Sūrah 82 · Āyāt 1–5

The passage (82:1-5). The surah opens, like its sister chapters of the final juz', with a chain of conditional "When..." clauses staging the dissolution of the cosmos: the sky cleft asunder, the stars scattered, the seas made to burst forth, the graves overturned — and then the apodosis lands in a single quiet line: "a soul shall know what it has sent forward and held back." The four upheavals are the setting; the soul's reckoning is the point.

The four cosmic signs. The present sources read these literally and eschatologically while preserving lexical range. Al-Tabarsi (Majma' al-Bayan) glosses infitar as the sky being split and rent, citing 25:25, and reports from Ibn 'Abbas that the stars "fall black, with no light." On al-bihar fujjirat he, al-Tusi (al-Tibyan) and al-Mizan converge on the dominant reading (Qatada, al-Jubba'i): the barriers between waters are breached so the sweet and the salt mingle and become "one sea" — al-Mizan expressly tying this to 81:6 ("the seas made to boil"), and noting the minority gloss (al-Hasan: "their water goes away"). My web cross-check confirms this "merger" reading is the mainstream one and matches Qarai's "merged." On al-qubur bu'thirat, all four sense-commentaries read the graves "turned upside down," their earth stirred to bring out the dead for requital; al-Qummi (as transmitted in al-Burhan) puts it concretely — "they split open and the people come out." Al-Qummi's own surviving gloss is terser still: the seas "turn into fires," the explosive reading the Enlightening Commentary also entertains (water as combustible hydrogen and oxygen).

The soul's reckoning. On 'alimat nafsun ma qaddamat wa akhkharat, the sources agree the verb covers both deeds done and consequences outliving the doer. Al-Tabarsi and al-Tusi both carry the Ibn Mas'ud reading — "what it sent forward" of good or evil, "what it held back" of a sunna (custom) one sets going so that its reward or burden keeps accruing — and al-Tabarsi anchors it in the Prophetic hadith (recited by Hudhayfa) that whoever inaugurates a good or evil practice bears the like of his followers' reward or sin. Al-Mizan sharpens the epistemology: the "knowing" here is the soul's own detailed recall, distinct from the later unrolling of the record (75:14-15), and "a soul" denotes the genus, so it is universal; he grounds the "traces" sense in 36:12 ("We record what they sent ahead and their traces"). The Enlightening Commentary develops the same into the doctrine of the lasting deed — endowments, a guiding tradition, a righteous child, a planted tree — and pairs it with 'Ali's saying that "every soul shall realize what it has sent before."

The Imami register. Beyond the plain sense, al-Burhan opens the surah with its merits of recitation (from al-Sadiq and the Khawass al-Qur'an) and closes v.5 with a distinctive ta'wil from Sharaf al-Din al-Najafi citing al-Qummi: that "what it sent forward and held back" was revealed against "the second one," reading the verse polemically through the lens of wilaya. It is recorded as transmitted, without endorsement, alongside — not in place of — the plain reading the same sources give.