مِن شَرِّ ٱلْوَسْوَاسِ ٱلْخَنَّاسِ
from the evil of the sneaky tempter
ٱلَّذِى يُوَسْوِسُ فِى صُدُورِ ٱلنَّاسِ
who puts temptations into the breasts of humans,
مِنَ ٱلْجِنَّةِ وَٱلنَّاسِ
from among the jinn and humans.’
English translation: Ali Quli Qarai
The refuge sought in vv. 1–3 is now given its object: min sharr al-waswās al-khannās, alladhī yuwaswisu fī ṣudūr al-nās, min al-jinnati wa-l-nās — "from the evil of the slinking whisperer, who whispers in the breasts of mankind, from among jinn and mankind." The sources converge closely on the lexicon and the identity of the whisperer, and diverge only where the Imāmī narrations add material.
Lexicon. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī agree that waswās is the soul's inner speech resembling a faint sound, and that khannās is an intensive from khunūs — "to hide after appearing." Ṭūsī links it to "so I swear by the slinkers" (81:15), the stars that vanish after showing. Ṭabāṭabāʾī adds that khannās names Satan because he whispers, withdraws when God is remembered, then returns at heedlessness — and that "breasts" here means the souls, the seat of perception, since perception is idiomatically ascribed to the heart, "the hearts that are in the breasts" (22:46).
Who whispers. All four Arabic sources report the threefold grammatical analysis of "from the evil of the slinking whisperer" (the evil of the whispering itself; the evil of its possessor, Satan; or the evil of every rebel of jinn and men), and all read min al-jinnati wa-l-nās as teaching that the whisperer is of two kinds — devils among the jinn who whisper unseen, and devils among men who come openly pretending to counsel. Ṭabāṭabāʾī anchors this in "the devils of men and jinn" (6:112); Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī make the same point. The much-cited hadith of Anas recurs in Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān: "Satan sets his snout upon the heart of the son of Adam; when he remembers God he slinks away, and when he forgets, he devours it." Qummī and Baḥrānī add al-Ṣādiq's image of two ears on every heart — an angel breathing into one, the slinking whisperer into the other — and Ibn ʿAbbās's picture of a pig-snouted Satan who withdraws at God's remembrance.
The Imāmī expansions. Ṭabāṭabāʾī preserves from al-Ṣadūq's Amālī the scene of Iblīs on Mount Thawr after 3:135, where the "slinking whisperer" volunteers to make sinners forget to seek forgiveness — and is entrusted with the task till the Resurrection. Qummī and Baḥrānī gather the distinctively Shīʿī cluster: that the two suras of refuge were revealed together when the Prophet fell ill and were used by Gabriel (and, in Baḥrānī's Fuḍayl report, Michael) to charm him; that they are unquestionably part of the Qurʾan; and, pointedly, that "Ibn Masʿūd used to erase the two suras of refuge from the codex" — to which Abū Jaʿfar replies that he did so "on his own opinion, and the two are part of the Qurʾan." (The historical report that Ibn Masʿūd's codex omitted the muʿawwidhatayn is attested in Sunni sources too, where scholars read it as a copyist's reservation rather than a denial of their canonicity.) Baḥrānī caps the passage with well-known merits — Ubayy's "as though he recited all the revealed books," and ʿUqba b. ʿĀmir's report, which Muslim includes, that "verses the like of which were never sent down" are these two. Qummī's block runs on into ʿAlī's gathering of the Qurʾan and "Āl Muhammad are those firmly rooted in knowledge"; that companion-polemical and walāya-tinged material is flagged for review and rendered strictly as attributed.
The Enlightening Commentary keeps to the moral register: the whisperers work hiddenly, mixing sin into the guise of worship and falsehood into the shell of truth — citing ʿAlī's Sermon 50 on how, were falsehood unmixed with truth, seekers would easily shun it — so that one must take refuge with God from every tempter "of jinn and men," never presuming oneself beyond need of divine help.