Sūrah 93 · Āyāt 1–5

Sūrat al-Ḍuḥā 93:1–5 — The two oaths and the divine reassurance

The passage opens with two oaths — "By the morning brightness, and by the night when it settles" — and answers them with a tender reassurance to the Prophet: "Your Lord has neither forsaken you, nor is He displeased," capped by two promises: the hereafter will be better than the present, and "soon your Lord will give you, and you will be pleased."

The lexicon of the oaths. The present sources converge on the imagery. Majmaʿ al-Bayān (Ṭabarsī) glosses al-ḍuḥā as the light of the full day (from ḍaḥā li-l-shams, "to be exposed to the sun"), or specifically the forenoon, and sajā as the night's darkness when it "becomes still and settled," citing Qatāda for "stillness" and ʿAṭāʾ/al-Ḍaḥḥāk for "covered everything with darkness." al-Tibyān (Ṭūsī) gives the same two-fold sense — al-Ḥasan: "covered with its darkness"; Qatāda: "became still," from baḥr sājin, a still sea. al-Mīzān (Ṭabāṭabāʾī), citing al-Rāghib's Mufradāt, defines ḍuḥā as "the spreading of the sun and the extension of the day" and sujūw as the night's stillness, and notes the fitness of day-light and night-darkness as figures for the coming and the pausing of revelation. al-Qummī and al-Burhān (Baḥrānī) preserve the plainest gloss: ḍuḥā = "when the sun rises," sajā = "when it darkens." (A web cross-check confirms sajā carries both "stillness/calm" and "covering with darkness" — Qarai's "when it is calm" is well-grounded.)

The occasion of revelation. Ṭabarsī is richest: revelation was withheld — fifteen days (Ibn ʿAbbās), twelve (Ibn Jurayj), or forty (Muqātil) — and the polytheists taunted that Muhammad's Lord had abandoned and come to hate him; the sūra rebutted them. He adds the Gabriel exchange ("I longed for you even more, but I descend only by my Lord's command") and the Umm Jamīl report. Ṭūsī gives the same fifteen-night account. But al-Qummī and al-Burhān carry the distinctively Imāmī version (Abū al-Jārūd ← al-Bāqir): the cause was Gabriel's delay after Sūrat al-ʿAlaq, and it was Khadīja's words — "perhaps your Lord has left you and will not send to you" — not the polytheists' taunt, that the verse answered.

"Forsaken... displeased." All agree: mā waddaʿaka = "He has not cut off revelation as a farewell," mā qalā = "He has not detested you." Ṭūsī adds the rational point that "the intellect indicates God would never detest one of His prophets," and the grammatical note that the kāf of qalāka is elided to preserve the yāʾ rhyme (as in fa-āwā, fa-hadā, fa-aghnā). al-Mīzān reads vv. 4–5 as an ascent: you are under grace now, better in the hereafter — "an absolute gift followed by an absolute pleasure."

"You will be pleased." Here the sources foreground a famous Ahl al-Bayt teaching, shared by Ṭabarsī, al-Burhān, and al-Mīzān's narration section: that 93:5 — not 39:53 — is "the most hope-giving verse in the Book of God," identifying "what will please you" with the Prophet's intercession (Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya ← ʿAlī). al-Qummī and al-Burhān gloss "the hereafter" (v. 4) as al-karra, "the Return." All four narration-bearing sources also carry the Fāṭima tradition (al-Ṣādiq / Jābir): finding her grinding grain in a coarse cloak, the Prophet bade her "hasten the bitterness of the world for the sweetness of the hereafter," upon which this verse came. The published Enlightening Commentary weaves these same threads — the day/night-as-revelation metaphor, the intercession reading, and the Fāṭima report — into a single consoling arc.