Sūrah 104 · Āyāt 1–3

Woe to the slanderer who hoards — and thinks wealth makes him immortal (104:1-3)

The surah opens with {Woe to every humaza lumaza} and at once profiles the man: {who amassed wealth and counted it over, supposing that his wealth has made him immortal}. On the two title-words, the present sources converge on a shared lexicon and then fan out. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) both root hamz in "breaking" (al-kasr): the faulter, by reviling, "breaks" and "jabs" at his victim, the fuʿala form (humaza/lumaza, like ḍuḥaka "much-laughing") marking a confirmed habit. Both canvass whether humaza and lumaza are synonyms (mere emphasis) or distinct — faulting behind the back versus to the face (al-Layth), by foul speech versus by a narrowed eye and a jerk of the head — and both relay Ibn ʿAbbās's gloss (the tale-bearer who sunders loved ones) and Ziyād al-Aʿjam's verse on the false friend. al-Ṭabarsī adds the surah's qirāʾāt (the Basrans, Ibn Kathīr, Nāfiʿ, ʿĀṣim read jamaʿa; the rest jammaʿa; ʿumud/ʿamad in v9) and its iʿrāb (alladhī jamaʿa as badal from humaza, not an adjective, since humaza is indefinite-generic). The Enlightening Commentary gathers the same six distinctions and concludes the two terms share "a vast meaning" covering all fault-finding, defaming, sarcasm, and mockery "by tongue or mimicry," and stresses the gravity of wayl — the Qurʾān reserving for mockers a severity (it cites al-Tawba 9:80 and al-Munāfiqūn 63:5) it grants almost no other sin.

On {who amassed wealth and counted it over}, the sources read ʿaddadahu as tallying it repeatedly (al-Farrāʾ), or laying it up as a hoard against the ages (al-Zajjāj, al-Jubbāʾī) — al-Ṭūsī tying it to one "who loves wealth and pays not God's due." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) makes the indefinite {mālan} a belittlement (wealth avails nothing beyond bare bodily needs) and supplies the surah's psychological spine: the more a man gathers, the more limitless his greed; his sense of self-sufficiency drives him to insolence — {Indeed man transgresses when he sees himself self-sufficient} (al-ʿAlaq 96:6-7) — and that arrogance "bequeaths him the hamz and the lamz." He reads the verses as a chain of causes: the delusion of immortality explains the hoarding, and the hoarding explains the slander.

On the occasion of revelation, the exoteric sources name candidates without fixing one: al-Walīd b. al-Mughīra (Muqātil), al-Akhnas b. Shariq al-Thaqafī (al-Kalbī, al-Suddī), Jamīl b. ʿĀmir al-Juhanī, with Mujāhid, Warqāʾ, and Ibn ʿAbbās holding the verse "general, not specific to anyone" — a generality the Enlightening Commentary endorses. The Imāmī sources read the type through the lens of contempt for the weak: al-Qummī glosses the humaza as "one who derides people and despises the poor" and the lumaza as one who "twists his neck and grows angry when he sees a poor man or a beggar," and ʿaddadahu as "he made it ready and laid it by." al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) carries that same Qummī gloss, but prefaces it with a distinctive narration (al-Daylamī ← al-Ṣādiq) reading humaza lumaza as those who slighted the right of the Family of Muḥammad — recorded here strictly as transmitted, its chain (through the weak al-Daylamī) unvetted, not endorsed.