Sūrah 112 · Āyāt 3–4

Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ 3–4 — "He did not beget, nor was He begotten; nor is there to Him any equal."

Where the first two verses affirm, these two negate, stripping from God every relation that would compromise His oneness: offspring, origin, and peer. The sources read the negations as the necessary completion of al-ṣamad. Al-Mīzān argues this most fully: each denial follows from God's being al-ṣamad. To beget is to divide and so to be composite, and the composite needs its parts — but al-ṣamad has no need; to be begotten is to need that from which one comes — but al-ṣamad needs nothing; and an "equal," in essence or in act, would have to be independent of God in the very respect of its equality — impossible, since everything besides Him needs Him "from every supposable direction." Al-Mīzān concludes that the whole Sūrah amounts to describing God as "Single and One" in essence, attributes, and acts. Strikingly, this very derivation is anticipated in a tradition that al-Ṭabarsī, the Enlightening Commentary, and al-Burhān all transmit — Imām al-Ḥusayn's letter to the people of Basra — in which God is said to "explain al-ṣamad" by these verses: nothing dense (like a child) or subtle (like a soul) emerges from Him, nor does He emerge from anything as offspring emerge from parents, plants from earth, or sight from the eye.

On lam yalid wa-lam yūlad, all six sources read a refutation of three or four communities. Qummī's Ibn-ʿAbbās narration is the most concrete: God did not beget — not ʿUzayr (Ezra), as the Jews said; not the Messiah, as the Christians said; not the sun, moon and stars, as the Magians said; not the angels, as the pagan Quraysh said. The Enlightening Commentary anchors the same list in the Qur'an — the Jews' "ʿUzayr is the son of God" and the Christians' "Christ is the son of God" (Q 9:30), the pagans attributing "sons and daughters" to Him (Q 6:100) — and, following the Ḥusayn letter, extends "begets" to a broad metaphysical sense: God emits nothing, dense or subtle, and no states (sleep, grief, laughter, hunger) "branch off" from Him. Al-Ṭūsī reads "He did not beget" as denying His being a "parent-god" and "nor was He begotten" as denying His being a "begotten-god," both being attributes of bodies; al-Ṭabarsī preserves ʿAlī's terse gloss (via ʿAbd Khayr): He did not beget "so as to be inherited and perish," nor was He begotten "so as to be a god who shares [lordship]."

On wa-lam yakun lahu kufuwan aḥad, the sources gloss kufuʾ as like, match, or peer. Al-Ṭūsī notes kufw / kifāʾ / kafīʾ are one word — the like and the equal. Al-Mīzān distinguishes an essential equal (which no religion ever asserted — none posits two Necessary Beings) from an equal in act/governance (which the idolaters did assert, of a Pharaoh or Nimrod claiming independent rule), and the verse negates both. Al-Ṭabarsī records a second reading — that kufuʾ alludes to a consort, since "a wife is an equal to her husband," so the verse denies God any spouse from whom a child could come — and then frames the whole Sūrah as a fourfold creed: oneness (aḥad), divine justice (al-ṣamad), the impossibility of begetter and begotten, and the impossibility of any peer, "so that pure oneness is attained." On this reading the four verses are not four separate claims but one indivisible doctrine of tawḥīd approached from four sides — which is why a sound tradition (web-confirmed ṣaḥīḥ, via Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī and others, and cited by al-Mīzān and the Enlightening Commentary) makes this Sūrah "equal to a third of the Qur'an."