Synthesis: Sūrat Muhammad 20–28

Triangulating Majmaʿ al-Bayān, al-Tibyān, al-Burhān, Tafsīr al-Qummī, al-Mīzān, and the Enlightening Commentary.

Human-review flags: al-Burhān's report 9859 uses the taḥrīf-adjacent phrase "what Gabriel brought down… concerning ʿAlī" for v. 26; the passage's Banū-Umayya / khums-pact readings (Qummī, Baḥrānī) are rendered strictly as-attributed, not endorsed.

What the passage says. The believers long for a sūra to be sent down; but when "a conclusive surah" mentioning war arrives, the sick-hearted look on "with the look of someone fainting at death" (v. 20) — "woe to them." Verse 21 half-praises "obedience and upright speech" and warns that, once war is resolved, truth to God would have been better. Verses 22–24 confront those who, turning away, would "cause corruption in the land and ill-treat your blood relations" — cursed, deafened, blinded, their hearts locked against the Qurʾān. Verses 25–28 describe those who "turned their backs after the guidance had become clear," seduced by Satan, who told the enemies of revelation "We shall obey you in some matters"; the angels will take them "striking their faces and their backs," for they pursued what displeased God.

How the present sources read it. On v. 20 al-Mīzān makes a pointed philological argument that "those in whose hearts is sickness" are the weak in faith among the believers, not the hypocrites, since the verse credits "the believers" with the very longing for the sūra — reading "woe to them" as "that befits them." Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī keep the older options for "obedience and upright speech" (v. 21), whether a command to the hypocrites or a description of the believer's proper response, and both read "when the matter is resolved" (ʿazama al-amr) as the firm determination of war. On v. 22's "corruption and severed kinship," Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī offer the twin senses — misrule through bribery if given authority, or reversion to Jāhiliyya bloodshed — and Ṭūsī names the Quraysh–Banū Hāshim feud; al-Mīzān favours the reading that "turning away" is apostasy from the Book, its expected fruit being corruption and the severing of ties in greed for the world. On v. 24 all three (Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, al-Mīzān, the latter quoting Majmaʿ) draw the same lesson: the command to "contemplate the Quran" refutes those who forbid interpreting its plain sense without transmitted report.

The Imāmī reading dominates the tradition-material. Qummī and Baḥrānī both refer vv. 22–28 to the Banū Umayya and to those who abandoned ʿAlī's walāya, preserving the ʿUmar–ʿAlī exchange (ʿAlī citing v. 22 as revealed about the Banū Umayya) and the report that "We shall obey you in some matters" describes a pact against the Household over the caliphate and the khums, sealed with the same divine rebuke of Zukhruf 79–80. Ṭabarsī independently attributes to al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq that the verse's "those who loathed what God sent down" are the Banū Umayya who loathed what came down concerning ʿAlī's walāya — a rare point of overlap between his Majmaʿ and the narration-collections. al-Mīzān, reviewing the candidates for the secret pact (Jews, hypocrites, or others), declines to press a name and files the ʿAlī-centred reports under jarī. The Enlightening Commentary supplies the plain sense the Arabic works assume: the sick-hearted dread the summons to jihād, and those who turn away are cursed with a deafness and blindness of the heart, their apostasy the work of a Satan who "gave them far-flung hopes."