Sūrah 51 · Āyāt 20–30

al-Dhāriyāt 20-30 — signs in the horizons and the self, provision in heaven, and Abraham’s guests

The passage turns from argument to evidence: “In the earth are signs for those of certainty, and in your own selves — will you not see? And in the heaven is your provision and what you are promised.” It seals this with an oath by the Lord of heaven and earth that the promise is “as true as that you speak,” then pivots to narrative — the honoured guests of Abraham, their refusal of the calf, his fear, and the glad tiding of a knowing son that draws Sarah’s astonished cry, “an old barren woman!”

On the signs, al-Mīzān frames the whole run (vv.20-51) as one sustained proof of God’s oneness in Lordship, reading the earth as one interlocked order and the self as many self-contained faculties governed by a single soul, rising to the “malakūt” glimpsed by those who watch God within. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī keep closer to the concrete — the body’s passage from a drop to age, the mountains and seas standing without pillar — and both, with Qummī, preserve al-Ṣādiq’s homely gloss that the “sign in yourselves” is your own turning between anger and pleasure, hunger and fullness.

On “in the heaven is your provision,” the sources spread a spectrum. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī take it first as the rain that brings forth food, with “what you are promised” as reward and punishment or the Garden. Qummī and Baḥrānī hear in “what you are promised” the tidings of the rajʿa and the Resurrection kept in the heaven. al-Mīzān canvasses all these — height, heavenly causes, the world of the Unseen — and appends a philosophical “discussion” that provision and its recipient are inseparable correlates, which is why provision is called a decreed “truth.” Baḥrānī adds a memorable ʿAlid tradition: asked why one lifts the hands to heaven in supplication when God is everywhere, ʿAlī answers that provision is sought “from its place.” Here too the Imāmī reading surfaces: ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn, in Baḥrānī, glosses the oath’s “it is indeed true” as “the rising of the Qāʾim,” tying it to the istikhlāf promise of 24:55 — recorded here as an attributed messianic taʾwīl.

On Abraham’s guests, the four commentaries agree on the frame — angels honoured before God (or honoured by Abraham’s own service), his greeting “Peace,” his unease at “a people unknown,” the untouched calf, and the fear that turned to glad tidings. al-Mīzān notes the fine contrast between the guests’ verbal “salāman” and Abraham’s abiding nominal “salām,” and reads “a people unknown” as his inner thought, harmonising it with Sūrat Hūd. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī record the old dispute whether the promised “knowing boy” is Ishmael (from Mujāhid) or Isaac (from Sarah). Baḥrānī alone supplies the narrative texture — al-Bāqir’s teaching that Lot’s townsfolk were misers whose stinginess bred their sin, that the messengers first consoled Abraham, and that Sarah was ninety and Abraham a hundred and twenty — while Qummī, characteristically, refers the fuller story back to Sūrat Hūd.