Sūrah 89 · Āyāt 6–14

The passage turns from oath to history: ʿĀd of Iram "possessors of the pillars," Thamūd "who hewed the rock in the valley," and Pharaoh "of the stakes" — three powers that "transgressed in the lands and multiplied corruption," upon whom God "poured a scourge of punishment," because "surely your Lord is ever on the watch (la-bi-l-mirṣād)."

Identifying Iram. The sources share a menu of opinions but weigh it differently. Al-Mīzān reads Iram as a peerless city of ʿĀd in al-Aḥqāf, yet treats the lurid "garden of Iram" legends (from Wahb b. Munabbih and Kaʿb al-Aḥbār) as myth. Ṭabarsī, by contrast, reproduces that legend in full — ʿAbd Allāh b. Qilāba stumbling on a jewelled city in the deserts of ʿAdan, and Kaʿb al-Aḥbār identifying it to Muʿāwiya as Shaddād b. ʿĀd's defiant imitation of Paradise, destroyed by a cry from heaven. Ṭūsī stays terse: Iram is variously a tribe, a town (Alexandria or Damascus), or ʿĀd's ancestor; "possessors of the pillars" means either tall, powerful frames or great buildings.

Thamūd and Pharaoh. On Thamūd the sources converge: they carved houses from the mountains of Wādī al-Qurā (Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all cite 26:149). On Pharaoh "of the stakes" two readings stand side by side — Ibn ʿAbbās's "possessor of armies / tent-pegs" (cited by Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī) and the torture-explanation, that he staked his victims' limbs to the ground or to wood, which al-Mīzān links to Pharaoh's own threat to crucify the magicians (20:71). Al-Burhān anchors that last reading in a chain from al-Ṣādiq (via Abān al-Aḥmar) giving exactly this account. Qummi adds a distinct note: Pharaoh built "the stakes" to climb to heaven, and ʿĀd was destroyed "by the howling, frigid wind."

"Your Lord is ever on the watch." This is the passage's hinge, read on two levels. Lexically (Ṭūsī, al-Mīzān) al-mirṣād is the watch-place from which a watcher seizes the passer-by unaware — a representative metaphor for God's inescapable oversight of deeds. Theologically Ṭabarsī gathers narrations that turn it eschatological: from ʿAlī, that God is able to requite the disobedient; from al-Ṣādiq, that the mirṣād is "a bridge over the Path which no servant bearing another's wrong may cross"; and the seven-station bridge of Ibn ʿAbbās where the testimony, prayer, zakāt, fasting, Ḥajj, ʿumra and wrongs-to-others are each examined. al-Mīzān adds that annexing "your Lord" to the Prophet signals that this law of requital runs in his community as it ran among the nations destroyed before.

Synthesis. The named nations are not antiquarian. Every present source reads them as a warning addressed through the Prophet to his contemporaries, the recurring lesson being that overwhelming worldly power — "the like of which was not created in the lands" — is no defence against a Lord who is la-bi-l-mirṣād.