-Raḥmān, a-ushhidū / a-shahidū) and press the same reductio: whoever’s face darkens at a daughter is least entitled to ascribe daughters to God; and imitation (taqlīd) is “ugly to the intellect,” since if valid the truth would lie in a thing and its opposite. Both read v. 18’s “one reared amid ornaments” as the woman weak in argument (though al-Ṭūsī notes Abū Zayd’s minority reading of the idols). Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) adds the metaphysical point that “part” (juzʾ) means a child, and a child requires composition, which is impossible for the One who is “one in every respect”; his major contribution is the theological reading of v. 20 — the idolaters’ “Had God willed” is a fallacy conflating the creative will (irāda takwīniyya) with the legislative will (irāda tashrīʿiyya): God did not creatively compel their abstention (leaving them free), yet legislatively willed their tawḥīd — and on this basis al-Mīzān explicitly refutes the predestinarian (Mujbira) use of the verse, a refutation al-Ṭūsī voices as well.

The two Imāmī narrative sources supply distinctive material. Al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) both carry an unusual gloss on v. 18, placing “one reared amid ornaments” in Pharaoh’s mouth about Moses, whom God displayed to Pharaoh upon “moist gold.” On v. 19’s “their testimony shall be written,” al-Burhān gathers a cluster of pointedly Imāmī narrations — the Cave-and-Raqīm test in which only ʿAlī is answered as “a prophet or a prophet’s legatee,” the sealed pact (ṣaḥīfa) in the Kaʿba, and al-Kāẓim’s claim that “the testimony is ours… we are God’s witnesses over His creation.” These are rendered exactly as al-Burhān attributes them (segment type: ḥadīth), not as the plain sense of the verse, which concerns the angels’ alleged femininity. Al-Qummī then carries the passage into v. 26, quoting Abraham’s disavowal — “He will guide me,” i.e., “make it clear to me and keep me firm.”

The published English. An Enlightening Commentary treats the daughters-claim as the pagan Arabs’ self-contradiction and reads the “Had God willed” plea as a confusion of Divine permission with Divine approval, warning against the “imitation of forefathers” (taqlīd) as a substitute for reasoned faith — closely tracking al-Mīzān’s will-distinction in plainer terms. All six sources are present for this passage; none was silent.