Sūrah 53 · Āyāt 33–41

Al-Najm 33–41 — The One Who Turned Away, and the Scrolls of Moses and Abraham

The third section opens with a portrait of retreat: Have you seen him who turned away, and gave little and then stopped short? (vv.33–34). Does he possess knowledge of the unseen to warrant his gamble (v.35)? He is recalled instead to what is in the scrolls of Moses, and of Abraham who fulfilled (vv.36–37) — a charter of personal responsibility: no bearer shall bear the burden of another; man shall have nothing but what he strove for; his striving shall be seen; then he shall be recompensed with the fullest recompense (vv.38–41).

Who turned away? The occasion draws several names. Al-Ṭabarsī gives the fullest slate — ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān (whose foster-brother offered to shoulder his sins for a she-camel), al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra, al-ʿĀṣ b. Wāʾil, and Abū Jahl. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī frames it more soberly as a Meccan spending-episode and expressly doubts the ʿUthmān/Uḥud reading, since the sura is Meccan; he takes 'the unseen' as the man's imagined foreknowledge that spending would ruin him. The Enlightening Commentary reads the whole as a rebuke of buying off guilt with a token gift.

'Abraham who fulfilled.' Here the Arabic sources cluster. Al-Qummī and al-Ṭūsī gloss waffā as Abraham's complete discharge of God's command and prohibition — al-Ṭūsī recalling the sacrifice of his son and his being cast into the fire — and al-Baḥrānī preserves the striking tradition from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq that his 'fulfilling' was a daily formula of pure monotheism ('I have risen and my Lord is praised; I associate nothing with Him…'), for which he was named 'a grateful servant.' Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī anchors waffā in 2:124 ('when his Lord tried Abraham with words and he fulfilled them').

Personal responsibility and the reach of 'striving.' All four commentators affirm that no soul bears another's burden and man has only what he strove for. The tension they must negotiate is how this squares with intercession and vicarious benefit. Al-Ṭabarsī reports Ibn ʿAbbās's view that the ruling was abrogated (by 52:21, the joining of offspring), ʿIkrima's that it was specific to Abraham's and Moses's peoples, and the school view that it forbids proxy-worship except where evidence licenses it (as in ḥajj on another's behalf). Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī resolves it philosophically: the verse concerns real ownership — what one acquires by one's own act — and intercession, the believers' prayers, and instituting a good or evil sunna all attach to a person's own striving. On the closing to your Lord is the end (al-muntahā), al-Ṭūsī reads it as the final issue of reward and punishment, while al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī insists on its absoluteness: every existent and every act of governance terminates in God, in both origin and return — the hinge on which the sura's final movement toward the Resurrection now turns.