Sūrah 32 · Āyāt 16–20

al-Sajda 16–20 — The night-vigil keepers, the hidden reward, and the two unequal parties

What the passage says. The believers of v. 15 are now defined by their deeds: “their sides forsake their beds, to call upon their Lord in fear and hope, and they spend out of what We have provided them” (v. 16); for them God has hidden a reward beyond knowing — “no soul knows what comfort of eyes has been kept hidden for them, as a reward for what they used to do” (v. 17). Then the great antithesis: “Is one who is a believer like one who is a transgressor? They are not equal” (v. 18) — the believers receive “the gardens of refuge as hospitality” (v. 19), while the transgressors’ “refuge is the Fire; whenever they seek to leave it they are turned back into it,” and are told, “taste the punishment of the Fire which you used to deny” (v. 20).

How the present sources read it. On v. 16, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī, al-Mīzān, al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī converge that “their sides forsake their beds” means rising from sleep for the night prayer (tahajjud) — the reading narrated from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq, and from al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid and ʿAṭāʾ. al-Mīzān stresses the balance of “fear and hope” as the etiquette of servanthood (neither despair nor false security). The hadith-tafsīrs anchor this in the Prophet’s teaching to Muʿādh b. Jabal (“fasting is a shield, charity extinguishes sin, and a man’s standing in the depth of the night…”), reported across al-Ṭabarsī, al-Baḥrānī and al-Mīzān; al-Baḥrānī adds al-Bāqir’s gloss that the verse was revealed about “the Commander of the Faithful and his Shīʿa,” who sleep early then rise in the last third of the night.

On v. 17, all sources cite the tradition — paralleled in al-Bukhārī and Muslim — that God has prepared “what no eye has seen, no ear has heard, and what has not occurred to any human heart.” al-Ṭabarsī gives three reasons for the concealment (the reward’s greatness, its infinity, and its correspondence to the hidden night prayer), citing al-Ṣādiq that the night prayer alone has its reward left unstated “on account of its great worth.” al-Qummī, al-Baḥrānī and al-Mīzān attach the long Friday tradition — the believer robed and summoned, the Lord’s self-disclosure, the seventyfold increase (“and with Us is yet more”), the wind-played tree recompensing those who shunned forbidden song, and the garden “created by God’s hand” that no eye has seen — together with al-Baḥrānī’s Ascent-vision of the river whiter than milk and the glorifying trees, in which the Prophet names ʿAlī “their imam.” al-Mīzān notes the grammatical point that “comfort of eyes” (not “their eyes”) and the indefinite “a soul” in negation make the reward gladden every eye and exceed every soul’s conception.

On vv. 18–20, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān read the rhetorical question as emphatic denial of any parity between believer and transgressor (al-Mīzān defining fisq as “stepping outside the garb of servanthood”), and take “taste the Fire you denied” to show the “transgressor” here is the denier of the Return. On the occasion of revelation, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī, al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī report — al-Baḥrānī through numerous chains, including Sunni ones (via al-Wāḥidī and al-Bayhaqī) — that the verses were revealed concerning ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (the believer) and al-Walīd b. ʿUqba (the transgressor) after their dispute, with al-Baḥrānī adding al-Ḥasan’s rebuke of al-Walīd before Muʿāwiya and Ḥassān b. Thābit’s verses; al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī also give al-Qummī’s vivid picture of hell, into which the damned plunge “a distance of seventy years.” These narrations are recorded here faithfully as the sources transmit them. The published Enlightening Commentary frames the section around the incommensurable destinies of the God-fearing vigil-keeper and the heedless transgressor.