Sūrah 90 · Āyāt 1–7

al-Balad 90:1–7 — God swears by Mecca and by the Prophet within it, that "man was created in toil," then exposes the deluded boaster. The present sources read the opening as a solemn oath. al-Ṭabarsī (Majmaʿ al-Bayān) reports that "the commentators are agreed that this is an oath by the inviolable town, which is Mecca," and al-Ṭūsī (al-Tibyān), with Ibn ʿAbbās, Mujāhid, Qatāda and Ibn Zayd, says the same; al-Ṭūsī adds the grammatical point that lā uqsimu in fact means "I swear," the lā being a connective particle (or a rebuttal of an opponent's claim). Tafsīr al-Qummī compresses it: "the town is Mecca."

"And you reside in this town." The phrase wa anta ḥill draws three readings the sources preserve side by side. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī first gloss it as residence — the town's honour deriving from the Prophet who dwells in it; al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) makes this precise, calling ḥill "a verbal noun meaning residence and settlement," with the explicit "this town" set for the pronoun "to signal the town's great standing." A second reading, from Ibn ʿAbbās and ʿAṭāʾ in both al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī, takes it of the Conquest: it was made lawful for the Prophet to fight there "only for an hour of a day." al-Ṭabarsī alone records a third, narrated from Imam al-Ṣādiq (ʿa): "you are treated there as one whose sanctity is violated" — Quraysh would magnify the town yet hold the Prophet licit within it, a sense al-Burhān (al-Baḥrānī) corroborates from ʿAlī ibn Ibrāhīm: "Quraysh would not hold it licit to wrong anyone in this town, yet they held it licit to wrong you within it."

"By the begetter and what he begot." al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī array the views — Adam and his progeny; every parent and child; Abraham and his offspring — and al-Ṭabarsī preserves a distinctly Imami gloss from al-Ṣādiq (ʿa): "Adam and the prophets, the legatees and their followers whom he begot." al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī settles on Abraham and Ishmael, "the two original causes of the founding of Mecca and the builders of the Sacred House," binding the oath to the town just sworn by.

The thesis: "man was created in toil." This is, for al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī, the sūra's governing claim — that "the very constitution of the human being is built upon toil," with no affair of life "unaccompanied by the bitterness of striving... until he dies." al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī give kabad as hardship — "he contends with the calamities of this world and the rigours of the next" — and both also report Mujāhid's reading of erect stature (man "standing upright on his two feet"), which Tafsīr al-Qummī states starkly: "erect, and nothing else was created in his likeness."

The boaster who forgets he is seen. On verses 5–7 al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī read a-yaḥsabu an lan yaqdira ʿalayhi aḥad as a rebuke — "does he think no one can punish him when he disobeys God?" — and gloss ahlaktu mālan lubadā (al-Ḥasan) as the squandering of "abundant, heaped-up wealth," boasted in enmity to the Prophet. al-Burhān, citing Abū al-Jārūd, names the type as ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd, "when ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (ʿa) offered him Islam on the Day of the Trench." Against his conceit that "none saw him," al-Ṭabarsī closes with the Prophetic warning that the servant will be questioned about his life, his wealth — "whence he gathered it and on what he spent it" — his deeds, "and our love, the People of the House."

The Enlightening Commentary (Imani) frames the opening oaths as the Qurʾān's way of flagging "facts of very great importance," and makes the key point that Mecca is sworn by not for the pagans' sake but "for the sake of the blessed existence, in it, of Muḥammad (S)" — the spiritual value of a land deriving from those who dwell there. On kabad it gathers the lexicography directly: "as Ṭabarsī cites in Majmaʿ al-Bayān, [it] originally means 'intensity,'" while "as Rāghib cites in Mufradāt, the word kabad means 'a disease in the liver' … used for any trouble and misery." It corroborates al-Burhān's identification of the boaster, citing the tradition that at Khandaq, when ʿAlī (as) invited ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd to Islam, he retorted, "What about that which I have spent, abundantly, from my wealth, against you?", and closes verse 7 with the same Prophetic ḥadīth of the four questions — lifetime, wealth, deeds, "and his love for us; the Ahl al-Bayt."