Sūrah 66 · Āyāt 1–5

al-Taḥrīm 66:1–5 — The Prophet's oath, a broken confidence, and the measure of a wife

These opening verses give the sūra its name. God addresses His Prophet with tender reproach — "O Prophet, why do you forbid what God has made lawful to you, seeking to please your wives?" — then assures him that the dissolution of oaths has already been provided for, and that He, Gabriel, the righteous of the believers and the angels stand behind him against any collusion within his household.

What the episode was. All six sources read these verses against a single domestic incident, though they differ on its detail. Al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) lay two classical occasions side by side: the honey episode — the Prophet, detained over honey at one wife's apartment, is told (at ʿĀʾisha and Ḥafṣa's prompting) that others smell maghāfīr on him, so he swears off the honey — and the Māriya episode, in which he forbids himself his bondmaid Māriya the Copt by an oath to please Ḥafṣa. Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) carry the Māriya account in fuller, pointed narrative form on the authority of al-Ṣādiq, al-Bāqir and ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm: the confided secret was who would hold the command after the Prophet, Ḥafṣa broke the confidence to ʿĀʾisha, and both add the contested report that a group "gathered to poison" the Prophet. Al-Mīzān (al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī) stands a little apart: it accepts that the "prohibition" was a self-imposed forbiddenness by oath — not a legislative act, which is not the Prophet's to make — and frankly notes that the divergent wordings of the honey-reports fit this single-context passage only obscurely.

The point of law. Al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Burhān (via Zurāra from al-Bāqir) converge on a precise Imāmī juristic reading: merely saying "you are forbidden to me" entails nothing — neither divorce nor expiation — because a man cannot forbid what God has made lawful. The expiation the Prophet owed was strictly for the oath he had sworn (al-Burhān specifies its measure: feeding ten poor persons, a mudd each, or a garment), not for any "prohibition." Al-Mīzān, citing al-Rāghib on faraḍa lahu, frames taḥillat al-aymān as God's gracious provision of a way to dissolve the oath's knot.

The two wives and the One who backs the Prophet. On "if you two repent… for your hearts have inclined," the sources are unanimous — al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān both cite the Ibn ʿAbbās–ʿUmar report (in al-Bukhārī) naming ʿĀʾisha and Ḥafṣa. Al-Mīzān reads the grammar of "God — He — is his Protector" as marking God's unmediated, special care for the Prophet, with Gabriel, the righteous believers and the angels in one rank behind him. On "the righteous of the believers" (ṣāliḥ al-muʾminīn) the Shīʿī sources are emphatic and richly attested: al-Qummī, al-Burhān (which gathers fifty-two narrations from both Shīʿī and Sunnī chains, including via Asmāʾ bint ʿUmays and the Ghadīr tradition), and al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī (citing Shawāhid al-Tanzīl and Mujāhid) identify him as ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib; al-Mīzān reports the same from both routes while setting aside other views for lack of evidence.

The measure of a better wife. On "wives better than you," al-Mīzān offers the deepest reading: since the listed traits — muslimāt, muʾmināt, qānitāt, tāʾibāt, ʿābidāt, sāʾiḥāt (glossed by al-Ṭabarsī, al-Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān alike as fasting, with Zayd b. Aslam's alternative emigrating), thayyibāt and abkār — would otherwise be pointless, the "betterness" must lie precisely in qunūt (constant, humble obedience) and tawba, the very things the offending wives lacked; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī ties this forward to "and she was of the devoutly obedient" said of Mary at the sūra's close. Al-Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān both preserve al-Kashshāf's note that the traits run without a connective except between the mutually exclusive thayyibāt and abkār. Al-Burhān reads the closing pair as an allusion to ʿĀʾisha, "for he married no virgin but her."