Sūrah 71 · Āyāt 21–28

Sūrat Nūḥ 71:21–28 — The Idols, the Drowning, and Noah's Final Prayers

What the passage says. Noah's last report to God: his people disobeyed him and followed the affluent "whose wealth and children only added to his loss" (v. 21); they schemed a "great plot" (v. 22) and rallied around five named idols — Wadd, Suwāʿ, Yaghūth, Yaʿūq, Nasr (v. 23) — leading many astray (v. 24). For their sins they were "drowned, then made to enter a Fire," finding no helper besides God (v. 25). Noah prays that no disbeliever be left on earth, since they would only mislead and "beget none but a profligate ingrate" (vv. 26–27); and he closes with a prayer of forgiveness for himself, his parents, "whoever enters my house as a believer," and all believing men and women — and ruin for the wrongdoers (v. 28).

How the present sources read it. On v. 21, all the Arabic witnesses agree the people "followed the rich": al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) notes the bitter irony that wealth and children, earlier promised as blessings (v. 12), here "increased them only in disbelief"; al-Ṭabarsī adds their taunt that a true messenger would himself be wealthy; al-Ṭūsī parses khasār as "destruction by the loss of capital." On the idols (v. 23), the sources transmit the classic account — preserved by al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī through ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm and a chain to Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad — that Wadd and the rest were originally righteous men whose images Iblīs induced later generations to worship; al-Ṭabarsī gives the fullest version (including Muḥammad ibn Kaʿb's account and al-Wāqidī's forms — Wadd as a man, Suwāʿ a woman, Yaghūth a lion, Yaʿūq a horse, Nasr an eagle) and the tribal distribution among the later Arabs, on which the commentators' details differ (al-Mīzān, citing al-Durr al-Manthūr, cautions that the idols' "passing" to the Arabs likely means correspondence of names, "not the transfer of those very idols").

On v. 25 the sources part most sharply. al-Mīzān reads "then made to enter a Fire" as the fire of the barzakh, "by which the guilty are punished between death and resurrection" — calling the verse "among the proofs of the barzakh" and admiring the composition's joining of "drowning by water and entry into fire." al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī report the alternative of al-Ḍaḥḥāk (drowned and burning simultaneously in this world), with al-Ṭabarsī citing Ibn al-Anbārī's verse, "marvel not… for God joins between water and fire." On vv. 26–27, all explain that Noah prayed for total destruction only after revelation told him "none of your people will believe except those who have already believed" (Hūd 11:36) — a point al-Baḥrānī and al-Qummī ground in an explicit tradition from Ṣāliḥ ibn Maytham; al-Ṭabarsī adds the report that the wombs and loins of the people were rendered barren forty years before the punishment, so no child remained among them. A recurring theological note in al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī (from al-Balkhī) insists that "increase… in error" can only mean withholding grace as punishment, never God creating misguidance, "for that is not permissible in the description of the All-Wise."

The distinctive narrations. al-Baḥrānī carries the passage's richest material: al-Mufaḍḍal's report that Noah built his ark in the Mosque of Kūfa and that the idols stood near the later Euphrates site; the Kaʿba-idols tradition that occasioned the "fly" parable (al-Ḥajj 22:73); and al-Ṣādiq's expansive account of Noah's 950 years of rejection, the angelic delegations who twice won a reprieve, and the date-palm trial that winnowed his followers to a faithful remnant — fifty years before the Flood. On v. 28, both al-Baḥrānī and al-Qummī preserve the Shīʿī reading that "whoever enters my house as a believer" signifies the walāya — "whoever enters the walāya enters the House of the Prophets" — al-Baḥrānī adding Ibn Shahrāshūb's tradition linking Noah's prayer to ʿAlī and Fāṭima. al-Mīzān, by contrast, keeps to the plain sense ("those of his people who believed… and the believing men and women to the Day of Resurrection") and closes by noting that this prayer "is the last of Noah's words related in the Noble Qurʾan." al-Ṭabarsī ends on the hope of "the people of verification": that as God answered Noah's prayer against the disbelievers, He will answer his prayer for the believers and forgive them.