Sūrah 102 · Āyāt 1–2

Vying drove you all the way to the graves (102:1-2)

The surah opens by naming a disease — al-takāthur, mutual rivalry in piling up "more" — and tracing where it ends. Every present source agrees the address is a rebuke. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) give the same lexical anatomy: al-ilhāʾ is being "diverted toward distraction (lahw)," and al-takāthur is "vainglory over an abundance of merits," counting one's advantages against a rival's; al-Ṭūsī adds that the boaster is by definition arrogant, "exalting himself without right." On {ḥattā zurtum al-maqābir} both transmit two readings from al-Ḥasan and Qatāda: either "until death overtook you in that state" (so visiting the graves is a metaphor for dying), or the grim literal sense — they so exhausted the contest among the living that they went to the cemetery to count the dead.

That literal reading rests on the occasion of revelation, which the sources report in three competing forms. al-Ṭabarsī lists all three: the Jews (Qatāda); a clan of the Anṣār (Abū Burayda); and — most fully — two Qurayshī clans, Banū ʿAbd Manāf b. Quṣayy and Banū Sahm b. ʿAmr, who counted their nobles, then their dead at the graves, Banū Sahm winning only because they had been more numerous in the Jāhiliyya (Muqātil and al-Kalbī). al-Ṭūsī names the same two Qurayshī clans. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) notes that the surah's context "admits of being either Meccan or Medinan," and that the counting-the-dead reading is "built on" these asbāb; leaning on al-Rāghib's Mufradāt, he fixes {zurtum al-maqābir} as "a metonym for death" and reads the whole as: the race for the world's adornment "occupied you away from what truly matters — the remembrance of God — until you met death."

The moral edge is sharpened by a Prophetic ḥadīth that both al-Ṭabarsī (citing Muslim, via Muṭarrif from his father) and the Enlightening Commentary quote: "The son of Adam says, 'My wealth, my wealth!' — yet what is yours of your wealth save what you ate and made to pass, what you wore and wore out, or what you gave in charity and so sent forward?" The Enlightening Commentary frames the passage around this, and reinforces it with ʿAlī's words in Nahj al-Balāgha (Sermon 221) over the graves — "how neglectful are these visitors" — arguing the dead "are more entitled to be a source of lesson than of pride." It also weighs the Meccan/Medinan question and sides with Meccan, noting that Ṭabarsī had inclined to Medinan.

al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) opens with ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī's running gloss across the whole surah, paraphrasing {alhākum al-takāthur} as "your [boast of] multitude made you heedless… and you did not remember death." On the diagnosis behind the disease, the Enlightening Commentary adds two traditions: from Imam al-Ṣādiq, "no one is arrogant except for a disgrace he finds in himself," and from ʿAlī, "two things have killed people: the fear of poverty and the demanding of pride." Tafsīr al-Qummī itself is silent on these two verses, commenting only later in the surah.