Sūrah 75 · Āyāt 31–40

Verses 31–40 — The man who neither believed nor prayed, and the proof he overlooked

The closing movement portrays the very type the sūra has been indicting: "He neither confirmed [the truth] nor prayed, but denied and turned away, then went off to his household swaggering." al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī) reads the four verbs precisely — he did not confirm the call "in its creed," nor follow it "in its branches whose pillar is prayer," but belied and turned, "then went to his household strutting in arrogance." The Enlightening Commentary agrees that fa-lā ṣaddaqa denies "Resurrection, reckoning of deeds, Divine Revelation, monotheism, and the Prophetic Call," and reads the swaggering home as the conceit of a man who "imagined that he attained a great triumph." On the verb yatamaṭṭā, al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) and Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) give the lexicon — a stretching of the body in languor, "originally twisting the back" — and both record the widely-shared report that the verses came down concerning Abū Jahl, with al-Ṭabarsī preserving the scene of the Prophet seizing his hand and saying "Woe to you, then woe," and Abū Jahl's defiance, "Neither you nor your Lord can do anything to me; I am the mightiest of the people of this valley."

Here the present Imāmī sources lay an alternative occasion of revelation beside that one. Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) both report from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm that the verses were revealed after Ghadīr Khumm: the pledge to ʿAlī having been called for, "the people turned back," and Muʿāwiya — leaning on al-Mughīra b. Shuʿba and Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī — said, "We will never acknowledge ʿAlī's authority, nor believe Muḥammad's words concerning him"; the Prophet ascended the pulpit intending to disown him, whereupon "Move not your tongue with it to hasten it" was sent down and he fell silent and did not name him. al-Burhān adds Ibn Shahrāshūb's parallel from al-Bāqir. On "Woe to you, then woe (awlā laka fa-awlā)," all the sources agree it is a doubled threat; the Enlightening Commentary renders it as the warning that "Divine torment is further befitting you," while al-Burhān and al-Mīzān both carry al-Riḍā's gloss, "distance from you from the good of this world, and distance from you from the good of the Hereafter." al-Mīzān, surveying the grammarians' many parsings, favours reading it as a word "with which God seals his heart," echoing 47:20.

The sūra then returns to its opening question, now turned to its decisive proof: "Does man suppose he will be left aimless (sudan)?" al-Qummī glosses sudan as "neither reckoned, nor punished, nor questioned," and al-Mīzān notes the deliberate echo of verse 3 — to be left aimless would mean "not being charged or requited." The answer is the argument from embryology: "Was he not a drop of sperm emitted? Then a clinging clot, and He created and proportioned, and made of him the two mates, male and female. Is not That One able to give life to the dead?" al-Tibyān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān draw out the a fortiori force — He who turns the drop into a clot, then into a living, sensing, composite creature, and fashions the two sexes by whom reproduction is sound, "is the more able to restore him after death"; both note that "in the verse is proof of the soundness of rational analogy," al-Ṭabarsī adding that "He measured the second origination by the first." The sources close as the sūra does, with the Prophet's response to verse 40 preserved by al-Ṭabarsī, al-Burhān and al-Mīzān alike — from al-Barāʾ b. ʿĀzib and reported also from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq: "Glory be to You, O God — yes indeed (Subḥānaka Allāhumma wa-balā)!"