Sūrah 90 · Āyāt 8–10

al-Balad 90:8–10 — the faculties God gave the human being, and the two open roads of good and evil. Having declared man "created in toil," the passage turns to the equipment with which he must meet that toil. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) reads the gifts purposively: the two eyes are "to see thereby the traces of His wisdom," the tongue and lips "to speak... making things plain with the tongue and aided in articulation by the two lips." al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) presses the same data into a proof of God's oneness: the eyes "to see with," the tongue and lips "to speak with," the two paths "that he might reason by them" — for "the firmly-wrought and well-ordered can come only from One who knows, and the fixing of acts upon [intended] meanings can come only from One who freely chooses." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) glosses the bodily organs plainly — that by which "knowledge of visible things accrues to him" and that "by which he is helped to speak."

The two highlands. All present sources converge that al-najdayn are "the way of good and the way of evil." al-Ṭabarsī anchors this in a weighty chain — ʿAlī (ʿa), Ibn Masʿūd, Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Ḥasan, Mujāhid and Qatāda — and al-Ṭūsī repeats nearly the same roster. Both also record the minority reading "the two breasts" (al-thadyayn); al-Ṭabarsī pointedly rebuts it with a narration that the Commander of the Faithful (ʿa), told that "some people say they are the two breasts," replied: "No — they are good and evil." al-Ṭabarsī adds the Prophetic saying reported by al-Ḥasan: "They are two highlands — the highland of good and the highland of evil; so why have you made the highland of evil dearer to you than the highland of good?" He resolves the puzzle of why evil too is called a "highland": both ways are named najd because each "is plain and conspicuous" to the morally responsible. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī gives a complementary reason — they are called najdayn "because of the exertion and striving involved in travelling each of them" — and stresses that the guidance is innate: "We taught him the way of good and the way of evil by an inspiration from Us, so that he knows the good and distinguishes it from the evil."

The Imami taʾwīl. Alongside the plain sense, two present sources add an interpretive layer. Tafsīr al-Qummī, after giving the literal "We made plain to him the way of good and the way of evil," appends a distinctly Imami reading of the two paths "to the wilāya of the two" — i.e. guidance toward allegiance. al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) carries the boldest taʾwīl of the faculties themselves: "the two eyes are the Messenger of God, the tongue is the Commander of the Faithful, and the two lips are al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn," while affirming for verse 10 the same literal "highland of good and of evil." These narrational glosses sit atop, not in place of, the lexical consensus the other commentators establish — the passage's plain burden being that a creature so equipped, and shown both roads, is left without excuse.

The Enlightening Commentary (Imani) reads the catalogue of gifts as a deliberate break of human pride: the eyes are "the most important means by which to communicate with the outside world" — it dwells on the seven coordinated parts of the eye as evidence of the Creator — the tongue conveys "the experience and information of one nation to another, or from one generation to another," and the lips serve speech, eating and drinking. It confirms the lexical point that najd "originally means 'an open highway,'" so najdayn, set against tihāma (low land), are "the two highways of good and evil," and it cites the Prophetic ḥadīth that God gave man the very means of self-control: "O children of Adam! If your tongue wants to make you commit sin, I have supplied you with two lips to control it; and if your eyes … two eyelids; close them!"