Surah Al-Mulk: the surah that asks you to look twice
Surah Al-Mulk read in three commentaries - al-Muyassar, al-Safi and al-Mizan: what the surah is arguing for, how death can be created, what "best in deed" means, the two men walking, and the question it closes with.
Surah Al-Mulk is the sixty-seventh surah of the Quran, revealed in Mecca, and thirty verses long. It opens the twenty-ninth part of the mushaf, and a great many people know it by a name that is not its own: Tabarak, its first word.
This article gives al-Tafsir al-Muyassar first at every place, then Tafsir al-Safi and al-Mizan, and sets out where they agree before where they differ. It does not adjudicate between schools.
The Arabic of every commentary quoted below is on the Arabic version of this page and on the page of each verse; the English renderings are ours.
Two names, one idea
The surah begins with the word that gave it its second name:
Blessed is He in whose hand is dominion, and He is over all things competent -
Al-Muyassar glosses tabarak as God's good and His blessing multiplying over all He has made — the One in whose hand the dominion of this world and the next both rest, and it adds that the verse establishes the attribute of the hand for God as befits His majesty. Al-Safi reads the same phrase in one short line: in the grip of His power is the disposal of all affairs.
The surah's usual name, al-Mulk, "the dominion", is taken from that same first verse. The two names are the same claim said twice. Al-Safi gives it two further names — al-munjiyah, the rescuer, because it rescues its reader from the punishment of the grave, and al-waqiyah, the shield — and counts its verses as thirty-one, where the mushaf this site serves has thirty.
What the surah is arguing for
Al-Mizan, by al-Tabatabai, opens with a statement of the surah's purpose, and this is something al-Muyassar does not do. The purpose, it says, is to establish that God's lordship extends over all the worlds, against the pagan claim that every sector of the world has a lord of its own from among the angels and others and that God is only the lord of those lords. That is why the surah counts favour after favour in creation and in governance — the counting is itself the argument — and why its contents reduce to a call to the oneness of lordship together with the affirmation of the Return.
Read that way the surah is not a loose list of signs. It is a case, and its order follows from the case: sky, then earth, then birds, then water.
Death, then life
The second verse puts the two in an order that is worth stopping at:
[He] who created death and life to test you [as to] which of you is best in deed - and He is the Exalted in Might, the Forgiving -
Al-Muyassar glosses it as a test of which of us is best and most sincere in deed, and takes the verse as both an encouragement to obedience and a warning against disobedience.
Al-Mizan raises the difficulty the wording itself creates: how can death be created, when death is an absence? Life, it says, is a thing's being such that it perceives and wills, and death is the lack of that — but death, on what the Quran's own teaching shows, is a passage from one mode of life to another, as Al-Waqi'ah 60-61 is taken to show. So there is no obstacle to creation attaching to death as it attaches to life. (The same move appears in al-Mizan on Ar-Rahman: perishing is transition, not annihilation.)
Al-Safi, on the order of the two words, reports two things that put life first: Tafsir al-Qummi reading created as decreed them, meaning He decreed life and then death; and al-Kafi from al-Baqir, God created life before death.
So al-Muyassar passes over the order; al-Mizan resolves it by denying that death is a bare absence; al-Safi reports what puts life first in the order of creation. None of the three is at odds with the others on the point that matters: both were made, and made for one end.
"Best in deed"
Here the three agree, and the agreement is worth setting out.
Al-Muyassar reads best in deed as the most sincere, not the most numerous. Al-Mizan states the purpose: that we were created this way — living, then dying — as a preliminary, testing kind of creation, by which the one who is better in deed is distinguished from the one who is not.
Al-Safi and al-Mizan then both carry the same report, from al-Kafi, from Ja'far al-Sadiq: it does not mean the most of you in deed, but the soundest of you in deed; and soundness is the fear of God and a truthful intention. He went on: keeping a deed until it is pure is harder than the deed itself; the pure deed is the one for which you want no one's praise but God's; and the intention is better than the deed — indeed, the intention is the deed — reciting, "Say, each one works according to his manner", meaning according to his intention. Al-Safi adds al-Kashani's own note: perhaps keeping a deed means not speaking of it wanting people's praise, so that it stays purely for God — and that, he says, is plainly harder than the deed.
Al-Mizan then quotes Majma' al-Bayan with the Companion who transmitted it. Abu Qatadah asked the Prophet what best in deed meant, and was told: it means whichever of you is best in understanding — then: the most complete of you in understanding, the most fearful of God, and the most careful in considering what God commanded and forbade, even if he is the least of you in voluntary acts. A second, from Ibn Umar, has the Prophet recite the opening of the surah and then say: whichever of you is best in understanding, most restrained from what God forbade, and quickest to obey Him.
Where they agree: that what is weighed is the quality of the deed and not its quantity. Al-Muyassar says "most sincere"; the report carried in both al-Safi and al-Mizan says "the soundest of you in deed" — and its completion is the fear of God and a truthful intention.
