Sūrah 100 · Āyāt 6–8

The answer to the oaths: man's ingratitude. The five oaths discharge into a single verdict — inna l-insāna li-rabbihi la-kanūd — and the present sources agree on the core gloss while spreading its nuance. al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī), Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) and al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) all read kanūd = kafūr, the ingrate, on the authority of Ibn ʿAbbās, Qatāda, al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid and Ibn Zayd; al-Ṭabarsī derives it from "the kanūd land that grows nothing," its root the withholding of what is due, and preserves the dialectal spread (the disobedient in Kinda and Ḥaḍramawt, the ingrate in Muḍar and Rabīʿa) and the Prophetic gloss from Abū Umāma — "the kanūd is he who eats alone, withholds his gift, and beats his slave" — with al-Ḥasan's memorable "he who counts misfortunes and forgets blessings." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī sets the verse beside inna l-insāna la-kafūr (al-Ḥajj 66) and reads it as a report of a nature absorbed in the world's fleeting goods and so "cut off from thanking his Lord."

Witness against himself, or witnessed by God? On wa-innahu ʿalā dhālika la-shahīd the sources weigh the pronoun. al-Ṭūsī gives both: al-Ḥasan's "man is a witness to that" and Qatāda's "God is a witness to that." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī argues from "the consistency of the pronouns" that the witness is man himself — his own blameworthy knowledge of his ingratitude — the verse in the sense of bal al-insānu ʿalā nafsihi baṣīra (al-Qiyāma 14). The Enlightening Commentary (Imani) agrees that referring the pronoun to God is "very improbable" given the surrounding pronouns, and adds that man witnesses his ingratitude "in this world, too."

Intense in the love of wealth. On wa-innahu li-ḥubbi l-khayri la-shadīd, al-Ṭūsī, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān take al-khayr as wealth: man is "intense" — i.e. niggardly (al-Ḥasan: shaḥīḥ), withholding God's due for love of it; al-Ṭabarsī cites Ṭarafa on the grasping miser and Ibn Zayd's note that wealth is called "good" only because people reckon it so. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī floats a subtler reading: love of good is innate, but man mistakes the world's adornment for the good and is thereby made to forget his Lord. The Enlightening Commentary lands the same way — khayr spans every good, but the commentators narrow it here to wealth, "which the ungrateful disbeliever turns to self-interest" — and devotes a closing note to the question "Is man naturally ungrateful?", answering that man has two poles and these verses name only the lower one.

The ʿAlid overlay. Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān again read the verses onto two specific men: the kanūd and the "witness to enmity" are the two commanders who, "out of envy," urged ʿAlī off his road, and their "love of khayr" is love of [their own] life — they feared the wild beasts of the predator-track. al-Baḥrānī adds Jābir's gloss ("that is the Commander of the Faithful") and a report glossing kanūd as ingratitude "toward the wilāya of the Commander of the Faithful." These are recorded as transmitted taʾwīl, standing beside — not in place of — the plain moral reading.