"With hardship comes ease": what Ash-Sharh 5-6 promises
The two verses people quote in hard times, read in their own context: the three gifts that precede them, why the sentence is repeated, and how al-Muyassar, al-Safi and al-Mizan each read it.
Two verses near the end of the Quran turn up in condolence messages, in congratulations, and on a great many walls. They are rarely read in their own surah, and almost never with the question their repetition raises.
The commentaries quoted below are in Arabic; the renderings are mine.
Eight verses, in order
Surah Ash-Sharh is the ninety-fourth surah and eight verses long. It opens with three things given, each phrased as a question that expects agreement:
Did We not expand for you, [O Muhammad], your breast?
And We removed from you your burden
Which had weighed upon your back
And raised high for you your repute.
(Ash-Sharh 94:1 to Ash-Sharh 94:4)
A chest expanded, a burden lifted, a name raised. Then:
For indeed, with hardship [will be] ease.
Indeed, with hardship [will be] ease.
(Ash-Sharh 94:5, Ash-Sharh 94:6)
In al-Tafsir al-Muyassar
The King Fahd Complex commentary reads the verse as consolation addressed to the Prophet in the face of his opponents: let their harm not turn you from delivering the message, for with the constriction there is relief — with the constriction there is relief. The promise is not that the hardship will end and ease will follow after it. The Arabic preposition is with.
Why is the sentence repeated?
This is where the readings part. Tafsir al-Safi cites Majma al-Bayan for a report that the Prophet came out glad, laughing, saying that one hardship will not overcome two eases — and then gives the grammatical reasoning behind it: al-usr, the hardship, carries the definite article in both verses, and a definite noun repeated is the same one; yusran, ease, is indefinite in both, and an indefinite noun repeated is a second one. One hardship, two eases.
In Tafsir al-Mizan
Allama Tabataba’i takes the definite article differently. He reads it as generic rather than as pointing to one particular hardship, and ties the verse to a standing pattern in creation: God lifted the burden and raised the name, he writes, and that was in keeping with His way in the world of bringing ease after hardship — the way, perhaps, by which events turn and states of affairs change and nothing lasts. On the second verse he holds that it repeats for emphasis and reassurance, and notes that others read it as a fresh sentence.
What the verse actually promises
All three agree the promise is real, and differ over its reach: relief accompanying the hardship, or two eases for one hardship, or a law of creation that hardship does not last. None of them says ease arrives without work — which is how the surah itself ends:
So when you have finished [your duties], then stand up [for worship].
And to your Lord direct [your] longing.
(Ash-Sharh 94:7, Ash-Sharh 94:8)
Related: