Sūrat al-Wāqiʿa · Āyāt 27–56

What the passage says

These thirty verses set the two destinies side by side — the People of the Right in their garden, the People of the Left in their fire — so the reader feels the contrast as much as reads it.

The opening cry, "the People of the Right — what are the People of the Right!" (v.27), is left half-finished on purpose: their state is too great to spell out, so the question stands in for the answer. Then the garden is drawn detail by detail. They rest among thornless lote trees (v.28) — the prickly sidr of the desert, but with every thorn stripped away — and clustered ṭalḥ (v.29), a tree laden with fruit from top to bottom, read by most as the banana. Over them lies a long, extended shade (v.30) that no sun ever burns off, and beside them water poured out without end (v.31), which the Enlightening Commentary pictures as flowing waterfalls. There is fruit in abundance (v.32), never cut off by season and never out of reach (v.33) — no winter takes it, no distance or thorn or price keeps it back. They have raised beds (v.34), which the same word also lets the scholars read as exalted spouses — and the next verses confirm that second sense: God has brought these companions into being by a fresh, special creation (v.35), made them virgins (v.36), loving toward their husbands and of equal age (v.37). All of this belongs to the People of the Right (v.38), and they are a great throng — a multitude from the earlier peoples (v.39) and a multitude from the later ones (v.40).

Then the scene turns. "The People of the Left — what are the People of the Left!" (v.41) — the same unfinished cry, now in dread. They are in a scorching wind that pierces the very pores of the body and boiling water (v.42), under a shade made of thick black smoke (v.43) that is neither cool nor kind (v.44) — a "shade" that gives no rest, the opposite of every shade above. The verses then name why they came to this: they had lived before in heedless luxury (v.45) and clung obstinately to the great sin (v.46), saying, "When we are dead and turned to dust and bones, are we really to be raised again — and our forefathers of old too?" (vv.47–48), denying the Resurrection outright. The answer is given to the Prophet to deliver: Say — the earlier and the later peoples will all be gathered to the appointed tryst of a known Day (vv.49–50). And as for these deniers: "Then you, you who stray and deny, will eat from the tree of Zaqqūm (vv.51–52), fill your bellies with it (v.53), and drink scalding water on top of it (v.54), gulping it down like thirst-stricken camels" (v.55). This is their welcome-feast on the Day of Recompense (v.56) — the word for a host's hospitality, used here in bitter mockery against the garden's true feast.

Convergence — where the six agree

• On the two trees, the readings line up closely. Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān), Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān), Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) and the Enlightening Commentary all gloss the sidr makhḍūd as the thornless lote — stripped of thorns, or so weighed down with fruit that the thorns are gone — and read ṭalḥ manḍūd as the banana (or a tree of cool, moist shade), its fruit layered from trunk to crown. The Enlightening Commentary preserves the Prophet's reply to the Bedouin who worried about a thorny tree in Paradise: God cut off its thorns and "made fruits instead of thorns."
• All the sources record the celebrated reading-variant tied to ʿAlī: that the word is ṭalʿ ("ranged date-spathes," as in 26:148) rather than ṭalḥ, with ʿAlī's refusal to alter the written text — "the Qurʾān is not to be stirred today." Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, al-Burhan and al-Mīzān all add that al-Ṣādiq, asked the same question (through Yaʿqūb b. Shuʿayb), likewise gave ṭalʿ manḍūd.
• On shade, water and fruit, Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān converge: a perpetual shade no sun erases, water that never stops flowing, and fruit that is "neither seasonal as in this world nor blocked by distance, thorn, or price." Several cite the report of a tree whose shade a rider crosses for a hundred years.
• On the spouses, Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all note that furush marfūʿa can mean either "raised beds" or "women of exalted rank," and lean toward the second because the next verse — "We brought them into being anew" — fits women, not bedding. All read the four traits the same way: newly created, ever-virgin, loving (ʿurub), and of equal age (atrāb).
• On the People of the Left, all six render the same triad of torment — the piercing samūm wind, the boiling ḥamīm, and the black smoke that is "neither cool nor noble" — and all trace their ruin to heedless affluence (itrāf) plus their stubborn denial of the Resurrection. On the final word nuzul, the sources agree it means a host's welcome-fare and is used here as mockery (tahakkum): a feast that is really a torment.

Divergence — where they differ

• The sharpest split is between the plain sense and the Imāmī taʾwīl of who the two parties are. Al-Qummī reads the People of the Right as ʿAlī and his Shīʿa, and the People of the Left as the enemies of Muḥammad and those who allied with them. Al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) carries the same, and adds a narration (from al-Ṣādiq via Abū Saʿīd al-Madāʾinī) that "a multitude from the former" is Ḥizqīl, the believer of Pharaoh's house, and "a multitude from the latter" is ʿAlī. Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) reports these same readings but frames them explicitly as jary — application of the verse to its highest instance — holding that the surface sense addresses all mankind, not one nation alone.
• On the two "multitudes" themselves, Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī lay out the older debate: whether they mean past nations versus this nation, or both groups from this nation. Ṭabarsī cites Ibn Masʿūd's long vision-report and the Prophet's rising hope that his community be a quarter, then a third, then half of Paradise's people; the Enlightening Commentary notes the same disagreement and the view that the later community is twice the former.
• On the cause of ruin, al-Mīzān goes deeper than the rest: it answers the objection that many of the Left were not wealthy by redefining itrāf — even a poor man is "made wanton" when God's blessings (not only money) distract him from his Lord. The Enlightening Commentary instead reads the verse as pointing chiefly at the ringleaders who lead others astray.
• On "the great sin" (al-ḥinth al-ʿaẓīm), the sources spread the older views — a grave sin in general, polytheism, or the sworn denial of resurrection — but al-Mīzān uniquely ties it to breaking the primordial Covenant of servanthood (the Covenant of the Particles), reading it as absolute shirk.
• Two sources stand apart for what they alone supply. Al-Baḥrānī alone carries the vast Paradise-and-houri corpus — the believer's "pass" at the gate, the two springs of radiance and health, the thousand palaces, the counts of spouses, and al-Ṣādiq's answers to a zindīq on how Paradise's pleasures work — and alone transmits the esoteric gloss (from Naṣr b. Qābūs) that the shade, water and fruit "are the Knowledge and what issues from it." The Enlightening Commentary alone adds the modern register — rendering the poured water as "waterfalls" and tabulating the four traits of the Paradise-spouses as a list. Al-Qummī, by contrast, is the briefest, giving terse word-glosses and the walāya identification.

Each scholar's full text is in the source panels below.