Sūrah 91 · Āyāt 8–10

The Inspired Soul: Felicity and Ruin (vv. 8–10)

After fashioning the soul, God "inspired it [to know] its wickedness (fujūr) and its godwariness (taqwā)," and the long chain of oaths finally discharges into its answer: "indeed he prospers who purifies it, and indeed he fails who corrupts it."

What the inspiration is. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī agree on the dominant gloss, traced to Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda and al-Ḍaḥḥāk: God "acquainted the soul with the path of wickedness and of godwariness," making it averse to the one and desirous of the other — He taught it to discriminate obedience from disobedience. Both also register a minority determinist reading ("He forsook it until it chose wickedness, and granted it success in godwariness"), recorded without endorsement. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī deepens the point philosophically: drawing on al-Rāghib, he defines fujūr as "tearing the veil of religion" and taqwā as "placing the soul in a guard," and argues that the inspiration attaches to the moral description of an act, not its bare form — God acquaints man that this act is wickedness and that godwariness (the same outward deed, e.g. consuming wealth or sexual union, being wickedness or godwariness by its object). Crucially he ties the inspiration back to the "fashioning" of v. 7: the practical intellect that distinguishes good from evil "is part of the completion of the soul's creation" — the innate fiṭra of Q 30:30.

The answer to the oath. All four Arabic commentaries identify "indeed he prospers who purifies it" as the jawāb al-qasam, with an implied emphatic lām ("la-qad aflaḥa"). Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read zakkāhā as cleansing and reforming the soul through obedience and righteous deeds (and, on one transmission via Thaʿlab, through charity), and dassāhā as abasing, corrupting, or leading it to ruin through sin. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī grounds the metaphor: zakāt is "wholesome, blessed growth," so purification is growing the soul by adorning it with godwariness and provisioning it (citing Q 2:197, "the best provision is godwariness"); tadassī — literally "inserting with concealment" — is making the soul grow "contrary to what its nature requires."

The devotional and the esoteric. Al-Ṭabarsī preserves the Prophet's practice of pausing at this verse to pray, "O God, grant my soul its godwariness; You are its Guardian and Master; purify it, for You are the best of those who purify it," together with the Bāqir–Ṣādiq gloss: "he prospers who obeys… he fails who disobeys" — a gloss al-Baḥrānī transmits in the same words. Against this universal-moral reading, al-Qummī and al-Baḥrānī again carry the Imāmī taʾwīl: the soul purified is "the Commander of the Faithful, whom his Lord purified," and the one who "corrupts it" is read polemically of the first two caliphs "in their [false] pledge of allegiance" — content rendered here as the sources give it and flagged as sectarian-sensitive. The Enlightening Commentary draws the plain sense to a pastoral point: of all God's gifts, the Qurʾān singles out here the inspired conscience that knows piety from impiety, "because this is the most important factor in the destiny of man" — salvation hangs on keeping the soul in its original purity, ruin on soiling it by choosing evil.