Sūrah 74 · Āyāt 32–48

al-Muddaththir 74:32–48 — The oaths, the pledge, and the dialogue in Saqar

What the passage says. A volley of oaths — kallā wa-l-qamar, "by the moon, by the night when it turns away, by the morning when it brightens" — answers that Saqar "is indeed one of the greatest [warnings]," "a warner to mankind," "to whoever of you wills to advance or hold back" (vv. 32–37). Then comes the principle: kullu nafsin bimā kasabat rahīna, "every soul is held in pledge for what it earned," except the Companions of the Right (38–39), who in their gardens question the guilty — "What drove you into Saqar?" The guilty answer themselves (43–46): "we were not of those who prayed, nor did we feed the needy; we used to wade [in vanity] with the waders and deny the Day of Requital, until certainty came to us" — "so the intercession of intercessors does not avail them" (48).

The lexical–theological reading. Al-Mīzān, Majmaʿ al-Bayān and al-Tibyān converge on the structure: the oaths magnify the warning; innahā la-iḥdā l-kubar refers to Saqar (or, al-Mīzān adds, possibly the Qurʾān's signs); and the warning is universalized to "whoever wills to advance or hold back," which the three read as a proof of human agency against the Jabriyya. On kullu nafsin… rahīna, al-Mīzān is the most developed: it is a pledge of servitude — every soul is detained with God until it pays faith's due, freed if it believes, held forever if it dies in disbelief — and he places the sābiqūn (56:10-11) wholly outside the division (37:127-128), neither pledged nor reckoned. All three gloss the guilty's confession the same way (prayer = God's right, feeding the needy = the people's right, al-yaqīn = death), and read fa-mā tanfaʿuhum shafāʿat al-shāfiʿīn as: intercessors exist, but their intercession cannot reach those barred from it (Ṭabarsī adds Ibn Masʿūd's ordered chain of intercession).

The Imāmī reading (al-Qummī, al-Burhān). Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān recast the same verses through the walāya, transmitted as-attributed: innahā la-iḥdā l-kubar… nadhīran = "Fāṭima" (al-Bāqir); the Companions of the Right = "the Commander of the Faithful and his Shīʿa," who put the question to "the enemies of Āl Muḥammad"; "we were not of those who prayed" = "not of the followers of the Imams" (al-Burhān adds al-Ṣādiq's gloss that al-muṣallī is the racehorse next after the foremost — so "not of the followers of the sābiqūn"); "we did not feed the needy" = withholding "the khums, the dues of Āl Muḥammad"; and "the intercession of intercessors does not avail them" = no intercession avails a nāṣib of Āl Muḥammad even from every angel and prophet. al-Burhān's continuous [31–56] run (carried whole in this unit) further fixes aṣḥāb al-yamīn as "our Shīʿa, the Ahl al-Bayt" by several chains, with the Prophet naming the guilty "the deniers of your walāya, O ʿAlī."

Convergence and divergence. All six affirm the plain frame: Saqar is a supreme warning; every soul is pledged save the saved, who interrogate the damned; and the four named sins — neglecting prayer, neglecting the poor, wading in falsehood, denying the Reckoning — seal their fate beyond intercession. They diverge on the identity of the actors: the Arabic tafsīrs and al-Mīzān keep them general (the middling believers, the universal warning, the fitna of the wardens carried over from v. 31), while al-Qummī and al-Burhān bind "the Companions of the Right," "those who prayed," and "feeding the needy" to the walāya and the khums — recorded as the sources transmit them, not endorsed. No source is silent on this passage.