Sūrah 110 · Āyāt 3–3

Sūrat al-Naṣr 3 — Celebrate the praise of your Lord, and seek His forgiveness; indeed He is ever-relenting

This is the long-delayed answer to āyāt 1–2: when the help, the victory, and the in-gathering arrive, the response commanded is not triumphalism but glorification, praise, and the seeking of forgiveness. The present sources read the command along two complementary lines.

A blessing creates an obligation. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī give nearly identical reasoning: fa-sabbiḥ orders the Prophet to "declare God far above whatever does not befit Him," and the duty is tied to the victory because "a blessing requires the fulfilment of its due — thanking the Bestower, magnifying Him, and obeying Him." Both confront the obvious question — why istighfār for a sinless Prophet? — and answer that "an event has occurred that calls for thanksgiving and seeking forgiveness even if there be no sin," since istighfār can be pure glorification and "devotion wholly to God," not only contrition. Al-Ṭūsī stresses that the address, though to the Prophet, "is an instruction to his whole community."

Glory, beauty, and need. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) deepens this into a structure: because the victory was an "abasement of polytheism and exaltation of [divine] oneness — a nullification of falsehood and vindication of truth," it fits to glorify God (tasbīḥ, His majesty) and to praise Him (taḥmīd, His beauty); and because the Prophet's lifelong striving against falsehood was now largely complete, he is told also to recall "his own deficiency and need" through istighfār. For one already forgiven, al-Mīzān explains, seeking forgiveness means "asking for the continuance of forgiveness — the need for it in its perpetuation is like the need for it in its origination." The Enlightening Commentary frames the three commands as a guard at the dangerous "moment of victory" against "pride, self-conceit, or revenge," and reads innahu kāna tawwāban both as the reason for istighfār and as a hint that the victor should, like God, accept the repentance of the defeated — as the Prophet did at Mecca.

"Ever-relenting" (tawwāb). Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī gloss it precisely: God "accepts the repentance of those who remain just as He accepted the repentance of those who passed"; as a divine attribute al-tawwāb is "the One who abundantly accepts repentance," and in the servant "the one who abundantly performs repentance."

The surah of farewell. A striking convergence: every narrational source reads this short surah as foretelling the Prophet's death. Ṭabarsī names it Sūrat al-Tawdīʿ and reports al-ʿAbbās weeping, Ibn ʿAbbās's "my soul is to be taken this year," and the maxim "at the point of perfection, decline is awaited." Al-Mīzān cites the same Muqātil report and the testimony of al-Riḍā that this was "the last surah revealed" — qualifying it as the last revealed complete (a point independently confirmed in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim via Ibn ʿAbbās). Al-Baḥrānī gathers the supporting narrations — the Prophet's constant "Glory be to Allah and His praise; I seek His forgiveness and turn to Him" between takbīr and recitation (Umm Salama, Ibn Masʿūd, ʿĀʾisha) — alongside distinctively Imāmī material ("O ʿAlī, O Fāṭima," the Thaqalayn), recorded as transmitted and flagged for review. Tafsīr al-Qummī is silent on this āyah, commenting only on the occasion at āyah 1.