Sūrah 106 · Āyāt 3–4

The verses. “So let them worship the Lord of this House — who fed them against hunger and secured them from fear.” The dangling lām of the opening now resolves into an imperative: the right response to the īlāf is worship, and the object of worship is identified not by an abstract title but by His two concrete gifts to Quraysh.

“Let them worship the Lord of this House.” The present sources read the command as pointed monotheism. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān): “let them direct their worship to the Lord of this Kaʿba and affirm His oneness — and He is Allah.” al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) makes the polemic explicit: the mukallafīn are to worship “Allah, the Lord of the Sacred House, and none besides Him of the idols” — a rebuke to a people who served the House yet worshipped others within it. al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) parses the prefixed fāʾ as carrying a suppressed conditional/“whatever-the-case” force (like “and for your Lord be patient,” al-Muddaththir 7), and sums the three verses: let Quraysh worship the Lord of this House because He accustomed them to the two journeys, living thereby in security. al-Mīzān also gathers here the alternative construal — that, read as a continuation of al-Fīl, the destruction of the elephant army was itself “a favor added to a favor” (al-Farrāʾ’s lām = ilā), or was done so that Quraysh might resettle Mecca and the Prophet be born among them — while flagging that deriving all this from the bare context is itself debatable.

“Who fed them against hunger.” The sources tie the feeding directly to the trade-favor of vv. 1–2. al-Ṭabarsī: “through the provisions He arranged for them in the winter and summer journey and the wealth He gave them”; al-Ṭūsī likewise, “the wealth He gave them and the provisions He arranged by striving in trade.” al-Ṭabarsī preserves a second reading — aṭʿamahum min jūʿ = “fed them after hunger” (as one says “I clothed you after nakedness”) — and Ibn ʿAbbās’s report that Quraysh were in “hardship and famine until Hāshim gathered them upon the two journeys,” after which no single lineage was richer or mightier. The Qummī / al-Burhān narration adds a striking historical coda: after the Prophet’s mission the caravans became unnecessary, “for the people came as delegations and made pilgrimage to the House” — provision now arriving at Mecca’s door.

“And secured them from fear.” On the security gift the panel is unanimous in substance and instructive in its spread. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī locate it in the inviolability of the Ḥaram: none would assail Quraysh because they were “the people of Allah’s Ḥaram”; al-Ṭabarsī’s vivid detail — even a man seized among the Arab tribes was freed once called ḥaramī, “out of veneration for the Ḥaram,” while outsiders were raided. al-Mīzān frames the whole as one self-evident sign: feeding and security together, “in a land that has no fertility and no security for others” — therefore worship “a Lord who governs their affair with the best management.” The Qummī/al-Burhān gloss reads khawf concretely as “the fear of the road.” al-Ṭūsī alone preserves a minority lexical view — āmanahum min al-judhām, “secured them from leprosy” (rendered as his reported “it is said,” not endorsed). The published Enlightening Commentary draws the moral the verses press: granted security in trade and honor in life, Quraysh “should have gratefully worshipped the Lord of the Kaʿba,” yet the same tribe became, at first, Islam’s fiercest opponents — so the surah is at once a remembrance of favor and an open admonition.