Sūrah 102 · Āyāt 3–5

Three deterrents: "Nay — you shall come to know" (102:3-5)

The passage is built on the triple kallā — "Nay!" — and the sources read the repetition as deliberate escalation, not redundancy. al-Ṭabarsī explains the sequence: God first "refuted them" with {kallā} ("the state you ought to be in is not this vying"), then "threatened them" with {sawfa taʿlamūn}, then "confirmed and repeated it." On the doubled warning he records two readings. Al-Ḥasan and Muqātil call it "a threat upon a threat" — you will know the outcome "when death descends upon you." The second reading, which both al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī carry on the authority of ʿAlī, distributes the two warnings across two moments: "you will know in the grave," then "you will know after the resurrection." al-Ṭabarsī preserves the striking testimony (via Zirr b. Ḥubaysh) that ʿAlī said: "We did not cease to doubt the punishment of the grave until Alhākum al-takāthur was revealed" — making the verse a scriptural proof-text for ʿadhāb al-qabr. al-Ṭūsī agrees the verse "indicates the punishment of the grave." al-Ṭabarsī adds a third option (seeing the abode of the righteous, then of the dissolute) and notes the Arabs intensify with both kallā and ḥaqqan.

On {kallā law taʿlamūna ʿilma l-yaqīn} the present sources converge tightly. al-Ṭabarsī treats it as "a fresh statement" with the apodosis of law suppressed: "were you to know the matter with certain knowledge, what you know would occupy you away from boasting." al-Ṭūsī parses {ʿilm al-yaqīn} as an accusative verbal noun and gives the same suppressed-answer construction. Both define al-yaqīn identically and memorably: "the knowledge by which the breast is set at rest after the agitation of doubt" — adding the theological corollary that God is therefore never called mutayaqqin ("one who attains certainty"), since certainty presupposes a doubt removed. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) reads the three verses as "a deterrence upon a deterrence by way of emphasis," glosses al-yaqīn as "the knowledge into which no doubt or misgiving enters," and reaches the same suppressed-apodosis sense.

A narrational thread sharpens v.5. al-Mīzān and al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) both transmit, through al-Barqī from al-Ṣādiq, that {law taʿlamūna ʿilma l-yaqīn} means al-muʿāyana — "direct beholding"; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī comments, "the narration corroborates the meaning we have set forth." al-Burhān adds a second narration (al-Najafī ← Ibn Najīḥ ← al-Ṣādiq) reading the doubled {sawfa taʿlamūn} as "once at the Return (al-karra) and once on the Day of Resurrection" — invoking the distinctive Imāmī doctrine of the rajʿa (flagged for review and recorded only as transmitted). The Enlightening Commentary rounds out the passage with its set-piece on the degrees of yaqīn — ʿilm al-yaqīn (knowledge from evidence, like inferring fire from smoke), ʿayn al-yaqīn (seeing the fire), ḥaqq al-yaqīn (entering it) — and cites al-Bāqir ranking yaqīn above faith and taqwā. Tafsīr al-Qummī is silent on these verses.