Sūrah 68 · Āyāt 17–33

al-Qalam 68:17–33 — The owners of the garden: a parable of presumption and denied charity

Triangulating Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān), al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) — Arabic, my translation — with the narration-collections al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) and Tafsīr al-Qummī, and the published Enlightening Commentary.

After vindicating the Prophet, the sūra turns to a warning by parable: "Indeed We tried them as We tried the owners of the garden, when they swore they would harvest it in the morning and made no exception." A night-visitation from God reduced the lush garden to a blackened waste; the brothers, who had crept out resolved to cut the fruit and shut out the poor, found it ruined, fell to mutual blame, and turned in hope to their Lord — sealed with "such is the punishment, and the punishment of the Hereafter is greater, did they but know."

Whom the parable warns, and where. All sources read the "them" of v. 17 as the Meccan deniers, tried — like the garden owners — for their presumption. Al-Mīzān sets out both framings: the parable as a warning that the deniers' punishment is "poised over them while they are heedless," and the alternative occasion that the verses concern the famine that struck Mecca after the Prophet's prayer "O God, tighten Your grip on Muḍar, make it years like the years of Joseph" — a tradition al-Ṭūsī gives as the verse's setting and which al-Burhān, al-Qummī and al-Mīzān carry from al-Bāqir (the garden being in Yemen, "al-Riḍwān, nine miles from Ṣanʿāʾ"). Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī, citing Saʿīd b. Jubayr, instead place it at "Ṣirwān, twelve miles from Ṣanʿāʾ." The sources also differ on the family: the long Ibn ʿAbbās narration shared by al-Qummī, al-Burhān and al-Mīzān makes them five sons of a pious father who always gave the poor their due; al-Ṭūsī reports them as ten sons of a man of the Children of Israel, and al-Mīzān notes the Israelite version among the reports.

The sin and its lexicon. The pivot is wa-lā yastathnūn — they "made no exception," i.e. omitted "if God wills." Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī gloss this as the missing in shāʾ Allāh; al-Mīzān draws out a tawḥīd reading carried through the whole parable: by relying on themselves and the means and excepting nothing, they "excised God from causation," which is a kind of shirk — hence the surviving brother's rebuke lawlā tusabbiḥūn means "why do you not declare God free of partners?" Ṭabarsī gives the same sense (the exception as reliance and acknowledgment of God's will) alongside "magnify God" and "pay the poor's due"; al-Burhān and al-Qummī gloss it plainly as "why do you not seek forgiveness (tastaghfirūn)?" The much-discussed ʿalā ḥard is read by Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī as denial of the poor (its primary sense), or "aim/intent" (qaṣd), or "earnest effort" (Mujāhid, Qatāda), or "rage" (Sufyān). Awsaṭuhum draws a near-consensus that it means the most just/upright in speech, not the middle in age — and the Ibn ʿAbbās narration makes the point vivid: he was "the youngest in age and the greatest in intellect, for the most balanced of a people is the best of them," likened to the umma's being wasaṭ (2:143).

Trial, deprivation, and the door of return. Al-Burhān opens the passage with al-Bāqir's terse principle (via al-Fuḍayl) that "a man commits a sin and is thereby barred from sustenance" — the moral al-Qummī's Ibn ʿAbbās narration dramatizes at length. On the brothers' closing words, Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī preserve ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd's careful note that innā kunnā ṭāghīn and ʿasā rabbunā an yubdilanā may be genuine repentance or may be only the unbeliever's cry under distress; Ṭabarsī adds Ibn Masʿūd's report that they were in fact sincere and were granted a better garden, "al-Ḥayawān." Al-Mīzān closes on the parable's universal rule — man tested by wealth and sons grows insolent and forgetful until the punishment surprises him — and explains why the Hereafter's is "greater": it springs from a divine over-mastering with no escape even by death. None of these readings is adjudicated here; the Shīʿī-transmitted material (the al-Bāqir occasion, the five-sons narration) is reported strictly as the sources carry it.

Sources present: enlightening_commentary, tabatabai_al_mizan, tabarsi_majma_al_bayan, tusi_al_tibyan, bahrani_al_burhan, qummi. Silent: none.