Sūrah 103 · Āyāt 1–2

By Time — and the verdict of universal loss (103:1-2)

The surah opens with a one-word oath, {By al-ʿaṣr}, and answers it with a sweeping diagnosis: {indeed man is in loss}. On the oath, the present sources canvass the same set of meanings and then weigh them. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) give the shared lexical anatomy: the root ʿaṣr is the wringing of a garment to press out its water, whence ʿaṣr al-dahr, "time" as the span in which affairs are wrung out; both list the readings that al-ʿaṣr is Time/the age (Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Kalbī), the late afternoon (al-Ḥasan, Qatāda), the ʿaṣr (middle) prayer (Muqātil), or night-and-day, al-ʿaṣrān (Ibn Kaysān). al-Ṭūsī adds a fuller lexicon — al-muʿṣirāt (rain-laden clouds), al-iʿṣār (a dust column), the maiden "pressed" by ripening youth. The Enlightening Commentary gathers six such interpretations and judges the most fitting to be "Time and the history of Man," because a Qurʾanic oath bears on its subject — and the loss in view is the squandering of one's lifetime.

al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) sharpens this: since the next verses make loss universal except for the faithful, the best fit is that al-ʿaṣr is "the age of the Prophet," the rising of Islam and the triumph of truth over falsehood; he records the other readings (afternoon, the middle prayer, night-and-day, al-dahr) and notes that "some narrations" make it the age of the Mahdī's appearance — a reading independently confirmed in the Enlightening Commentary's own list. That Imāmī line is voiced most strongly by al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān), who transmits al-Mufaḍḍal ← al-Ṣādiq glossing al-ʿaṣr as "the age of the coming-forth of the Qāʾim" and {man is in loss} as "our enemies" — recorded here strictly as transmitted, not endorsed, its chain unvetted.

On {man is in loss}, the sources read the noun two ways. al-Ṭabarsī takes al-insān as the genus (proven, he says, by the grammatical fact that "those who believe" are excepted from it) and explains khusr as the daily diminution of one's lifespan-capital — "no loss is greater than deserving everlasting punishment" — while also citing al-Akhfash ("destruction") and a minority view that the disbeliever specifically (Abū Jahl, al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra) is meant. al-Ṭūsī leans to the disbeliever reading: man "in loss" through sin and unbelief, a ruin of self greater than any loss of capital. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī keeps the genus and, citing al-Rāghib's Mufradāt, fixes khusr/khusrān as "the diminution of capital," reading the indefinite {khusrin} as magnification (and possibly a kind of loss beyond wealth and station), cross-referenced to {the manifest loss} of al-Zumar 39:15. al-Qummī is brief here — the oath and its answer — but preserves al-Ṣādiq's variant recitation adding {and that he is therein until the end of time}, a transmitted Imāmī reading (also reported by Ṭabarsī from Ibn Masʿūd and ʿAlī), not the canonical text.