Sūrah 26 · Āyāt 176–191

al-Shuʿarāʾ 176–191 — Shuʿayb and the Companions of the Thicket: honest measure and the Day of the Shadow

The sūra's seventh and last story turns to Shuʿayb and the Companions of the Thicket (aṣḥāb al-Ayka), and every source flags the one formal departure from the pattern: where the earlier prophets are called their brother, here it is simply when Shuʿayb said to them. Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all explain that Shuʿayb "was not of their lineage" — al-Mīzān noting that Hūd and Ṣāliḥ were kinsmen and Lūṭ kin "by marriage-tie," so each of those is their brother, whereas Shuʿayb (like Mūsā among the Copts, per Ṭūsī) is not. On the Ayka itself all agree it is "a tangle of interwoven trees" — al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī (from al-Bāqir) give the same terse gloss — and Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī note Qatāda's view that Shuʿayb was sent to two nations.

The commercial ethic (181–184). What distinguishes this pericope is that Shuʿayb's call has a specific economic content: give full measure… weigh with the straight balance… do not defraud people of their things… do not spread corruption. The sources gloss the vocabulary closely — qisṭās as the just balance (Ṭūsī reports al-Ḥasan's "steelyard"), bakhs as diminishing people's due, ʿathā as "the worst kind of ruin." al-Mīzān reads the clauses as a tight structure — do not defraud completing weigh with the balance, be not of those who cause loss completing give full measure, and do not spread corruption confirming both — and cross-links 17:35 on "how cheating corrupts human society," consistent with its running thesis that the prophetic call is the setting-right of social life. On fear Him who created you and the former generations (al-jibilla), Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī gloss jibilla as the earlier creation/generations; Ṭūsī adds the grammatical care that it cannot mean God "created their unbelief," and al-Mīzān suggests it is singled out because God "set in their nature the abhorrence of corruption."

The denial and the Day of the Shadow (185–191). Their reply repeats Thamūd's — you are only one of the bewitched… a mortal like us — with the added we think you a liar; drop on us fragments from the sky. al-Mīzān reads the demand as "built on mockery," and Shuʿayb's answer my Lord knows best what you do as a kināya that "the matter is not his but God's," paralleling Hūd's "the knowledge is only with God" (46:23); Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī read it as: if He knows respite would bring repentance He will not cut them off, else the extirpating punishment comes. On the Day of the Shadow (yawm al-ẓulla), Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī narrate the vivid account — seven days of held-back heat, then a cloud they fled toward for coolness that "rained fire and burned them" — while al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī preserve the same tradition (heat drove them out toward the cloud, then "the Cry seized them and they lay prostrate"), glossing the day as one "of heat and burning winds (samāʾim)." al-Mīzān refers the full account to Sūrat Hūd. The seventh story, like the six before it, closes on most of them were not believers; your Lord is the Almighty, the Merciful.