Sūrah 75 · Āyāt 1–6

Verses 1–6 — Two oaths, and the question the fingertips answer

The sūra opens with God swearing — "I swear by the Day of Resurrection, and I swear by the self-reproaching soul (al-nafs al-lawwāma)" — and at once the commentators ask what the particle lā is doing before the oath. Both al-Tibyān (al-Ṭūsī) and Majmaʿ al-Bayān (al-Ṭabarsī) lay out the spectrum: some grammarians (Abū ʿUbayda, al-Kisāʾī) read lā as a connective with no negating force, so the sense is simply "I swear by the Day of Resurrection" (Ibn ʿAbbās, Saʿīd b. Jubayr); others hear in it a rebuttal flung at the deniers of the Raising — "Not as you suppose!" — before the oath proper begins. The Enlightening Commentary frames the opening as "two meaningful oaths" and inclines to reading lā as emphatic, observing that "the Qurʾān swears by things more significant than the Day of Resurrection, e.g. the Pure Essence of God." al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī) cuts through the dispute: whichever grammar one adopts, the verse is an oath, and the symmetry of the two clauses forbids treating the second as a mere negation; the oath's answer ("you shall surely be raised") is left unspoken precisely to magnify the Day.

On the "self-reproaching soul," the sources spread into a fan of readings. al-Mīzān takes it primarily as the believer's conscience, which reproaches him in this world and profits him in the next, while noting the broader and narrower options. Majmaʿ al-Bayān records that "there is no soul, righteous or wicked, but reproaches itself on the Day of Resurrection" — if it did good, "would that I had done more"; if evil, "would that I had not." Tafsīr al-Qummī and al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) preserve a distinctively Imāmī gloss from ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm: it is "the soul of Adam, which disobeyed, so God reproached it" — a reading whose fit al-Mīzān itself candidly admits is "not obvious."

The denial that drives the whole sūra surfaces in verse 3: "Does man suppose that We shall not gather his bones?" All the present sources read the question as a rebuke aimed at the genus of disbelievers, with "gathering the bones" standing for the Raising itself (Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī). The answer in verse 4 — "Yes, able to proportion his fingertips (banān)" — draws the commentary's most vivid attention. al-Mīzān dwells on why the fingertips are singled out: their forms, structure and number yield "uncountable benefits" — every kind of grasping, releasing and delicate craft by which man is set apart from the animals — "besides the prints and lines upon them whose secrets are still being unveiled to man one after another." Majmaʿ al-Bayān, al-Tibyān and al-Qummī add the counter-image from Ibn ʿAbbās and Qatāda: God could have made the fingers a single undivided piece, "like a hoof," so that man would take food with his mouth — but He favored him with articulated fingertips.

Verse 5 names the real obstacle: "Nay, man desires to sin ahead of him (li-yafjura amāmahu)." al-Mīzān, citing al-Rāghib (fujūr = "the rending of the veil of religion"), reads amām as future time: he wants to deny the Raising so that he may go on sinning the length of his life, "since there is no motive for faith and piety if there be no raising for reckoning." al-Qummī puts it as plain procrastination — "he advances the sin and postpones repentance, saying 'I shall repent'" — and al-Burhān preserves a further, polemical layer reported from the Imams: that the verse points to one who "desires to act perfidiously against the Commander of the Faithful." Verse 6 — "He asks, When is the Day of Resurrection?" — is heard by every source not as honest inquiry but, in al-Mīzān's words, "the question of a denying mocker."