Sūrah 73 · Āyāt 15–19

Verses 15–19 — the Messenger‑witness, Pharaoh's lesson, and the Day that greys the young

The threat now acquires a historical mirror. Verse 15 declares: "Indeed We have sent to you a Messenger, a witness over you, just as We sent a Messenger to Pharaoh." The Enlightening Commentary — the only one of the present sources to comment at length on these two verses — reads the Messenger's being a "witness (shāhid)" as supervisory: the Prophet "witnesses the deeds of his community in this world and bears witness to them on the Day of Resurrection," a function it extends, in the Imāmī frame, to the Infallibles. The Pharaoh parallel (vv.15–16) is a warning by analogy: Pharaoh "disobeyed the Messenger, so We seized him with a ruinous seizing," and "neither his army nor his realm nor his power could repel the punishment." The argument turns on the Meccans a fortiori — "you are far inferior to them in means and number; how could you be deceived by your meagre means?" The term wabīl (a "ruinous seizing"), it notes, originally means a "heavy downpour," hence any severe, crushing thing.

Verse 17 sharpens the eschatology: "So how will you guard yourselves, if you disbelieve, against a Day that turns the children grey‑haired (yajʿalu al‑wildāna shīban)?" On this image al‑Qummī and al‑Burhān again coincide — al‑Burhān in fact transmits al‑Qummī's words — offering two complementary readings. First a paraphrase of the rhetorical question: "how, if you disbelieve, will you guard yourselves against that Day?"; then ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm's striking gloss that "the children turn grey from terror, when they hear the Cry (al‑ṣayḥa)." The Enlightening Commentary records the same two possibilities the classical tradition preserves — that the Day's horror literally ages the newborn, or that the Day is so long the children grow old within it — and notes the worldly analogue that "some terrors of this world instantly turn people grey."

Verse 18 — "the heaven splitting apart thereby; His promise is ever fulfilled" — is read by the Enlightening Commentary as a measure of the Day's magnitude: if the heavens with all their immensity cannot withstand it, how shall frail man? It glosses infiṭār as a cleaving asunder. Verse 19 then closes the warning on a note of human freedom: "Indeed this is a reminder (tadhkira); so whoever wills, let him take a way to his Lord." The Enlightening Commentary observes that treading the path "nonchalantly is no merit — the merit is that man choose it willingly," and canvasses the classical disagreement over the referent of "this": the foregoing admonitions, the sūra or the whole Qurʾān, or specifically the command to the night prayer — in which case "the way (sabīl) to the Lord" is itself the night vigil generalized now to the whole community.

(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. The present Arabic sources comment chiefly on v.17; vv.15–16 and 18–19 here rest on the Enlightening Commentary*.)*