Sūrah 69 · Āyāt 25–37

The Companion of the Left, and the chastisement (verses 25–37)

The Sura now turns to the mirror-image of the blessed: "as for him who is given his book in his left hand." Tusi notes that the left hand is itself the sign, to angels and creatures, that its bearer belongs to the Fire; Tabarsi adds that he wishes the book away because of the ugliness it records, by which his face is blackened. All four named commentaries read "Would that it had been the end (al-qadiya)" (v. 27) as a longing for annihilating death: Tabarsi and Tusi cite al-Farra' (would that the first death had not been followed by raising) and Qatada (that Day he craved the death he had most hated in the world), while al-Mizan glosses it as the wish that the first death had decreed his non-existence so he would never have risen to eternal punishment. On "My wealth has not availed me; my authority (sultani) has perished" (vv. 28–29), the sources agree wealth wards off nothing of God's punishment, and gloss sultan as either his argument/proof (Ibn ʿAbbas, Mujahid — what he leaned on as a proof deserts him) or his worldly dominion and command; al-Mizan frames the two cries as the anguish of a man who had made wealth and power the whole key of his felicity and now sees the means cut off.

The command "Seize him and shackle him, then roast him in the Blaze, then in a chain seventy cubits long insert him" (vv. 30–32) draws careful philology: Tabarsi, Tusi and al-Mizan define al-ghull (the collar joining hand, foot and neck), al-jahim (the great, thick Fire), and the seventy-cubit chain, Tabarsi and Tusi reporting al-Dahhak's vivid image of the chain threaded through the body, Nawf al-Bikali's astonishing measure (each cubit seventy fathoms), and al-Hasan's reserve ("God knows best by which cubit"). The dread of the chain is amplified across sources: Suwayd b. Najih (in Tabarsi), Ibn Babawayh/Ibn Tawus (in al-Mizan and al-Burhan) all transmit that a single ring would melt the mountains, and al-Burhan preserves a long hadith of Jabir al-Juʿfi from al-Baqir picturing the disbeliever's resurrection in graphic detail (the bored chest, the seventy thousand angels, the seventy fire-skins, the plunge of seventy thousand years).

Verses 33–37 give the two causes of this fate — "he did not believe in God the Great, nor urge the feeding of the needy" — and the matching two privations: "no loyal friend (hamim) here today, nor any food except ghislin." Al-Mizan reads the structure tightly: because he denied God he has no intercessor (there being no forgiveness, hence no intercession for a disbeliever), and because he withheld the poor he has no food but the washings (ghislin) of the Fire-dwellers; Tabarsi and Tusi explain ghislin as their oozing pus, canvass whether the damned are ranked by food (ghislin / zaqqum / dariʿ, al-Ghashiya 6) per Qutrub, and define the khatiʾ (deliberate sinner) against the mukhtiʾ (the inadvertent). Al-Mizan and al-Burhan both relay al-Hakim's hadith that "a bucket of ghislin would make the world stink," and al-Mizan the celebrated anecdote in which a Bedouin misreads v. 37 as al-khatun ("walkers"), prompting ʿAli's order to Abu al-Aswad that founded Arabic case-marking. Against this mainstream eschatology, al-Qummi and al-Burhan carry the pointed partisan reading — reported strictly as their own ta'wil, never as fact: the Companion of the Left is Muʿawiya ("the Pharaoh of this umma," owner of the chain — al-Sadiq via al-Kulayni); the seventy-cubit chain "inwardly" is the seventy tyrants; the withheld "feeding of the poor" is the usurped rights of the Family of Muhammad; and ghislin is "the sweat of the disbelievers."