Sūrah 77 · Āyāt 16–28

al-Mursalat 16–28 — Ruined nations, the making of man, the sheltering earth

Three proofs now answer the deniers. First, history: Did We not destroy the former peoples, then make the later follow them? Thus do We deal with the guilty (16–18). Second, their own origin: created from a base fluid, lodged in a secure abode to a known measure, then determined by the best of Determiners (20–23). Third, the earth as kifat — a receptacle for living and dead — anchored by mountains and watered with sweet water (25–27). Each cluster closes with the refrain.

al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi identify the ‘former’ as the peoples of Noah, ʿAd and Thamud, the ‘later’ as those of Lot, Abraham and Pharaoh, and note al-Mubarrad’s point that nutbiʿuhum is future (‘We shall make them follow’); al-Tabarsi adds that ‘thus We deal with the guilty’ was fulfilled upon the deniers of Mecca, slain at Badr. On the embryology both read mahin as the weak sperm-drop, the secure abode as the womb, the known measure as gestation, finding in man’s perfection from so base an origin the clearest proof of a wise Maker. On kifat they converge on ‘that which gathers’: the earth’s surface for the living, its belly for the dead — al-Tabarsi citing al-Shaʿbi at a funeral and al-Tusi listing Ibn ʿAbbas’s four sweet rivers (Jayhan, Sayhan, Euphrates, Nile). al-Tabatabaʼi ties all three clusters to a single thread: each is a proof of the oneness of Lordship and, through the logic of taklif and requital, of the Day of Decision. al-Qummi gives the bare glosses (base fluid = stinking; measure = the term’s end; kifat = the dwellings).

The distinctively Imami material clusters here in al-Bahrani. From the same served block he carries a report raised to al-Rida reading ‘the former’ and ‘the later’ as the first caliphs (by rank) and ‘the guilty’ as the Banu Umayya, and an al-Kafi report from al-Kazim glossing ‘Woe to the deniers’ as ‘Woe — O Muhammad — to the deniers of the walaya of ʿAli’, with ‘the former’ = those who belied the messengers regarding obedience to the executors, and ‘the Godwary’ (v.41) = ‘we and our Shiʿa’. These are rendered strictly as attributed and flagged for human review; notably al-Tabatabaʼi, citing the same al-Kafi report, expressly calls it jary (application), not tafsir. The mainstream lexical and cosmological readings of the passage are shared across all four non-partisan sources, and the kifat narration of Amir al-Muʾminin at the Kufa graves is common to al-Qummi, al-Bahrani, al-Tabarsi and al-Mizan alike.