Sūrah 92 · Āyāt 5–11

The passage (92:5–11). Here the "diverse endeavours" of the opening are resolved into two portraits. The first: "As for him who gives and is Godwary, and affirms the best (al-ḥusnā), We will ease him to the easy way (al-yusrā)" (5–7). The second: "But as for him who is miserly and deems himself self-sufficient, and denies the best, We will ease him to the hard way (al-ʿusrā); and his wealth will not avail him when he perishes (taraddā)" (8–11).

Giving, Godwariness, and "the best." Ṭabataba'i (al-Mīzān) reads "gives" as spending wealth for God's Face (proven by its opposition to "miserly" and by v. 11), with "is Godwary" explaining that the giving is on the way of religious taqwā. On al-ḥusnā the sources spread out: Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) catalogues the views — the recompense (Ibn ʿAbbās, ʿIkrima), God's oneness (al-Ḍaḥḥāk), the Garden (Mujāhid, al-Ḥasan), God's promise (Qatāda) — while al-Mīzān fixes it as "the good promise," i.e. affirming the Resurrection and, with it, God's oneness and the Messengership. The Enlightening Commentary ties al-ḥusnā directly to Abū al-Daḥdāḥ, "who with faith in the Divine rewards spent his wealth."

"Easing" to ease or to hardship. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī both unpack fa-sanuyassiruhu as either making obedience progressively easy, or enabling the path to the Garden (and conversely the Fire). Both insist this is not compulsion: Ṭūsī is emphatic that God does not bar the morally responsible from either path nor force them — He confirms them upon the two, lifts the barrier, and encourages one over the other, "and if he chooses ill, ruin comes from his own self." Al-Mīzān reaches the same anti-determinist result and adds that the easing to hardship is itself something on which the easing to ease depends, "that God may distinguish the foul from the good" [8:37].

Who is meant. Ṭabarsī, Qummī and Baḥrānī all carry the asbāb identification: the giver is Abū al-Daḥdāḥ (Qummī's chain calls him "Ibn al-Daḥdāḥ"), the miser the palm's owner. Ṭabarsī also records the Sunni-leaning report (Ibn al-Zubayr) that the verse came down about Abū Bakr freeing slaves such as Bilāl and ʿĀmir b. Fuhayra — but he, like Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān, concludes the verses are general: for everyone who gives God's due and everyone who withholds it. Ṭūsī names the asbāb figures as Abū al-Daḥdāḥ al-Anṣārī and Samura b. Ḥabīb.

The Imāmī layer and the meaning of "perishes." Qummī and Baḥrānī gloss "affirms the best" / "denies the best" as affirming or denying the walāya (allegiance to the Imams). Baḥrānī adds al-Bāqir's "ten-for-one" narration (God repays a single good deed tenfold, up to a hundred thousand and more) — the same narration Ṭabarsī cites via al-ʿAyyāshī ← Saʿd al-Iskāf. On taraddā (v. 11), Qummī reads simply "when he dies," while Ṭabarsī and Baḥrānī preserve al-Bāqir's striking gloss: "by God, it is not a falling from a mountain or a wall or into a well, but a falling headlong into the Fire of Hell." Ṭūsī aligns with this ("in the Fire of Hell… related from Abū Jaʿfar"), and al-Ḥasan's aphorism in Ṭabarsī seals the passage's view of wealth: "what do the dead do with wealth?"