Sūrah 104 · Āyāt 8–9

Closed over them, in outstretched columns — the seal of eternity (104:8-9)

The surah ends on the closing of the Fire: {Indeed it will be closed over upon them, in outstretched columns}. On {muʾṣada}, the sources agree it means firmly shut. al-Ṭabarsī: "shut over its people, its doors fastened to confirm despair of escape." al-Ṭūsī supplies the philology — aṣadtu/awṣadtu al-bāb, "I shut the door," two dialects, kin to al-waṣīd (the threshold) of {their dog stretching its forelegs at the threshold} (al-Kahf 18:18), noting Abū ʿAmr's pronunciation of the hamza. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī reads it as "clamped shut, with no exit nor deliverance," and the Enlightening Commentary ties the punishment to the crime: as the hoarders "kept their riches in locked safes and secret storage, God puts them in a punishment shut up in Hell without a door to flee from."

On {in outstretched columns}, the readings multiply around a single image of immovable confinement. al-Ṭabarsī collects them: the plural of ʿamūd (Abū ʿUbayda: the stakes of the covers clamped over the people of the Fire); Muqātil's doors "made fast with pegs of iron, of fire," so no breeze enters; al-Ḥasan's columns of the canopy (surādiq) of al-Kahf 18:29; al-Kalbī's "columns like masts, stretched over them"; and Ibn ʿAbbās's reading that they are "in shackles upon their necks." al-Ṭūsī echoes the spread (Ibn Masʿūd, Ibn ʿAbbās — the chained — and Qatāda), defining the ʿamūd as "a round, elongated pillar strong against heavy bearing-down." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī adds the maqāṭir, "great trunks bored with holes" that hold prisoners' feet. The Enlightening Commentary lists three commentaries — iron nails fastening Hell's doors, stocks-and-fetters punishment "the result of the tortures they used on the innocent," and a modern reading likening the columns to penetrating "pillar-shaped" rays — judging "the first the most appropriate," and closes the surah with reflections on pride as "the origin of great sin" and on lawful versus idolized wealth.

The Imāmī sources supply the eschatological narrations. al-Qummī glosses muṭbaqa (clamped) and, on the columns, "when they are stretched, by God it devours the skins." al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) bundles three: the Qummī gloss; the ʿAyyāshī narration (Ḥumrān ← al-Bāqir) — also relayed in al-Ṭabarsī and in al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī's own narrational appendix — that the people of tawḥīd are interceded out of the Fire by the angels, prophets, and believers, "and they come out as the moth comes out," while "the columns were stretched and it was shut" in eternity over the rest; and a long, graphic ḥadīth from Kitāb Ṣifat al-Janna wa-l-Nār (al-Juʿfī ← al-Bāqir) describing the Fire entering from the back to "mount up over the hearts," crushing the bones, and the final sealing "shut over them" with "its columns barred." These narrations — the intercession-from-Hell report and the Ṣifat al-Janna ḥadīth — are recorded strictly as transmitted, not endorsed; their chains (al-Juʿfī among them) are not independently vetted.