Sūrah 96 · Āyāt 6–14

The turn from gift to transgression. Having recounted God's blessings, the surah pivots: "Indeed man becomes rebellious when he considers himself without need." Every source reads this as a diagnosis of human nature. The Enlightening Commentary notes the verse's delicacy — it says man thinks himself self-sufficient, not that he is — since no creature is ever free of need for God's grace. Al-Ṭabarsī glosses the rebellion as overstepping one's bound through "clan, wealth and strength," and cites Qatāda that the man, on gaining wealth, merely enlarged "his clothes, his mount, his food and drink." Al-Mīzān casts it as ingratitude: absorbed in himself and the outward means to his ends, man "grows heedless of his Lord… so he forgets Him and transgresses." Al-Qummī and al-Burhān compress the whole into one line: "when man becomes self-sufficient, he disbelieves, transgresses and denies."

"To your Lord is the return." Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī both read verse 8 as the rebuttal to that conceit — how can man be insolent with wealth when his return is to the One able to destroy and requite him? Al-Mīzān reads it, given the threat that follows, as a warning of "death and resurrection," addressed to the Prophet.

The man who forbids prayer. Verses 9–14 turn to a concrete transgressor. Al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all identify "a servant when he prays" as the Prophet himself, and the forbidder — per the mainstream report Muslim records and al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān both cite — as Abū Jahl, who swore to tread on the Prophet's neck mid-prostration but recoiled, finding "a trench of fire, and terror, and wings" between them; the Prophet said the angels would have "snatched him away limb by limb." The Enlightening Commentary relates the same incident and stresses that, although the occasion is Abū Jahl, "man" remains collective and Abū Jahl is only an example. Notably, al-Qummī and al-Burhān instead name al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra as the forbidder — and al-Mīzān explicitly weighs this Qummī narration against the context and judges it not to fit "the apparent sense… that the one praying is the Prophet."

"Does he not know that God sees?" The closing verses, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī explain, lay out the alternatives — what if the one praying is rightly guided and bidding others to Godwariness, while the forbidder is the one who "calls him a liar and turns away"? Al-Mīzān refines "does he not know" as knowledge by entailment: even the idolater, who concedes God is Creator of all, is thereby committed to God's all-seeing knowledge, "even if he is heedless of it." The Enlightening Commentary draws the practical lesson in the maxim "Worship God as if you see Him, for if you do not see Him, He sees you." Al-Ṭabarsī adds a striking counter-example of restraint: ʿAlī, seeing people pray voluntarily before the festival prayer, refused to forbid them — "I do not wish to forbid a servant when he prays" — teaching by the very words of the verse.