Sūrah 85 · Āyāt 17–22

The passage (85:17-22). The sura closes by turning to the Prophet: "Has the story of the hosts come to you — Pharaoh and Thamud?" Yet the disbelievers "persist in denial," though "God encompasses them from behind"; "nay, it is a glorious Qur'an, in a Preserved Tablet."

The hosts. al-Tusi and Majma' al-Bayan read the rhetorical question as a summons to remembrance and patience — "remember, O Muhammad, their story, an instructive reminder," and "be patient as the messengers before you were patient" — both prizing the verse's concision (ijaz) over explicitness. Al-Mizan reads the pair as confirming the severity of His seizing and consoling the Prophet. The Enlightening Commentary supplies the historical contrast — Pharaoh destroyed "through water in the Nile," Thamud by earthquake and storm — the two chosen because "the Arab pagans knew their names."

Denial and encompassment. On v.19, al-Tusi takes "those who disbelieved are in denial" of the Meccans who belied the raising and the resurrection; al-Mizan likewise reads "those who disbelieved" as the Prophet's own people, the verse a turning-away (idrab) signalling that no faith is to be hoped from those "insistent upon their denial." On "God encompasses them from behind," Majma' al-Bayan and al-Tusi read it as the besieged who cannot escape God's grasp — "of the eloquence of the Qur'an" — and al-Mizan glosses "behind" as the surrounding external directions, "able over them from every side," noting too the alternative that they "took God behind their backs."

The glorious Qur'an and the Preserved Tablet. The closing verses read as an idrab against the charge that the Qur'an is poetry or magic. al-Tusi and Majma' al-Bayan gloss majid as karim — noble, great, generous in the good it gives — and both unfold the threefold definition of "wisdom" (hikma) the Qur'an embodies: a principle to act upon, an exhortation that softens the heart, and a proof distinguishing truth from falsehood. Al-Mizan calls it "a recited Book, great in meaning, abundant in knowledge, in a Tablet preserved from falsehood and the touch of the devils." On the Preserved Tablet (lawh mahfuz — the Qur'an's only occurrence of the phrase, as the Enlightening Commentary notes), Majma' al-Bayan and al-Tusi gather the traditions: preserved from alteration; the "Mother of the Book" (Mujahid); a white pearl whose length spans heaven to earth (Ibn 'Abbas, Mujahid); on Israfil's forehead (Anas) or at the right of the Throne (Muqatil). Tafsir al-Qummi and al-Burhan give the vivid Imami tradition that the Tablet "has two ends — one on the right of the Throne and one on Israfil's forehead — and when the Lord speaks the revelation, the Tablet strikes Israfil's forehead" and the contents pass to Jibril. Al-Mizan reports the same and the Durr al-Manthur tradition of the pearl-Tablet glanced at "three hundred and sixty [times] each day," cautioning that these descriptions are "of the nature of a likeness (tamthil)." The Enlightening Commentary draws the final consolation: the Qur'an "will remain safe and unchanged," so the Prophet need pay no heed to those who call him poet or soothsayer.