Sūrah 78 · Āyāt 1–5

The Great Tiding (al-Nabaʾ al-ʿAẓīm) — verses 1–5

The sūra opens not with a statement but with an overheard argument: What are they questioning one another about? About the Great Tiding, concerning which they differ. The whole present commentary reads these five verses as a single rhetorical movement — a question posed in God's voice, an answer that magnifies its subject, and a doubled warning that closes the door on the dispute.

What the passage says. On al-nabaʾ al-ʿaẓīm, the "Great Tiding," the Arabic and English sources converge on the resurrection while preserving a minority reading. The Enlightening Commentary frames the sūra as opening with "an awakening question" about "the Great News … or the Hereafter," noting that these late-Meccan sūras press Creation and Resurrection in "a shocking and awakening tone." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) makes the case most tightly: the context — answer, warning, threat — shows the questioners are "the polytheists of Mecca who denied prophethood and the Return," and the Great Tiding is "the tiding of the Raising and Resurrection." He catalogues the kinds of denial behind the single word mukhtalifūn ("differing"): some held resurrection impossible, some far-fetched, some doubtful, some certain-but-obstinate, citing parallels in Sūras Sabaʾ, al-Muʾminūn, al-Naml and al-Mulk.

How the present sources read it. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān) agree that the verb is interrogative but the intent is magnification — "the wording is interrogative but the intent is to magnify the affair" (al-Zajjāj, cited by both). al-Ṭūsī alone supplies an occasion of revelation: the Prophet, mocked by Quraysh when he recounted the histories of past nations, was briefly forbidden to narrate to them, and the verse descended when they pressed him to resume. On kallā sayaʿlamūn ("Nay, they shall know"), both Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī offer the same triad — rebuke, or "truly," or a graded warning (what befalls them at the Resurrection, then in Hell) so that the repetition is not idle.

The distinctive Imāmī reading. Two of the present sources carry a second, inner (baṭn) interpretation alongside the resurrection sense. Tafsīr al-Qummī, on the authority of al-Riḍā from the Commander of the Faithful, reports ʿAlī's words: God has no tiding greater than me, and no sign greater than me. al-Baḥrānī (al-Burhān) gathers a full dossier of such narrations through chains to al-Bāqir, al-Ṣādiq and al-Riḍā, glossing the Great Tiding as al-walāya (allegiance to ʿAlī), and even cites a non-Shīʿī chain (via al-Shīrāzī to al-Suddī) to the same effect, with the Ṣiffīn episode of ʿAlī confronting a Syrian soldier reciting the verse. Tellingly, al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī himself records the ʿAlī-identification but expressly files it "of the inner sense" (min al-baṭn), keeping resurrection as the verse's plain meaning. The reader should weigh these as the sources' own traditions — reported faithfully here, not asserted as consensus exegesis.