Sūrah 74 · Āyāt 8–31

al-Muddaththir 74:8–31 — The Trumpet, al-Walīd, and "over it are nineteen"

What the passage says. A trumpet-blast (fa-idhā nuqira fī l-nāqūr) opens "a hard day for the disbelievers." Then God turns to a single adversary — dharnī wa-man khalaqtu waḥīdan, "Leave Me with him whom I created alone" — recounting the wealth, sons and ease given him, his ingratitude and craving for more, and his cold calculation against the Qurʾān ("he reflected and devised… this is only magic transmitted, only the speech of a mortal"). The sentence is Saqar, "the scorcher," "over which are nineteen" (vv. 30–31), whose number is declared "a trial" that confirms the People of the Book, increases the believers' faith, and provokes the diseased of heart to ask "what did God intend by this?"

The occasion (near-unanimous). Al-Mīzān, Majmaʿ al-Bayān, al-Tibyān and al-Qummī agree the man is al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra al-Makhzūmī; web cross-checks confirm a near-unanimous classical consensus that vv. 11–26 describe him and his plot. al-Ṭabarsī preserves the Dār al-Nadwa council (the Quraysh settling on "magician" because magic "separates the loving"), while al-Qummī and al-Mīzān carry the recitation-of-Fuṣṣilat version (al-Walīd shuddering at "a thunderbolt like ʿĀd and Thamūd," then conceding the Qurʾān's "sweetness… it rises and is not risen above," before devising the charge of "magic"). The Imāmī sources add (al-ʿAyyāshī, via al-Ṭabarsī and al-Burhān) the reading that al-Waḥīd connotes "one of no known father."

The lexical and theological core. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī supply the dense apparatus — Saqar undeclined for gender and definiteness, lawwāḥa as scorching/blackening the skin, ʿanīd as stubborn enmity — and both, with al-Mīzān, read the nineteen as angel-wardens whose number is a fitna: a test that makes the Torah-and-Gospel agreement a proof of prophethood and exposes Abū Jahl's bravado ("can ten of you not seize one of them?"). al-Mīzān presses two points the others only touch: that "We have not made their number except as a trial" is a making-by-report, not by creation; and that the whole sūra is Meccan, defending this against the claim that "those in whose hearts is disease" requires a Medinan date (hypocrisy, he argues, has Meccan causes too, citing 29:10–11). On "none knows the hosts of your Lord but He," al-Mīzān notes the negation attaches to the hosts themselves, reserving to God all knowledge of their reality and number.

The Imāmī reading (al-Qummī, al-Burhān). Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān layer a sustained political and eschatological taʾwīl, transmitted as-attributed: nuqira fī l-nāqūr as the veiled Imām/Qāʾim whom God "strikes a point in his heart" to bring forth (al-Mufaḍḍal ← al-Ṣādiq), and the Nāqūr as Gabriel's heavenly proclamation of the walāya; and the whole al-Walīd portrait re-read of "Zufar" — "obstinate to Our signs" = denying ʿAlī's walāya, ṣaʿūd = a torment of the Qāʾim, "this is only magic" = "the Prophet bewitched people through ʿAlī." al-Burhān's long [31–56] run (from al-Kāẓim and others) fixes "those given certainty," "the increase in faith," and "it is but a reminder" all upon the walāya, and the nineteen as its sign. These readings are recorded here as the sources transmit them, not as established meaning.

Convergence and divergence. All six converge on the plain drama: a blessed ingrate who weighed the Qurʾān, branded it magic, and earned Saqar guarded by nineteen whose number tries the deniers. They diverge in register — the two Arabic tafsīrs and al-Mīzān keep the historical-theological frame (al-Walīd, the wardens as a probative fitna), while al-Qummī and al-Burhān recast the same verses through the walāya and the Qāʾim. No source is silent on this passage.