Sūrah 75 · Āyāt 20–30

Verses 20–30 — The two faces, and the soul at the collarbones

"No indeed! But you love the fleeting (al-ʿājila) and forsake the Hereafter." al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī) reads the rebuff as another turning-away from the unbeliever's supposition "that there is no giving-life after death," and al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) spells out the choice: they want "the present benefits and incline to them," abandoning the work that earns reward. The Enlightening Commentary locates here the true root of denial: not real doubt about God's power "to assemble the scattered dust of the rotten bones," but "intense love for mammon and unchecked concupiscent desires," which lead a man to clear away every impediment to indulgence. al-Qummī glosses al-ʿājila simply as "the present world."

Then the Day sorts all faces into two. "Some faces that day are radiant (nāḍira), looking to their Lord (ilā rabbihā nāẓira)." This single clause draws the longest and most consequential commentary in the sūra, because it is the classic proof-text for the beatific vision of God — and the present sources are, almost to a one, set against reading it so. The Enlightening Commentary takes nāḍira as "a particular kind of happiness… accompanied by felicity, beauty, and splendor." al-Tibyān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān mount the full lexical-theological case against physical sight: naẓar bound to the eye denotes seeking to see, not seeing itself ("I looked at the crescent but did not see it"); a thing cannot be made the goal of itself ("I kept looking until I saw it"); and in any case sense-vision requires facing, direction and the meeting of a ray with its object — all impossible for God. Their preferred construction, reported from Mujāhid, al-Ḥasan, Saʿīd b. Jubayr and al-Ḍaḥḥāk and "narrated from ʿAlī," is that the faces are "awaiting the reward of their Lord," the genitive standing for an elided "reward of." al-Mīzān takes a subtler path: the looking is real, but it is "the looking of the heart and the heart's seeing by the reality of faith" — these believers "look at nothing and see nothing except as it is a sign (āya) of God," so that looking at the sign as a sign is itself a looking at the One signified. The Imāmī ḥadīth sources concur: Tafsīr al-Qummī glosses the verse as looking "to the face of God — i.e. to God's mercy and bounty," and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) carries al-Riḍā's "bright, awaiting the reward of their Lord," together with his long refutation of an anthropomorphic vision ("the face of God is His prophets, messengers and proofs… God is not grasped by sight or imagination") and the radiant tradition of the believers gazing upon the Prophet and ʿAlī upon a pulpit of light — "for the like of this let the workers work." Against the radiant stand the scowling: "expecting that a back-breaking calamity (fāqira) will be wrought upon them," which al-Tibyān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān derive from the breaking of the vertebrae of the back.

The passage ends at the deathbed. "No indeed! When it reaches the collarbones (al-tarāqī)" — the soul, say al-Qummī, al-Mīzān and al-Burhān, when it climbs to the bones at the base of the throat where the death-rattle sounds. "And it is said, Who can heal (man rāqin)?" carries two glosses across the sources: the dying man's family seeking a physician who cannot be found (Qatāda, in Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī), or the angels asking "who will take up his soul — the angels of mercy or of punishment?" al-Burhān and al-Mīzān both preserve al-Bāqir's compact reading of the whole scene from al-Kāfī: "that is the son of Adam — when death befalls him he says, 'Is there a physician?'… he is certain of parting from his loved ones; the world twines with the Hereafter; … the journey is to the Lord of the Worlds." So "to your Lord that day is the driving (al-masāq)" — driven, al-Mīzān stresses, with "no choice in this passage and no escape from it."