Sūrat al-Mulk · Āyāt 1–5

What the passage says

Sūrat al-Mulk opens by blessing God, in whose hand all sovereignty rests and who has power over everything (v.1). He is the One who created death and life — and He tells us why: to test which of us acts best (v.2). As proof of His mastery, the passage turns our eyes upward to the seven heavens, laid one above another in flawless order: look again and again, and you will not find a single crack or fault (vv.3–4). And the nearest sky He has adorned with lamps — the stars — which also serve to drive off the devils that try to eavesdrop on the unseen (v.5).

Convergence — where the six agree

• All power is God's, completely (v.1). "In His hand" is a figure of speech for total mastery: God owns every thing in every respect. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī note that "hand" is used here only for emphasis, and the Enlightening Commentary frames it as God's lasting ownership set against every passing, temporary power.
• Death is something God "made" — a doorway, not an end (v.2). Not sheer nothingness, but a passage from one mode of life to another — as the Enlightening Commentary puts it, "transference from one world to another." Al-Baḥrānī preserves Imam al-Bāqir's words: death enters nothing unless life has already left it.
• Life and death are a deliberate moral test (v.2) — and a test only makes sense if there is a Resurrection to settle it, which al-Mīzān makes the surah's underlying logic.
• The flawless cosmos is itself the proof (vv.3–4). From "you see no flaw," Ṭūsī and Ṭabarsī draw a further point: since God calls His own creation faultless, evil and sin are our doing, not His.

Divergence — where they differ

• "Best in deeds" — measured how? (v.2) Imam al-Ṣādiq (recorded by al-Baḥrānī) says it means the most correct and sincere, not the most numerous — "for the intention is the deed itself." A Prophetic report (via Ṭabarsī) says it means the best in understanding. Al-Mīzān reaches a similar end by reasoning.
• The "missiles" against the devils — what are they? (v.5) Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān preserve the reading that these are shooting-stars / meteors, not the fixed stars themselves — al-Mīzān calling that view "more in keeping with what we now know of the cosmos." Ṭūsī alone adds Qatāda's three purposes for the stars: beauty, missiles, and guidance.
• How far does the "test" reach? (v.2) Al-Baḥrānī alone opens it into the great free-will question — jabr (compulsion) versus tafwīḍ (full delegation) — settled in the tradition as "a matter between two matters."

Each scholar's full text is in the source panels below.