Sūrah 98 · Āyāt 6–8

The worst, and the best, of creatures. The closing verses split humanity by faith. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī gloss verse 6 plainly: those who deny God's oneness and the Prophet's mission "will be in the fire of Hell, their punishment never ending… the worst of creation (sharr al-bariyya)." Both pause on the variant reading of al-bariyya — Nāfiʿ and Ibn Dhakwān pronounce it with hamza (al-barīʾa, from baraʾa, "to create"), most without — al-Ṭūsī noting the alternative derivation from al-barā, "dust." Al-Mīzān observes the symmetry: verse 6 restricts worst-ness to the unbelievers exactly as verse 7 restricts (qaṣr) best-ness to the faithful. The Enlightening Commentary calls "the worst of all creatures" a "startling statement," explaining that they earned it because "all the means of salvation were prepared for them, but they refused intentionally."

Better than the angels. On "those who have faith and do righteous deeds — they are the best of creatures," al-Ṭūsī argues the superlative is unqualified: against the non-accountable, the accountable unbeliever, or the powerless, "the believer is undoubtedly the best." The Enlightening Commentary presses further — the phrase, being general and admitting no exception, "clearly shows that good believing people… are even higher than the angels."

"Ali and his Shīʿa." The single most attested point across the sources is the identification of khayr al-bariyya with Imam ʿAlī and his followers. Tafsīr al-Qummī says the verse "was revealed concerning the Family of Muḥammad." Al-Mīzān's narrative section gathers it from both directions: from al-Durr al-Manthūr (Ibn Mardawayh from ʿĀʾisha — "the noblest of creation"; Ibn ʿAsākir from Jābir — "this man and his Shīʿa are the triumphant on the Day of Resurrection," after which the companions said "the best of creatures has come"), and from Shawāhid al-Tanzīl. The Enlightening Commentary notes that the Sunni traditionist al-Ḥākim al-Ḥaskānī "cited more than twenty narrations" to this effect in Shawāhid al-Tanzīl. Al-Burhān assembles the fullest cluster — the deathbed address to ʿAlī (Yazīd b. Shuraḥīl), Jābir's report of the Prophet striking the Kaʿba, ʿAlī's adjuration of the Shūrā (Abū Rāfiʿ), and a chain explicitly "from the route of the opponents" (al-Muwaffaq b. Aḥmad's Manāqib) — the recurring promise being "you and your Shīʿa… radiant-faced, white-limbed, at the Pool," with the enemies cast as sharr al-bariyya. These are recorded as the transmitted reports they are; one fetched line in al-Burhān/al-Qummī even mislabels verse 6's lemma as khayr where the text reads sharr — an evident scribal slip, noted and not propagated.

The reward, and its summit. On verse 8, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read jannāt ʿadn as "Gardens of perpetual abode," and al-Ṭūsī defines riḍā precisely: a will "named pleasure only when its object has come about and is followed by no aversion." Al-Mīzān takes ʿadn as "settledness and permanence" and God's pleasure as "an attribute of act, its instance the reward." Both al-Mīzān and the present narrations dwell on the seal "that is for whoever feared his Lord": al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī ties it to "only those of His servants who have knowledge fear God" [35:28] — "knowledge entails fear, and fear entails faith." Al-Burhān records Imam al-Ṣādiq's gloss that "God is pleased with the believer in this world and the next," though the believer attains full pleasure "only when he beholds the reward," and that "whoever feared his Lord" means "whoever obeyed Him"; Tafsīr al-Qummī concurs — God "is pleased with their deeds," and the fearful are "those who refrained from the disobediences of God."