Sūrah 31 · Āyāt 1–11

Luqmān 1–11 — The Wise Book against "diversion of speech"

The passage opens the sūra with the disconnected letters Alif Lām Mīm, then names the revelation "the verses of the Wise Book (al-kitāb al-ḥakīm), a guidance and a mercy for the doers of good (muḥsinīn)" — defined by three marks: establishing prayer, paying the alms, and certainty of the Hereafter (vv. 1–5). Against them stands the man "who buys diversion of speech (lahw al-ḥadīth) to mislead from God's path without knowledge and takes it in mockery" (v. 6), who turns away arrogantly when the verses are recited "as though in his ears were a heaviness" (v. 7) — earning a humiliating, then painful, punishment, while the believers are promised the Gardens of Bliss (vv. 8–9). The passage closes with creation-signs of God's oneness: the heavens raised "without pillars you see," the mountains set lest the earth sway, the scattering of every creature, and the growth of "every noble pair," capped by the challenge: "This is God's creation; now show Me what those besides Him have created" (vv. 10–11).

On al-kitāb al-ḥakīm: al-Mīzān reads the epithet "wise" as deliberately antithetical to lahw al-ḥadīth — the Book is a discourse with no breach through which idle, false talk could enter; "guidance and mercy" complete its wisdom, for it leads to reality rather than distracting from it. al-Mīzān fixes the sūra's overall aim as the call to tawḥīd, certainty in the Return, and the universals of the Law, and judges it Meccan.

On lahw al-ḥadīth: all four Arabic sources converge — with the published Enlightening Commentary — that the dominant reading is singing (al-ghināʾ). Tabarsī and Ṭūsī attribute this to Ibn ʿAbbās, Ibn Masʿūd and the Imams al-Bāqir, al-Ṣādiq and al-Riḍā, while widening it to "everything that diverts from God's path" (pipes, instruments, mockery of the Qurʾān, lying legends — per Abū Muslim, ʿAṭāʾ, Qatāda, al-Kalbī). al-Qummī glosses it tersely as "singing, wine-drinking, and all amusements." al-Burhān gathers the densest evidence: a chain of narrations from al-Kāfī (via Abū Baṣīr, Muḥammad b. Muslim, Mihrān, al-Washshāʾ from al-Riḍā, al-Ḥasan b. Hārūn) and from al-Ṣadūq and al-Zamakhsharī's Rabīʿ al-Abrār, all equating the verse with singing and the unlawful earnings of singing-girls (with the distinction that a girl summoned to weddings is permissible, unlike one to whom men are admitted privately).

On the occasion of revelation: Tabarsī, Ṭūsī, al-Qummī and al-Mīzān (citing al-Majmaʿ and, via Abū al-Jārūd, al-Qummī) all name al-Naḍr b. al-Ḥārith, the Qurashī trader who imported Persian tales of Rustam and Isfandiyār to lure listeners away from the Qurʾān; Tabarsī adds Ibn ʿAbbās's alternative — the buyer of a singing slave-girl. al-Mīzān suggests this may be the occasion of the whole sūra.

On the creation-signs (vv. 10–11): Tabarsī and Ṭūsī both defend "without pillars you see" as meaning the heavens simply have no pillars (rejecting Mujāhid's "pillars you do not see" via an infinite-regress argument). Strikingly, al-Mīzān's narrational section preserves the opposite reading on the Imams' authority: a report from al-Riḍā (via al-Qummī) affirms "there are pillars, but you do not see them." On v. 11, al-Qummī (echoed in al-Burhān) parses "this is God's creation (khalq)" as "this is God's created thing (makhlūq)," since the act itself is unseen and the demonstrative points to the visible handiwork — the ground of al-Mīzān's argument that creation and governance are inseparable, so the idols who create nothing govern nothing.