Sūrah 75 · Āyāt 16–19

Verses 16–19 — "Move not your tongue": an etiquette of revelation

Four verses interrupt the scene of Judgment to address the Prophet directly: "Move not your tongue with it to hasten it; indeed upon Us is its gathering and its recitation; and when We have recited it, follow its recitation; then upon Us is its exposition." The mainstream of the present sources reads these as a parenthesis about the manner of revelation itself. The Enlightening Commentary states the occasion plainly: the Prophet, eager and afraid of forgetting, would rush to repeat the words as they came; he is told to let the revelation complete, "since their preservation is upon Him." Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) supplies the two classic reports — from Ibn ʿAbbās, that he hastened "out of love for it and eagerness to seize it," and from Saʿīd b. Jubayr, that "he would move his tongue and lips before Gabriel finished reciting" — and aligns the verse with 20:114, "Hasten not with the Qurʾān before its revelation to you is completed."

al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī) gives this reading its fullest defence. The four verses, framed by the descriptions of the Day on either side, are "parenthetical, containing a divine etiquette (adab)," and he draws the homely analogy of a listener who keeps completing the speaker's sentences a word ahead, until the speaker breaks off: "Hasten not with my speech; listen, that you grasp what I say." On "upon Us is its gathering and its recitation," he takes qurʾān as a verbal noun ("recitation"): God undertakes to gather what He reveals and to recite it, "so that nothing of it escapes." Ṭabāṭabāʾī notes that al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) and Majmaʿ al-Bayān both also record a minority view, al-Balkhī's, that the verses refer not to the Qurʾān at all but to the servants' reading of their record-books on the Day of Judgment — a rebuke "when haste will not avail" — and both he and they set it aside as ill-suited to the parallel with 20:114. al-Mīzān adds a striking corollary: this very prohibition of hastening supports the reports "that the Qurʾān had a single [whole] descent upon the Prophet besides its gradual descent."

It is on the last clauses that the present Imāmī sources part company with the others. Where Majmaʿ al-Bayān, al-Tibyān and al-Mīzān gloss "then upon Us is its exposition (bayānahu)" as God's undertaking to make the meaning clear — its interpretation, or its sending-down "as an Arabic Qurʾān containing clarification for the people" (al-Zajjāj, in Ṭabarsī) — Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) preserve a pointed reading from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm: "Upon Us is its gathering and its recitation" means "upon the Family of Muḥammad is the gathering of the Qurʾān and its recitation," and "upon Us is its exposition" is "its interpretation (tafsīr)." al-Burhān embeds this in the larger Imāmī claim, raised by al-Ṭabarsī's chain to Ibn Masʿūd, that "the Commander of the Faithful has three hundred names in the Qurʾān," with this verse among those cited. Read together, the sources hold the plain etiquette of revelation and the Imāmī thesis — that the Qurʾān's authoritative collection and exposition rest with the Prophet's House — within a single frame.

It is worth noting that even the four verses' placement is read theologically: Majmaʿ al-Bayān explains the connection to what precedes by saying that, the Day and its threat having been described, God turns to His Prophet so that the message may "settle in the hearts" of a people "made heedless by their love of the fleeting" — the very vice the next verses expose.