Sūrah 43 · Āyāt 26–39

Al-Zukhruf 26–39 — Abraham’s Word, the “Great Man,” and the Devil-Companion

What the passage says. Abraham disowns all that his father and people worship “save Him who created me; He will guide me” (vv. 26–27), and God makes this “a lasting word among his posterity, that they might return” (v. 28). Yet He let the Meccans and their fathers enjoy ease until the truth and a “manifest apostle” came — whereupon they called the Qurʾān “sorcery” (vv. 29–30) and objected: why was it not sent to “some great man of the two towns”? (v. 31). God answers that He, not they, apportions both livelihood and the greater mercy of prophethood, raising some above others so that people serve one another (v. 32); that were it not for the danger of all uniting in unbelief He would give the deniers silver houses, since such things are but “the wares of this world” (vv. 33–35); and that whoever turns blind to His remembrance is yoked to a devil-companion who bars him from the way while he thinks himself guided — until, on Judgment Day, he wishes the two of them “the distance of the two easts” (vv. 36–39).

How the present sources read it. The four Arabic sources agree closely on the plain sense. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī work the variants (saqfan/suqufan, lammā/lamā, jāʾanā/jāʾānā), identify the “two towns” as Mecca and al-Ṭāʾif and the “great man” (from Qatāda, Mujāhid, Ibn ʿAbbās) as al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra and/or ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd, and both derive from v. 33 a doctrine of divine grace (luṭf): God withholds universal wealth from deniers because it would be a mafsada inviting unbelief. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) deepens v. 32 into a full theory of society — the mutual subjection (istikhdām, taʿāwun) by which provision and rank are apportioned by God alone — and, notably, cautions that the exegetes’ naming of the “great man” is mere application, since “the verse left it vague.” On v. 36 al-Mīzān reads the devil-companion as the seal upon a heart that first turned from a truth it was disposed to recognize — the state in which the astray “suppose themselves guided” (cf. al-Kahf 103–104; Qāf 27).

The Imāmī narrative sources read v. 28 through the Imamate. Al-Qummī glosses “a lasting word in his posterity” of the Imams and — distinctively — of their return (rajʿa) to the world; al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) amasses a large dossier grounding the Imamate specifically in the line of al-Ḥusayn (the twelve Imams, the Mahdī, the Moses-and-Aaron parallel for why al-Ḥusayn’s line and not al-Ḥasan’s, and the ḥadīth of the Two Weighty Things). Strikingly, al-Mīzān independently endorses this Imamate reading on exegetical grounds, referring “He made it” back to the “guidance” of “He will guide me.” On v. 38, both al-Qummī and al-Burhān carry a pointedly ʿAlid application: al-Qummī reports from al-Bāqir a variant recitation naming “so-and-so and so-and-so” and glossing “it will not avail you” with “[you wronged] the House of Muḥammad their right,” while al-Burhān attaches a long Ascension narration of the coming trials of ʿAlī, Fāṭima, al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn. These Imāmī taʾwīls — Imamate, rajʿa, the ʿAlid reading of v. 38, and al-Mīzān’s report that “vengeance… by ʿAlī” falls on the nākithīn and qāsiṭīn — are rendered exactly as attributed (al-Burhān as ḥadīth), not as the plain wording.

The published English. An Enlightening Commentary reads Abraham’s word as the enduring monotheism of the prophetic line, rebuts the “great man” objection with the point that prophethood is a divine appointment measured by inner worth rather than wealth, and treats the devil-companion of v. 36 as the natural consequence (“like attracts like”) of turning from God’s remembrance. All six sources are present; none was silent.