Sūrah 99 · Āyāt 4–5

The earth turns witness. The passage answers the bewildered question of verse 3: on that Day tuḥaddithu akhbārahā — the earth recounts its news. Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) glosses this as the earth telling “what was done upon it,” and anchors it in the Prophetic ḥadīth: “Do you know what its news is? … It bears witness against every servant for what he did upon its back, saying: he did such-and-such on such-and-such a day.” al-Ṭabarsī reinforces the point with the report “have a care for the earth, for she is your mother — there is no one on her who does good or evil but she informs of it,” and Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī's tradition that no jinn, human, or stone hears the adhān but bears witness for the caller. The published Enlightening Commentary (Imani) frames the same idea: the very earth on which we act is “one of the greatest witnesses to Man's deeds,” and adds ʿAlī's practice of praying at scattered spots and addressing the treasury, “bear witness for me that I ruled you justly.”

How can the earth “speak”? al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) and al-Ṭabarsī lay out the same range of explanations: God may turn the earth into a creature able to speak; or create speech in it and ascribe it figuratively; or make manifest in it signs that stand in the place of speech — illustrated by the Arabs' “your eyes testify to your sleeplessness” and the poetic “the two eyes said: hearing and obedience.” al-Ṭūsī also cites Ibn Masʿūd: “the earth speaks that Day, saying: God commanded me with this.” The Enlightening Commentary adds a modern analogy — recordings and films that capture deeds as undeniable courtroom evidence — and reads the earth's speech as one instance of the effects of every act being made manifest.

“Because your Lord inspired it.” On bi-anna rabbaka awḥā lahā, al-Ṭabarsī explains awḥā as God's instructing or permitting the earth to recount (so too al-Farrāʾ and Ibn ʿAbbās: “by God's revelation and His leave”), with the lexical note that awḥā lahu and ilayhi mean to cast a thing from a hidden quarter; al-Ṭūsī agrees and cites al-ʿAjjāj. al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) presses deeper: the lām of lahā carries the sense of ilā, since īḥāʾ governs its object with ilā — so the earth recounts “because your Lord inspired to it.” For al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī this implies the earth is genuinely aware of the deeds it bears, given leave on the Last Day to testify; he ties it to “there is nothing but glorifies Him” (17:44) and “God made all things speak” (41:21), concluding that life and perception in fact “run through all things, even if we are heedless of it” — so the scholastic dispute over whether the speech is literal or figurative loses its force.

The Shīʿī register. al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) carries the narration of al-Faḍl b. al-Zubayr: ʿAlī, stilling a tremor in the Raḥba, recites through these very verses and asks, “Do you not see that it tells concerning its Lord?” — reading the earth's inspired testimony as a sign bound to the walī. The isnād and taʾwīl are flagged for review. Tafsīr al-Qummī offers no distinct gloss on vv.4–5 and is recorded as silent here.