Sūrah 51 · Āyāt 47–51

al-Dhāriyāt 47-51 — the built heaven, the outspread earth, pairs, and “flee to God”

After the ruined nations, the sūra lifts the eye to the cosmos: “And the heaven — We built it with might, and We are surely expanders; and the earth — We spread it out, how excellent the Preparers! And of everything We created a pair, that you may remember.” The signs converge on a single summons: “So flee to God … and do not set up another god with God.”

On “bi-aydin,” all four Arabic sources agree the word means “with power”: Qummī glosses it flatly “with power,” Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī attribute this to Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda and Ibn Zayd, and al-Mīzān allows both “power” and “bounty.” On “mūsiʿūn” they spread the options — able to make greater, or wide in provision by rain (Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī) — and here al-Mīzān adds its celebrated further reading: that mūsiʿūn may derive from “widening,” so the verse opens toward “the expansion of the heaven’s creation, as the mathematical researches of today incline.” al-Mīzān also notes that the earth’s being “spread out” does not contradict its sphericity, quietly harmonising scripture and cosmology.

On the “pairs,” Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān read zawjayn as the great contraries — night and day, heaven and earth, jinn and men — or as male and female, all pointing to a Maker who is Himself beyond pairing, “One, unique” (al-Mīzān). It is precisely this verse that Baḥrānī makes the occasion for his richest material: two tawḥīd sermons. In the first, ʿAlī answers Dhiʿlib on the pulpit of Kūfa that the Lord is “seen” not by the eyes but by “the hearts, through the realities of faith,” and that God’s setting of things in opposed pairs — “of everything We created a pair” — is itself the proof that He has no partner and no divider. The second, from al-Riḍā, drives home that “the order of God’s oneness is the denial of limits from Him.” These are doctrinal, not sectarian, and cohere exactly with al-Mīzān’s reading of the pairs as a pointer to the unpaired One.

On “flee to God,” the sources offer two layers. Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān read the plain spiritual sense — flee from His punishment to His mercy, from all that distracts, by sincere worship of Him alone, the clause “do not set up another god” interpreting the flight. Alongside this, Qummī and Baḥrānī — and Ṭabarsī citing al-Ṣādiq — preserve the well-attested Imāmī gloss (from al-Bāqir and Zayd b. ʿAlī) that “flee to God” means “perform the Ḥajj”: since the Kaʿba is God’s House, whoever makes for it makes for God. The two readings are complementary, the pilgrimage being the outward enactment of the inward flight, and both close on the doubled warning, which Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī explain as two distinct admonitions — against withholding obedience, and against associating a god.