Sūrah 75 · Āyāt 7–15

Verses 7–15 — The Day breaks, and man becomes a witness against himself

When the answer to the unbelievers' mocking question finally comes, it comes as cataclysm: "When the sight is dazzled, the moon is eclipsed, and the sun and moon are joined." The Arabic sources read the dazzling (bariqa l-baṣar) in two registers. al-Tibyān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān preserve the philologists' split — baraqa (with fatḥa) of a glittering light, bariqa (with kasra) of an eye struck with terror and bewilderment — and al-Ṭabarsī glosses the moment concretely: the eye "stares, fixed, on beholding the Angel of Death, unable to blink from the intensity of terror." al-Mīzān keeps it spare ("bewilderment and dismay in seeing") and reads the joining of sun and moon as their common loss of light, while Majmaʿ al-Bayān records Ibn Masʿūd's alternative that they are joined in rising from the west "like two yoked camels." The Enlightening Commentary canvasses both the astronomical readings — that the two share the property of being eclipsed, or that "the moon may approach the sun under the influence of the latter's gravity and finally join it" — and the moral upshot: the world's order is destroyed so that "the earth is plunged into frightening shadows." al-Qummī, characteristically terse, says only: "the sight is dazzled, unable to blink."

The unbeliever's cry "Where is the escape (al-mafarr)?" is met by God's own rebuff, "No indeed! No refuge (lā wazar)!" Here al-Qummī, al-Tibyān, al-Burhān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān speak almost in one voice: wazar is the mountain or fortress one fortifies oneself with — "whence the word 'vizier,' the one resorted to in affairs" — and the Enlightening Commentary pictures the deniers "searching for a safe haven out of shame," as they once sought escape from peril in this world. al-Mīzān presses the theology of the next clause, "To your Lord that day is the resting place": the fronting of "to your Lord" yields exclusivity — there is no refuge but Him — for "man is journeying to Him," meeting and ending to his Lord with no veil to bar the way.

Verse 13, "Man will be informed of what he sent ahead and left behind (mā qaddama wa-akhkhara)," gathers a cluster of readings the synthesis can stack: the first and last of his deeds (Mujāhid, in Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī); or — and here al-Qummī and al-Burhān both carry the report of Abū al-Jārūd from al-Bāqir — "what he advanced of good and evil, and the practice (sunna) he left to be followed after him; if evil, the like of their burden is upon him… if good, the like of their reward," with nothing diminished from those who follow. al-Mīzān lists the weaker options and sets them aside.

The passage's moral centre is verse 14: "Nay, man is a witness against himself (baṣīra), though he should cast forth his excuses." al-Mīzān reads baṣīra as "the heart's seeing and inward perception," then as the proof a man becomes against himself when "his hearing, sight and skin testify against him and his hands and feet speak." al-Tibyān and Majmaʿ al-Bayān concur — the limbs bear witness — and add the lexical possibility that maʿādhīr means not "excuses" but "curtains": though he draw the curtains and bar the doors to hide his deeds, his own soul testifies against him. Both al-Ṭabarsī (via al-ʿAyyāshī) and al-Burhān (via al-Kāfī) anchor the verse in a saying of al-Ṣādiq: "What does it profit a man to display good and conceal evil? … When the inner secret is sound, the outer is strengthened," sealed by the Prophet's word, "Whoever conceals an inner secret, God clothes him in its mantle — if good, then good; if evil, then evil." al-Burhān even carries the verse's juristic afterlife — ʿAlī's ruling that "whoever finds the taste of sleep, standing or sitting, must renew his ablution" — and al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṣādiq's use of it to leave the limit of fast-breaking illness to the believer who "knows best what he can bear."