Sūrah 95 · Āyāt 6–8

The Believers' Exception and the Most Just of Judges (95:6–8)

The sūra closes by exempting the faithful from the downfall just described, naming their recompense, and turning on the hearer two rhetorical questions that clinch its argument for the Resurrection: "except those who have faith and do righteous deeds — for them is a reward unfailing (ghayr mamnūn); so what makes you deny, thereafter, the Recompense (al-dīn)? Is not God the most just of judges?"

The reward "unfailing." On ghayr mamnūn the present sources converge on a cluster of glosses: al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī both list "undiminished" (ghayr manqūṣ), "uncut-off" (Abū Muslim), "unreckoned" (Mujāhid), and "unmarred by anything hurtful" (al-Jubbāʾī); al-Mīzān settles on "uncut-off." My web cross-check confirms the dual sense — "never broken off" and, from the root manna ("to remind of a favour"), "without reproach." al-Ṭabarsī ties the exception back to the old-age reading of the previous verse: the believer who can no longer act in his dotage still has his former good "recorded for him," and he adduces a long Prophetic tradition from Anas on the stages of a believer's life (the divine favours at forty, fifty, sixty... ninety years), about which al-Ṭabarsī himself reasons soberly that, if sound, the elderly believer's lapses go unwritten only "because of the loss of his intellect."

The two questions. On "what makes you deny the Recompense," al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī again preserve two construals: the address is to "man" (al-Ḥasan, ʿIkrima, Abū Muslim) — what, after these proofs of your own creating, aging and frailty, moves you to deny requital? — or to the Prophet (Mujāhid, Qatāda) — who then could deny you concerning the true Religion? al-Mīzān frames the verse logically: it derives "the conclusion from the proof," the proof being that God, who made man into two groups, must in wisdom distinguish them in requital. On "Is not God the most just of judges?" all read it as an affirmation (taqrīr) of God's flawless governance; al-Ṭūsī presses it into a theological argument "against the doctrine of the Compulsionists (al-Mujbira) that God creates injustice," and al-Mīzān glosses it as God's being "above every judge in the perfection, rightness and effectiveness of judgement," linking it to Q 38:28 and 45:21 (God will not equate the righteous and the wicked). Both al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī close with the well-attested practice — from the Prophet, Ibn ʿAbbās and Abū Hurayra — of answering the final verse aloud: "Yes indeed (balā), and I am of those who bear witness."

The Imāmī application. al-Qummī and al-Burhān read al-dīn ("the Recompense") as the wilāya of ʿAlī: al-Qummī takes "that is the Commander of the Faithful," and al-Burhān carries narrations from al-Ṣādiq, al-Bāqir, Ibn Shahrāshūb and others to the same effect, alongside a vivid eschatological narration (via Abū Hurayra / Ibn ʿAbbās) in which ʿAlī, at the Resurrection, "emerges from the veil of majesty" crying "My Lord has judged in my favour" — read as the import of "the most just of judges." These polemical narrations, which name specific opponents in the Fire, are reported here strictly as attributed ḥadīth from al-Burhān's collection, not as the verse's literal meaning; al-Mīzān, recording the parallel Qummī narration on the oaths, expressly classes such readings as application rather than tafsīr.