Sūrah 74 · Āyāt 1–7

al-Muddaththir 74:1–7 — "Arise and warn"

What the passage says. The sūra opens by addressing the Prophet through his very posture — yā ayyuhā l-muddaththir, "O you wrapped up [for sleep]" — and turns repose into commission: qum fa-andhir, "Arise and warn." Five terse injunctions follow: magnify your Lord (wa-rabbaka fa-kabbir), purify your garments (wa-thiyābaka fa-ṭahhir), shun defilement (wa-l-rujza fa-hjur), do not give to gain more (wa-lā tamnun tastakthir), and for your Lord's sake be patient (wa-li-rabbika fa-ṣbir).

On its earliness. Al-Mīzān frames the whole sūra as among the very first revealed, in the context of the command to go public after a period of concealment; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī carefully weighs — and partly resists — the famous report that al-Muddaththir was the first sūra, noting that the sūra's own later verses presuppose that the Qurʾān had already been recited and rejected as "magic," so at most its opening seven verses belong to that earliest layer. The published Enlightening Commentary concurs that the sūra is Meccan and most likely the earliest revealed after the call went public (with al-ʿAlaq on the threshold of revelation itself), and reads the five injunctions as "models for the people": tawḥīd, purity, shunning sin, expecting no return, and patience.

The lexical core (the Arabic philologists). Majmaʿ al-Bayān (Ṭabarsī) and al-Tibyān (Ṭūsī) converge closely: al-muddaththir is al-mutadaththir, one wrapped in his garment; takbīr is to affirm God as the Greatest as one believes its meaning; ṭahāra here is specifically the removal of najāsa; al-mann is recalling a kindness in a way that spoils the thanks due for it. Both transmit the cluster of readings of wa-thiyābaka fa-ṭahhir — literal washing for prayer, "purify yourself of sins," "let your garment not be from unlawful gain," even "your wives" — and both note the Prophet was "disciplined with the noblest of manners" in lā tamnun tastakthir (give no gift seeking more). Ṭabarsī adds the fuller qirāʾāt apparatus (the rujz/rijz ḍamma–kasra split, Qatāda's idols Asāf and Nāʾila) and, like al-Mīzān, carries the Jābir tradition of the Ḥirāʾ vision — while flagging that the Prophet needs no such dread, since revelation comes with luminous proofs.

The Imāmī reading (al-Qummī and al-Burhān). Tafsīr al-Qummī supplies the distinctive Shīʿī taʾwīl: qum fa-andhir is read as the Prophet's "rising in the Return (al-rajʿa)," and wa-thiyābaka fa-ṭahhir as taqṣīr (shortening the hem) — "our Shīʿa purify [themselves]." Al-Baḥrānī's al-Burhān gathers the supporting narrations: that al-muddaththir is one of the Prophet's ten Qurʾānic names (from al-Kalbī ← al-Ṣādiq); that ʿAlī (ʿa) taught the Return explicitly ("alive, then dead again… yes, by God"); and an extended fiqh-of-dress cluster from al-Kāfī reading fa-ṭahhir as fa-shammir ("tuck up"), capped by ʿAlī's modest three-garment purchase and the note that "when our Qāʾim rises it will be upon this dress." On wa-l-rujza fa-hjur, al-Qummī glosses al-rujz simply as "the foul" (al-khabīth); on lā tamnun tastakthir, al-Ṣādiq gives the spiritual sense both al-Burhān and al-Mīzān preserve: "do not reckon as much the good you have done for God."

Convergence and divergence. All six agree on the plain sense — a sleeper roused to a public mission and given five foundational duties crowned by patience. They divide on register: the two Arabic tafsīrs and al-Mīzān read qum fa-andhir as the historical commission to warn, while al-Qummī and al-Burhān layer onto it the eschatological rajʿa; and where al-Mīzān treats fa-ṭahhir as plausibly the literal purity that founds ritual prayer, the Imāmī narrations fix it as the sunna of the shortened garment. None of the sources is silent on this passage.