Sūrah 70 · Āyāt 1–18

Verses 1-18 — the demanded torment, the ascending ways, and the terror of the Day. The sūra opens with a scoffer's challenge — "a questioner asked for a befalling torment" — and answers it: that torment is for the disbelievers, none can repel it, and it comes "from God, Lord of the ascending ways (dhī l-maʿārij)," up which "the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a Day whose measure is fifty thousand years" (vv.1-4). The Prophet is told to "be patient with a beautiful patience" (v.5): the deniers "see it far off, but We see it near" (vv.6-7). Then the Day itself is drawn — sky like molten metal, mountains like dyed wool (vv.8-9) — a Day so terrible that "no intimate friend asks after a friend" (v.10) though they are made to see one another, and the criminal would ransom himself from its torment with his children, wife, brother, sheltering clan, and all the earth, only to be saved (vv.11-14). "By no means! It is Laẓā, the Flame, stripping the scalp, calling whoever turned away and hoarded wealth without spending it" (vv.15-18).

The six readings converge on the scene yet diverge sharply on its occasion. On the sabab al-nuzūl, the Enlightening Commentary, al-Mīzān, al-Ṭabarsī and al-Burhān all carry the Ghadīr tradition: after the proclamation "whomever I am his mawlā, ʿAlī is his mawlā," a Fihrī objector (named al-Nuʿmān or al-Ḥārith b. al-Ḥārith) demanded that God rain stones upon him if the appointment were true, and a stone killed him. Al-Burhān reports this through both Imāmī chains and a non-Shīʿī route (Sufyān b. ʿUyayna → Ibn ʿAbbās, via al-Thaʿlabī), and preserves the Imāmī variant reading "for the disbelievers in the guardianship of ʿAlī" said to stand in the muṣḥaf of Fāṭima — rendered here as it is transmitted, not as the received text. Al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī presses the same narration into an argument that the sūra may be Medinan rather than Meccan, reinforced by the zakāt-bearing verse 24; against this stand the Sunnī reports (Ibn ʿAbbās, al-Suddī) naming al-Naḍr b. al-Ḥārith, whose end came at Badr, which al-Ṭūsī (with al-Farrāʾ) also records.

On "dhī l-maʿārij," al-Mīzān reads the maʿārij as the real, ranked stations of the angelic realm — not conventional metaphors — while al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī gather the alternatives: the heavens of the angels' ascent, or the lofty degrees God bestows on prophets and saints. The two also identify the Rūḥ of v.4 with Gabriel, singled out for honour, whereas al-Mīzān insists the Spirit is "of my Lord's command" and distinct from the angels; al-Qummī and al-Burhān give it a third turn, reading the ascent "in the dawn of Laylat al-Qadr… to the Prophet and the legatee." The "fifty thousand years" draws a shared body of tradition — al-Ṣādiq's "fifty stations, each a thousand years" (al-Kāfī, in al-Mīzān, al-Qummī and al-Burhān) and Abū Saʿīd al-Khudrī's word that the Day will weigh on the believer less than a single prayer — alongside al-Mīzān's reading of it as the Day all return to God and al-Burhān's rajʿa report tying the figure to the Messenger's returning reign. On the torment, the sources agree closely: muhl as molten metal or oil-dregs, ʿihn as carded or dyed wool; the self-absorption that silences even intimates (al-Mīzān: an escalation, lā yasʾal rising to the vain wish to ransom); and Laẓā "stripping the extremities," al-Mīzān noting that its call to "whoever amassed and hoarded" deliberately sets up the coming exception for those who pray and spend. Al-Qummī's distinctive eschatology — the fire from the West, the Qāʾim burning the grudge-bearers against the House of Muḥammad — is given as it is narrated.