Sūrah 89 · Āyāt 21–26

Here the sūra delivers the answer the oaths had withheld: the Day itself. "When the earth is pounded to powder… and your Lord comes, and the angels rank upon rank, and Hell is brought" — then man remembers too late, wishing "would that I had sent ahead for my life," when "none punishes as He punishes, none binds as He binds."

"Your Lord comes." The most delicate phrase, and the sources are united in refusing anthropomorphism. Al-Mīzān classes it among the mutashābih governed by "there is nothing like Him" (42:11), reading it as the coming of God's command (82:19) or as rational metaphor. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī give the same range — the command, the decree, or "the great signs of His" — and Ṭabarsī adds the subtle reading that what "comes" is the necessity of the knowledge of God, doubt vanishing as if by an arrival. Al-Burhān clinches it with a chain from al-Riḍā: "God is not described by coming and going… He means: the command of your Lord comes." The "ranks" of angels all read literally as serried rows.

Hell brought near. Here the narrative sources expand dramatically. al-Mīzān reads "Hell is brought" soberly as its being made visible (citing 79:36; 50:22). But Ṭabarsī, Qummi and al-Burhān carry the great ḥadīth — the Prophet's face changing when the verse descended, ʿAlī embracing him from behind, and Gabriel's account of Hell led by thousands of halters, each held by a hundred thousand angels, with a Path laid over it bearing three arches: trust and kinship, prayer, and the justice of the Lord of the Worlds. Qummi and al-Burhān explicitly tie this scene back to "your Lord is ever on the watch" (v14): the mirṣād is the final arch. al-Burhān further preserves the vast Tuḥfat al-Ikhwān recension of the thirty-thousand-headed Hell that, rebuked, prostrates to God.

"None punishes as He punishes." The grammar carries the meaning. Ṭūsī and Ṭabarsī lay out both readings: in the active (kasra) none punishes or binds as God does; in the passive (fatḥa) none is punished or bound as this unbeliever is — though, they note, Iblīs is punished more severely, so the verse is best taken of God's incomparable punishment. al-Mīzān reads the pronouns as God's. Qummi ("he is so-and-so / fulān") and al-Burhān ("that is the Second one / al-thānī") attach a taqiyya taʾwīl naming a specific figure — recorded strictly as attributed reports, never as the verse's plain sense.

Synthesis. Across the sources the passage answers the opening oaths: the dawn, the nights, the even and the odd were sworn by this — a Day that pounds the earth flat and brings the heedless to a remembrance that cannot help. The theological care (no spatial "coming" of God) and the narrative terror (Hell on its halters) are held together, and the warning of v14, "ever on the watch," becomes the bridge no wrongdoer crosses.