Sūrah 88 · Āyāt 21–26

Al-Ghāshiya 21–26 — "So remind" — the Prophet's office and the Return

The sūra closes by turning to the Prophet: "So remind! You are only a reminder; you are not a controller over them." An exception follows for the one "who turns away and disbelieves," whom God will punish "with the greatest punishment," before the final assurance: "To Us indeed is their return; then upon Us is their reckoning."

On the Prophet's role the present sources are united. al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī all read "so remind" as branching from the preceding proofs — since God is sole Lord and a Day of reckoning lies ahead, the Prophet's task is tadhkīr, reminding "in hope they respond and believe without compulsion" (al-Mīzān). On "you are not a controller (musayṭir)" they gloss muṣayṭir as one set in domineering authority; al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī note the lexical curiosity (via Abū ʿUbayda) that musayṭir and mubayṭir "have no third in the speech of the Arabs," and both weigh — then largely reject — the view that the verse was abrogated by the command to fight, al-Ṭabarsī concluding "the sound view is that there is no abrogation, for jihād does not force hearts." al-Mīzān reads the exception "except him who turns away and disbelieves" as carved from the object of "remind" (reminding a second time one who has already spurned it is "idle"), aligning the passage with 87:9–12; it cites the well-known ḥadīth via Jābir (al-Durr al-Manthūr, from Muslim, al-Tirmidhī and others) — "I have been commanded to fight people until they say there is no god but God... and their reckoning is upon God" — while noting it does not prove the "controller" exception. al-Qummī and al-Burhān add ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm's gloss that "controller" means "you are not a keeper or a scribe over them," and Abū al-Jārūd's from al-Bāqir that the one who "turns away" is he who "denies My lordship and is ungrateful for My favour."

On "To Us is their return; upon Us their reckoning," al-Mīzān notes "to Us" is fronted for emphasis and cadence, "not for restriction, since none holds that people return to other than God," and cites ʿAlī in Nahj al-Balāgha on how God reckons all creatures at once — "as He provides for them" though unseen.

It is the closing verses that draw the heaviest Imāmī reading, flagged for human review. al-Baḥrānī gathers a large cluster of narrations making the Ahl al-Bayt the agents of the reckoning: al-Bāqir tells Jābir that on the Day of Judgment the reckoning of the people is "handed to us," and that ʿAlī "weds the people of the Garden" and "closes the gates" of Garden and Fire; a chain of narrations (from al-Kāẓim, al-Ṣādiq and the golden chain from ʿAlī) has the Imams entrusted specifically with "the reckoning of our Shīʿa," whose grievances are remitted or gifted so they enter "without reckoning" — sealed by the Ziyāra Jāmiʿa's "the return of creation is to you and their reckoning is upon you." Strikingly, al-Mīzān itself preserves the milder core of this in its narrations: al-Ṣādiq's "every community is reckoned by the imam of its age," tied to 7:46. All such walāya-eschatology is rendered strictly as-attributed.