Sūrah 113 · Āyāt 1–2

Seeking Refuge in the Lord of the Daybreak (113:1–2)

The surah opens with a divine command — {Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created}. al-Tabarsi (Majmaʿ al-Bayan) and al-Tusi (al-Tibyan) agree that the command, though addressed to the Prophet, is meant for his entire community: every responsible creature is bidden to take protection in the Lord of the dawn against the evil of created things. al-Tabatabaʼi (al-Mizan) parses the act itself: al-ʿawdh is “taking hold and guarding oneself against evil by resorting to one who repels it.”

What is al-falaq?

The sources offer a cluster of readings, none of which they treat as exclusive:

• The dawn / daybreak. This is the dominant view in al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi, traced to Ibn ʿAbbas, Jabir, al-Hasan, Saʿid b. Jubayr, Mujahid, Qatada, and Ibn Zayd. The morning is called falaq because its column of light is “cleft (infilaq) by radiance from the darkness,” just as it is called fajr for the same bursting-forth. al-Mizan adds the grammatical point that falaq (two fatḥas) is an assimilated adjective in the passive sense — “that which is cleft from the darkness” — and notes the fittingness of invoking the Lord of light when seeking refuge from an evil that “conceals good and veils it.”
• Creation as such. al-Tusi records a narration from Ibn ʿAbbas and a lexicographers’ view that al-falaq simply means al-khalq (creation), since every created thing is “cleft forth” (mafluq) into being; he links it to the Qurʼanic divine names {Cleaver of daybreak} and {Cleaver of the grain and the date-stone}. al-Tabarsi gives the parallel image of newborns “splitting forth” from loins and wombs as a seed splits from the plant, and al-Mizan generalizes this to the cleaving of nonexistence by existence itself.
• A pit in Hell. al-Tabarsi and al-Mizan both transmit (from al-Suddi, via Abu Hamza al-Thumali and ʿAli b. Ibrahim al-Qummi) that al-falaq is a pit in Hell from whose heat its people seek refuge. This is the reading al-Qummi develops most vividly: the pit contains a “coffer of fire” holding six tyrants of the earlier peoples (the son of Adam who killed his brother, Nimrod, Pharaoh, the Samiri, and the two who founded the Jewish and Christian deviations) and six of the later — a sharply polemical Imami list whose final, coded names are reported here strictly as al-Qummi’s attribution, not as endorsement.

“The evil of what He has created”

All four classical sources stress that {ma khalaq} is general — “everything from which evil may proceed,” in al-Tabarsi’s and al-Tusi’s words: beasts of prey, vermin, satans, and the like. al-Mizan sharpens this with a logical caveat: the verse’s sweep does not entail that everything created is evil — “the inclusion of ‘what He created’ absolutely does not entail universality.” The Enlightening Commentary draws out the theology the verse implies: creation “by itself” has no evil, “because creation is the same as existence and existing is absolute goodness” (citing {He Who has made everything He created most good}, 32:7). Evil arises only where creatures “diverge from the laws of creation” — the same sting or tooth or weapon being good in defense and evil in aggression — and many things we call evil (startling warnings, hardships) are in truth goods that rouse us from heedlessness. The believer therefore seeks refuge not from God’s making, but from the misuse and the malice that ride upon it.