Sūrah 108 · Āyāt 3–3

Al-Kawthar 3 — "Surely your reviler — he is the one cut off"

The closing verse turns an insult back upon its author. al-Ṭūsī, al-Ṭabarsī, al-Mīzān and the Enlightening Commentary agree on the two key words: the shāniʾ is "the hater" (al-Ṭūsī: "you say shaniʾtuhu … when you hate him"; the Enlightening Commentary derives it from shanaʾān, "enmity, spitefulness, peevishness"), and al-abtar is, in al-Ṭabarsī's lexical note, "originally the docked donkey, the one whose tail is cut off," used for a man "cut off from good" and from posterity.

The occasion. al-Ṭabarsī, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, gives the classical account: al-ʿĀṣ b. Wāʾil al-Sahmī, asked whom he had been speaking with, called the Prophet "that cut-off one (al-abtar)," for the Prophet's son ʿAbdullāh had died and "they used to call whoever had no son abtar." al-Mīzān, citing al-Durr al-Manthūr, sequences the deaths — al-Qāsim first, then ʿAbdullāh, at Mecca — and records al-ʿĀṣ b. Wāʾil's jibe "his lineage is severed; he is abtar." al-Mīzān also honestly registers the variants — "in some reports the reviler is al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra, Abū Jahl, ʿUqba b. Abī Muʿayṭ, or Kaʿb b. al-Ashraf" — while holding "the reliable view is what preceded."

A distinct Imāmī line names the reviler ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ: so al-Qummī ("meaning your hater, ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ … he has neither religion nor lineage") and al-Burhān, which reproduces al-Qummī, Ibn Bābawayh's terse "al-abtar: ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ," and the polemical report of ʿAmr on the pulpit of Egypt boasting he "was given two hundred thousand dirhams to erase 'Surely your reviler is the one cut off.'" al-Mīzān supports the ʿAmr identification with al-Ṭabarsī's Iḥtijāj report of al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī rebuking him — yet al-Mīzān itself cautions that al-Qummī's mursal report (with its son-Ibrāhīm detail) "runs counter to the rest of the narrations," a divergence preserved here, not smoothed over.

The reversal and its meaning. The point, across the sources, is that the reviler — not the Prophet — is the one truly severed: "cut off from every good" and "the most diminished, the most abased" (Qatāda, in al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān), his "disbelief severed by his death" (al-Ṭūsī). al-Ṭūsī reads it as the answer to Quraysh's hope that the Prophet's "cause would be severed" once he died with no heir — "and the matter turned out exactly as Allah foretold."

al-Ṭabarsī draws out four proofs of prophethood from the brief sūra: the unseen report of what was "in the souls of his enemies"; the fulfilled promise that "his offspring multiplied until his lineage became greater than every lineage"; the iʿjāz that "the eloquent of the Arabs and non-Arabs were unable to produce its like"; and the foretold "collapse of their cause." The Enlightening Commentary echoes this as "the Miracle of this Surah," observing that the Ahl al-Bayt fill the world while "from the Umayyads … there remains no mentionable figure," and citing Fakhr al-Rāzī on the line of "Bāqir, Ṣādiq, Riḍā, and Nafs al-Zakiyya." Thus the closing verse loops back to the first: the Enlightening Commentary and al-Mīzān both identify Fāṭima's progeny as the very Kawthar given to the Prophet — the abundance that makes the slander of "abtar" recoil upon the one who hurled it. al-Ṭūsī adds a closing note on the verse's eloquence: li-rabbika is finer than "to us," wa-nḥar than "offer it up," and al-abtar than "the basest" — "these few letters have gathered many excellences."