Sūrat al-Raʿd 27–35 — Six-Source Triangulation

Present sources: Ṭabarsī, Majmaʿ al-Bayān [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] (its blocks here begin at v.30 — vv.27–29 were rendered in Passage 3); Ṭūsī, al-Tibyān [tusi_al_tibyan]; al-Qummī [qummi]; Ṭabāṭabāʾī, al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] (Arabic original, translated here); al-Baḥrānī, al-Burhān [bahrani_al_burhan]. Silent: An Enlightening Commentary [enlightening_commentary] — al-islam.org Cloudflare-blocked all run.

What the passage says. To the renewed demand for a sign, the answer: God "leads astray whom He wills and guides to Himself whoever turns [to Him]" (v.27) — namely believers "whose hearts find rest in the remembrance of God" (v.28); those who believe and do good have ṭūbā (v.29). The Prophet was sent to recite to a community that "disbelieves in al-Raḥmān" — "Say: He is my Lord" (v.30). Even a Qurʾān that moved mountains would not compel guidance — "to God belongs the whole affair" — nor will the disbelievers cease to be struck by calamity until God's promise comes (v.31). Messengers were mocked before, then God seized the deniers (v.32). Is He who "stands over every soul" like the idols? "Name them!" (v.33). Theirs is punishment here and worse hereafter (v.34); the godfearing are promised a Garden of perpetual produce and shade (v.35).

Guidance turns on "turning," not on a sign (vv.27–28). All four sources present here read v.27 as the key: [tabatabai_al_mizan] and [tusi_al_tibyan] stress that God's substituting "whoever turns (anāba)" for "whom He wills" shows His will runs on a fixed order — He guides the one who turns and has a readiness, not by an arbitrary decree, and "leads astray" only in the sense of withholding guidance from the transgressor. On v.28, a sharp divergence of register: [qummi] and [bahrani_al_burhan] give the walāya gloss — "'those who believe' are the Shīʿa; 'the remembrance of God' is the Commander of the Faithful and the Imams," and al-Ṣādiq's "by Muḥammad do hearts find rest; he is the remembrance of God and His veil." [tabatabai_al_mizan] develops a rich phenomenology of faith (not bare assent but the soul's yielding; guidance as "the expanding of the breast"; the wajal that precedes the iṭmiʾnān), takes dhikr as more general than the verbal, and reads the fronting "in the remembrance of God" as restriction — hearts rest in nothing else — then explicitly files the ʿAlid traditions under jary/inṭibāq (the Household as the foremost "instances" of God's remembrance, the verse being more general). This methodological note is the passage's most instructive point of contact between the layers.

ṭūbā (v.29). [qummi], [bahrani_al_burhan] and [tabatabai_al_mizan] all preserve the ṭūbā-tree traditions (the tree "in the house of ʿAlī," a bough in every believer's house, the Prophet's kissing of Fāṭima and its scent); Burhān adds al-Ṣādiq's "ṭūbā to whoever clings to our affair in the occultation of the Qāʾim." [tusi_al_tibyan] (like Ṭabarsī in P3) lists the ten lexical sayings (joy, honour, the Garden, "the sweetest life"). al-Mīzān again distinguishes the word's literal sense ("a most-goodly life," the fruit of the heart's rest) from these instance-glosses.

"Disbelieve in al-Raḥmān" and the Ḥudaybiyya report (v.30). [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] and [bahrani_al_burhan] both relay the occasion — the Ḥudaybiyya pact, the idolaters rejecting "al-Raḥmān" ("we know only the man of al-Yamāma") — alongside the Meccan "what is al-Raḥmān?" report. [tabatabai_al_mizan] pointedly rejects the Ḥudaybiyya occasion on internal grounds: the sūra is Meccan while Ḥudaybiyya is post-Hijra, and a single verse's context forbids revealing part of it in a separate incident — reading "in al-Raḥmān" as a hint that they reject a general divine mercy.

"A Qurʾān that moved mountains" (v.31). The interpretive crux is the omitted answer of "were." [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan], [tusi_al_tibyan] and [qummi] report the extolling reading — "it would be this Qurʾān" (Qummī: "were any Qurʾān so, it would be this") — Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī also noting al-Zajjāj's "even so they would not believe." [tabatabai_al_mizan] argues at length for the latter on contextual grounds ("they still would not be guided save that God will," parallel to al-Anʿām 111), rejecting the extolling reading as unsupported by "rather, to God belongs the whole affair." Strikingly, [bahrani_al_burhan] and [tabatabai_al_mizan] share the long al-Kāẓim ḥadīth — "we have inherited this Qurʾān, in which is that by which mountains are moved … and the dead revived" — which al-Mīzān transmits but flags as weak in chain.

"Name them!" and the Garden (vv.32–35). On the "name them" argument (v.33), [tabatabai_al_mizan] builds the tightest structure — the idolaters hemmed between three evils (partnership with no proof, attributes God does not know, or bare words "informing" God) — echoed more briefly by [tusi_al_tibyan] and Ṭabarsī, while [qummi] glosses "an outward of speech" tersely as "provision." On the closing parable (v.35), [tabatabai_al_mizan] notes the deliberate pairing "the godfearing / those who disbelieved" → "those who were godfearing / the disbelievers," sealing the truth-and-falsehood discourse that began at v.17; [qummi] adds al-Ṣādiq's awesome tradition on the shriek of the worldly fire before Hellfire. No claim rests on the silent Enlightening Commentary.