Sūrah 94 · Āyāt 7–8

Verses 7–8 — "So when you are free, toil; and to your Lord turn your longing"

The surah closes by turning the Prophet (and, the exegetes stress, every believer) from received favor to active devotion. On fa-nṣab, the classical sources are unanimous that the root naṣb means fatigue / toil. Ṭabarsī assembles a wide spread of readings — when free from the prescribed prayer, "toil in supplication"; from worldly affairs, "toil in worship"; from one obligation, move to the next; from struggle against enemies, struggle against the self — and reports the Imāmī gloss attributed to al-Ṣādiq (ﻉ): "it is the supplication at the end of the prayer while seated." He caps it with Shurayḥ's rebuke to two men wrestling: "It is not for this that the free man was commanded." Ṭūsī gives the same core (Ibn ʿAbbās, Qatāda, Mujāhid) and adds the key universalizing note: "though the address is to the Prophet, what is meant is all the morally responsible of his community." al-Mīzān reads the two verses as branching off the whole prior argument: since "hardship is followed by ease and the matter rests with God alone," then "when you are free from what is enjoined, weary yourself for God… and long for Him," dismissing the narrower "supererogatory prayers / after-prayer supplication" glosses as partial instances.

On wa-ilā rabbika fa-rghab, the sources agree it directs all yearning and petition to God alone, "to the exclusion of any other" (Ṭūsī). Ṭabarsī: "raise your needs to your Lord and raise them not to any of His creatures."

The narrational sources add the distinctively Imāmī reading. Qummī and al-Burhān — drawing on a dense chain of reports (al-Ṣaffār, al-Kulaynī, al-Riḍā, al-Ṣādiq via Salmān, al-Mufaḍḍal, Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī) — read fa-nṣab as the command to appoint Imām ʿAlī: "when you are free from the Farewell Pilgrimage / from perfecting the law / from your prophethood, set up ʿAlī as successor." Several explicitly tie the verse to Ghadīr Khumm ("Whoever's master I am, ʿAlī is his master"). These are flagged for human review and presented as attributed narrations expressing the walāya tradition — not as displacing the philological sense, which al-Burhān itself closes with by citing Ṭabarsī: "when you are free from the prescribed prayer, toil toward your Lord in supplication," reported from al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq (ﻉ). The Enlightening Commentary holds both together: "never be idle or lazy… when you finish one task, begin another," while noting the many traditions that the verse points to "the appointment of Amīr al-Muʾminīn ʿAlī (ﻉ) to the caliphate after the fulfillment of the mission of prophethood."