Sūrah 81 · Āyāt 1–9

The passage (81:1-9). The Surah opens with a cascade of conditional "When..." clauses painting the dissolution of the cosmos at the threshold of the Resurrection: the sun wound up and darkened, the stars falling and scattered, the mountains set moving, the prized pregnant she-camels abandoned, the wild beasts mustered, the seas made to boil, the souls paired with their like — and then, most arrestingly, the girl buried alive questioned "for what sin she was slain." The full grammatical weight of these clauses lands only at v.14 ("every soul shall know what it has brought forward"), but vv.1-9 already move from cosmic catastrophe to a single, intimate cry for justice.

The cosmic signs. The present sources converge on the literal-eschatological reading while preserving lexical range. Al-Mizan takes takwir as the encompassing darkening of the sun's body and inkidar as the stars' falling (citing 82:2), allowing also "the going-away of their light"; al-Tabarsi (Majma' al-Bayan) gathers the same opinions — light gathered and folded "as a turban is folded" (al-Zajjaj), or cast away — and al-Tusi (al-Tibyan) adds that the past-tense verbs denote the certain future. On al-'ishar 'uttilat, al-Mizan reads a metonymy: the wealth man vies over is left ownerless because each is "preoccupied with himself" (citing 80:37), while Tabarsi and Tusi preserve the minority gloss (al-Jubba'i: clouds that withhold rain), which al-Azhari rejected as unknown in the language. On al-wuhush hushirat, al-Mizan and Tabarsi link the beasts' mustering to 6:38 ("communities like you"), with retributive compensation among the animals, though al-Mizan cautions that scripture gives no detail of their final state. Al-bihar sujjirat is read both as "set ablaze" and "filled" across all four classical sources, with al-Qummi (carried in al-Mizan and Bahrani) vividly stating "the seas around the world all turn into fires."

The souls paired. For al-nufus zuwwijat, al-Mizan grounds the pairing in scripture: the felicitous with the purified spouses and houris (52:20), the wretched with their devil-companions (37:22; 43:36). Al-Qummi and al-Burhan transmit the same through Abu al-Jarud from Imam al-Baqir; Tabarsi and Tusi add the alternative that the spirits return to the bodies. Al-Burhan opens this section with the long narration of Abu Dharr on the sun's nightly prostration beneath the Throne and Gabriel's robing it in light — its withholding for three nights tied directly to kuwwirat — and an Ibn 'Abbas report that every believer is paired in Paradise save 'Ali, wedded to Fatima alone.

The buried girl. All sources read al-maw'uda as the daughter buried alive (Tabarsi and Tusi cite Qays b. 'Asim, who buried eight daughters, and the Prophet's command of expiation). On the grammar of "asked," al-Mizan and Tabarsi explain the question as an indirect rebuke of the killer — like God's questioning of Jesus (5:116) — a prelude to the victim's plea for redress; Tusi notes the variant (Ibn 'Abbas, "in our reports") in which she herself is the questioner. Distinctively, the Imami sources carry the variant reading al-mawadda ("love") attributed to Imams al-Baqir and al-Sadiq and to Ibn 'Abbas: those slain "in love of us, the People of the House," anchored in 42:23 ("I ask no reward except love for the near kin"). Al-Qummi and al-Burhan transmit this as-attributed through Jabir and others — including applications to the Shi'a of the Family of Muhammad and to al-Husayn at Karbala — while al-Qummi's own closing word, like Tabarsi and Tusi, returns to the plain sense of female infanticide.