Sūrah 52 · Āyāt 1–16

al-Tur 1-16 — The oaths and the sure punishment

The passage opens with five oaths — by the Mount (al-Tur), an inscribed Book in an unrolled parchment, the Prosperous House, the raised roof, and the brimming sea — sworn to guarantee that the torment of your Lord will surely fall, with none to repel it (vv.1-8). It then names the Day (the heaven sways, the mountains journey), pronounces woe upon the deniers who play in vain plunging, and shows them driven to Hell and mocked: This is the Fire you used to deny... roast in it; endure or endure not, it is the same (vv.9-16).

On the oath-object, the sources largely converge. al-Tabatabaʾi (al-Mizan) takes al-Tur to be Moses's mountain, sworn by for its sanctity (comparing 95:2 and 19:52), and — reading with the next verse — takes the inscribed Book to be the Torah written on unrolled parchment. al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi relay the fuller spread of opinions: the Mount is where God spoke to Moses (or any blessed mountain); the Book is the record the angels read, or the Qurʾan in the Preserved Tablet, or the scrolls of deeds, or the Torah. All note al-Mubarrad's point that every mountain is a tur, definite only with the article.

On the Prosperous House, al-Tabarsi, al-Tusi and al-Qummi transmit the tradition of a heavenly house in the fourth heaven (al-Qummi names it al-Durah) opposite the Kaʿba, which seventy thousand angels enter daily and never revisit — a report al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi carry from ʿAli (as) — while noting al-Hasan's view that it is the earthly Kaʿba itself. al-Mizan observes that reports of both schools agree it is a heavenly house the angels circle, differing only over which heaven. On al-bahr al-masjur, all give the two senses — filled (Qatada) and kindled — al-Mizan and al-Tabarsi linking the second to 81:6 (the seas set ablaze).

For the answer of the oath, al-Mizan notes the delicacy of the torment of your Lord (not "of God"): the possessive reassures the Prophet that his Lord will not disgrace him that Day (cf. 66:8), while with none to repel it marks it as decreed and unavoidable. The swaying heaven and moving mountains it reads as the cosmic folding-up of the Hour (cf. 21:104; 56:4-6). al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi gloss khawd as plunging into false speech and daʿʿ as the violent thrust into the Fire (Muqatil vividly: hands chained, forelocks bound), and read endure or endure not as: neither patience nor panic will lift the torment.

The Imami sources add narrative colour. On the inscribed Book, al-Bahrani (via Sharaf al-Din al-Najafi from al-Sadiq) reports a book God wrote before creation addressed to the Shiʿa of the Family of Muhammad — an as-attributed taʾwil, not the plain sense. On the Day they are shoved to the Fire (v.13), both al-Qummi and al-Bahrani carry a narration of the Prophet cursing ʿAmr b. al-ʿAs and (in al-Bahrani) al-Walid b. ʿUqba for deriding the slain Hamza — companion-defamation material rendered strictly as its sources give it and flagged for review. al-Qummi and al-Bahrani otherwise track the plain gloss: the sea set ablaze, the heaven heaving, the mountains moving like wind, and plunging as plunging into disobedience.