Sūrat Yā-Sīn · Āyāt 66–83

What the passage says

This run of verses is one tightly argued unit: God displays His power in this world as the proof that He can raise the dead in the next, and along the way He defends His Prophet and answers the mockers who deny the resurrection.

(v. 66) Had God willed, He could blot out the deniers' eyes so that even as they raced for the road they could not see it. The scholars read this as blinding — whether a literal loss of sight, or, as Ibn ʿAbbās is reported to say, being blinded to guidance, or, as al-Ḥasan and Qatāda hold, being left to wander about sightless.

(v. 67) Had He willed, He could deform them on the spot — transfigured into apes or swine, says Ṭabarsī, right where they sit, unable to move forward or turn back. The point, Ṭabāṭabāʾī notes, is how effortless this is for God: a mere act of will.

(v. 68) And to anyone He grants long life, He reverses in his very make-up — strength sinking back into weakness, growth into decline, until old age returns a person almost to the helplessness of childhood. "Will they not then use their reason?" The One who can wind a human being backward like this can surely raise him again.

(v. 69) "We did not teach him poetry, nor would it suit him." The Qurʾān is no poem — it is "a reminder and a clear Qurʾān." This answers Quraysh, who sneered that what Muḥammad recited was just verse.

(v. 70) Its purpose is to warn "whoever is alive" — the believer, whose heart is alive — and to let the sentence of judgment fall justly on those who refuse it; the unbeliever, in this reading, is as good as dead.

(vv. 71–73) A turn to the everyday signs of God's lordship: He made the grazing animals "with Our own hands," and so people own them and bend them to use — some to ride, some to eat — drawing from them wool, hides, meat, and milk. "Will they not then give thanks?"

(vv. 74–75) Yet they take other gods beside God, hoping for help. Those gods can give no help at all; rather — in the plain sense — idols and worshippers alike will be herded together into the Fire.

(v. 76) A word of comfort to the Prophet: do not let their talk grieve you. God knows everything they hide and everything they say aloud.

(v. 77) Does man not see that God made him from a mere drop of fluid — and then he turns into "an open adversary," arguing against his own Maker?

(v. 78) He coins a comparison against God and forgets how he himself was made, asking, "Who will revive these bones once they have rotted away?"

(v. 79) The answer: "He will give them life who produced them the first time" — and He has full knowledge of every created thing.

(v. 80) He is the One who draws fire out of the green tree, so that you kindle flame from it — moisture and fire joined in one branch, a living sign that opposites lie within His power.

(v. 81) Is the One who created the heavens and the earth not able to create the like of these people? "Yes indeed — He is the All-Creating, the All-Knowing." A creation far greater than man already stands as proof.

(v. 82) His command, when He wills a thing, is only to say to it "Be" — and it is.

(v. 83) So glory be to Him in whose hand is the dominion (malakūt) of all things, and to whom you will all be returned.

Convergence — where the six agree

• All six read vv. 66–67 as a display of God's power to punish in this world — blinding the deniers and transfiguring them where they sit. Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī, al-Qummī, and al-Baḥrānī gloss "in their place" plainly as "in this world," and Ṭabarsī frames the whole verse as a threat (tahdīd).
• On v. 68 they share one core reading: long life reverses a person from strength to weakness and back toward a childlike state. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī both carry Qatāda's gloss that old age returns one to a child's frailty and the "setting" of knowledge; Ṭabāṭabāʾī and the Enlightening Commentary echo it (intellect to ignorance, memory to forgetting), and all treat the verse as an argument from the lesser to the greater: He who reverses a man's constitution can raise the dead.
• On v. 69 all six agree the Prophet was not taught poetry and that the Qurʾān is "a remembrance and a clear Qurʾān," not verse — and that this rebuts Quraysh's charge that he was merely a poet. Ṭabāṭabāʾī and Ṭabarsī even preserve the same supporting reports (the Prophet breaking the metre of a proverb, prompting Abū Bakr's witness; the line "I am the Prophet, no lie").
• On vv. 71–73 they are unanimous that God created the cattle by His own exclusive power ("by Our hands," no partner), that human ownership and use follow from that creation, and that the listed benefits are riding, meat, wool/hides, and milk (mashārib). al-Qummī, al-Baḥrānī, Ṭabarsī, and Ṭūsī all use the same vivid touch: the camel, for all its strength and bulk, is "driven by a child."
• On vv. 77–81 they converge that man, formed from a lowly drop and carried stage by stage to full intellect, becomes "an open adversary"; that the rotten-bone objection is answered by pointing back to the first creation (the return being easier than the origination); and that the green tree (v. 80) and the heavens-and-earth (v. 81) are a fortiori proofs of the resurrection.

Divergence — where they differ

There is little doctrinal disagreement here; the readings are largely complementary, but a few genuine differences stand out:

• The Zanādiqa refutation (v. 68). al-Qummī uniquely reads the verse as a rebuttal of the materialist heretics who claimed man is generated by natural forces (the elements, the turning sphere, the passing of night and day) — for then he would grow forever, not decline. al-Baḥrānī reproduces this reading; the other four do not carry it.
• The "host" of v. 75 — who serves whom. In the plain Qurʾānic sense (named by Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī through al-Jubbāʾī) idols and worshippers are together "fuel for Hell." But al-Qummī, al-Baḥrānī, and Ṭabāṭabāʾī transmit, through Abū al-Jārūd from Imām al-Bāqir, the inversion that the worshippers are an army mustered for the gods; Ṭabāṭabāʾī adopts this as the readiest reading and limits "gods" to idols, demons, and self-deifying tyrants. Qatāda's third option (they merely grow angry for the idols in this world) is noted by both Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī.
• Where the fire-trees grow (v. 80). al-Qummī places the markh and ʿafār trees in the western lands; al-Baḥrānī says the lands of the Maghrib; Ṭabāṭabāʾī's translator identifies them botanically (Senegal-to-India, and Ethiopia/Yemen/Arabia); the Enlightening Commentary sets them in "the deserts of Arabia" and adds two layers no one else has — that all wood can spark by friction, and a modern "resurrection of energies" reading drawn from photosynthesis.
• Depth on the metaphysics. Ṭabāṭabāʾī alone develops the heavier theology: that "the like of them" (v. 81) turns on the undying soul as the seat of identity, that the divine will (v. 82) is "an attribute of act," and that malakūt (v. 83) names the God-facing aspect of things as distinct from mulk. The classical and homiletic sources treat these more simply.
• The variant readings and the named objector. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī carry a rich apparatus of Qurʾānic variant readings (singular vs. plural "place," the doubled vs. light nunakkisuhu) absent from the others; and the sources name different deniers behind the rotten-bone challenge — Ubayy b. Khalaf, al-ʿĀṣ b. Wāʾil, or ʿAbdullāh b. Ubayy — without settling it.

Each scholar's full text is in the source panels below.