Sūrah 100 · Āyāt 1–5

Five oaths, then a verdict on the human heart. The surah opens with God swearing by a charge of war — al-ʿādiyāt that pant (ḍabḥan), al-mūriyāt that strike sparks, al-mughīrāt that raid at dawn, then stir a trail of dust and plunge into the massed enemy. The present sources divide over the referent of the oath and converge on its gravity.

Horses or camels? al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) and Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) lay out the classical dispute. Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda and ʿAṭāʾ read al-ʿādiyāt as the war-horses charging in God's path, ḍabḥ being the sound of their breath at the gallop; Ibn Masʿūd — and, in a celebrated report both preserve, ʿAlī (a) — read them as the camels of the pilgrims pressing from ʿArafa to Muzdalifa to Minā, since (ʿAlī argued) there were but two horses at Badr, the first Muslim raid. al-Ṭabarsī records the exchange in which Ibn ʿAbbās, hearing ʿAlī, "abandoned my view and returned to what ʿAlī said," yet also keeps Ibn ʿAbbās's counter-argument — only horses pant and stir dust with hooves. al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) decides firmly for the horses: the attributes that follow — striking fire with hooves, the dawn raid, penetrating a squadron — "do not suit the camels," and the sequential fāʾ of the four verses traces one continuous assault.

A war-context — hence, for some, a Medinan surah. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī goes beyond the lexical reading: because jihād was legislated only after the Hijra, he judges the surah Medinan, revealed about ʿAlī's raiding-party at the campaign of Dhāt al-Salāsil — a position the published Enlightening Commentary (Imani) also "prefers," weighing the war-narrations against the short, oath-laden Meccan style. al-Ṭabarsī gives the same occasion alongside a second (al-Mundhir b. ʿAmr's overdue party of Kināna, whom the hypocrites declared dead), and notes the campaign was named "the one of chains" because ʿAlī fettered his captives.

The distinctively Shīʿī reading. Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) carry this furthest. Both transmit, from Abū ʿAbdillāh (a) through Abū Baṣīr, the long Wādī al-Yābis narrative: a coalition of twelve thousand horsemen vows to kill the Prophet and ʿAlī; two commanders are sent in turn (al-Qummī veils them as "so-and-so," al-Burhān names them Abū Bakr then ʿUmar) and each returns in dread; only when ʿAlī (a) is sent does he travel by night, pray in the last darkness and raid at dawn — so that the oaths describe his charge. al-Baḥrānī stacks corroborating reports: the Banū Sulaym version through Abān b. Taghlib, where ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ too is routed before ʿAlī "raids them at dawn" (120 slain, 620 taken), and the Amālī report through al-Ḥalabī — "lie low by day, travel by night." al-Ṭabarsī's lexicon anchors the very imagery the narrations exploit — ḍabḥ (panting), qadḥ (the flint-spark, "the fire of al-ḥabāḥib"), naqʿ (the dust one sinks into) — so the plain martial picture and the ʿAlid taʾwīl read here as two registers of one dawn raid. (These narrations are recorded as transmitted; their isnāds and polemical content are flagged for scholarly review, not endorsed.)