What each adds: al-Mizan names the Companions who transmitted the "best in understanding" report — Abu Qatadah and Ibn Umar — so it comes from the Prophet by a chain that is not confined to one school; al-Safi carries it without naming them, and adds al-Kashani's gloss.
Look, then look again
[And] who created seven heavens in layers. You do not see in the creation of the Most Merciful any inconsistency. So return [your] vision [to the sky]; do you see any breaks?
Then return [your] vision twice again. [Your] vision will return to you humbled while it is fatigued.
Al-Muyassar reads this as a standing instruction: look again, and again, for a crack or a seam — your sight comes back beaten, having found none. The surah tells the reader in advance how the search ends, and still sends him to search.
Two men walking
The surah's picture of belief and disbelief is two men and their gait:
Then is one who walks fallen on his face better guided or one who walks erect on a straight path?
Al-Muyassar names it plainly as a likeness struck for the one who denies and the one who believes: a man stumbling face-down who cannot see where he is going, against a man upright on a clear road. Al-Safi says the same in its own words — a likeness of the idolater and the monotheist by the two walkers, and of the two religions by the two roads.
It then reports from Musa al-Kazim a reading that fixes the referent: that God struck a likeness for whoever turned away from the guardianship of Ali as one who walks on his face unable to find his way, and made whoever followed him the one walking erect — the straight path being the Commander of the Faithful.
Where they agree: that the verse is a likeness, that its two sides are the monotheist and the one who is not, and that the thing likened is two walkers on two roads. That is al-Muyassar's reading and al-Safi's own words for it.
Where they differ: al-Safi adds a report fixing the straight path in a named person, where al-Muyassar names no one at this verse. The difference is over the referent, not over the likeness.
It ends with a question about water
The last verse asks one thing, and answering it needs no learning at all:
Say, "Have you considered: if your water was to become sunken [into the earth], then who could bring you flowing water?"
Al-Muyassar reads it as addressed to the idolaters, and as a question with no answer available to them: if the water you drink sank away out of reach, who other than God would bring you water running on the surface of the earth?
Al-Safi begins from that same plain sense — sunken into the earth so that the buckets cannot reach it; flowing water, running or surfaced and easily drawn. It then reports a cluster of readings that take your water otherwise: al-Qummi, if your Imam were to become absent, who would bring you an Imam like him?; al-Rida, your water is your gateways, the Imams, and the Imams are the gateways of God — flowing water being the Imam's knowledge; and al-Baqir, that the verse was revealed about the awaited Imam. That last report ends with something worth quoting for what it concedes: by God, the interpretation of this verse has not yet come, and its interpretation must come.
Where they agree: that the plain sense of the verse is the water people drink, and that the question is one no one but God can answer. That is al-Muyassar's reading, and al-Safi puts it before anything else.
Where they differ: al-Safi attaches to the plain sense an interpretation in the Imam, and states that it is an interpretation distinct from the plain sense and one whose time has not yet come. A surah that opened by saying the dominion is in God's hand closes by pointing out that the nearest and most necessary thing in a person's life is not in his own — and that is what the plain sense says on its own.
What the surah does not say
- It does not say that whoever does the most passes the test. The wording is best in deed, and the report both commentaries carry reads it as the soundest of you in deed.
- It does not name a number of looks beyond the one in the verse: return your vision twice again.
- The names al-munjiyah and al-waqiyah are not in the surah; they come from the commentaries.
Counted against the mushaf
- The surah has thirty verses in the mushaf this site serves, which is also what al-Mizan states at its head; al-Safi states thirty-one, a difference in how verses are counted, not in the text.
- Tabarak occurs in six verses of the Quran: Al-A'raf 54, Al-Furqan 1, 10 and 61, Ar-Rahman 78 and Al-Mulk 1. Two surahs open with it: Al-Furqan and Al-Mulk.
- Ar-Rahman, the Most Merciful, is used of God in four verses of this surah — 3, 19, 20 and 29 — which is the point al-Mizan makes about its purpose.
- The word rendered "tame", dhalul, occurs nowhere else in the Quran than Al-Mulk 15.
- The word rendered "sunken", ghawr, occurs in only two places: Al-Kahf 41 and Al-Mulk 30.
A note on the surah's reported merits
A great deal is said about reciting Al-Mulk each night, and the reports behind those claims are graded differently by different hadith scholars. This article is not the place to weigh them; what follows is only what the commentaries this site serves actually carry. Nothing of the kind appears in al-Muyassar at this surah's verses. Al-Safi quotes Thawab al-A'mal and Majma' al-Bayan, from al-Sadiq: whoever recites Tabarak alladhi bi-yadihi al-mulk before sleeping remains in God's safekeeping until morning, and in His safekeeping on the Day of Resurrection until he enters the garden. Weighing such reports is for the specialists.
Sources
- The Quran text — the Madinah mushaf, Hafs from 'Asim, King Fahd Complex for the Printing of the Holy Quran. English renderings of verses are the Sahih International translation this site serves.
- Tafsir al-Muyassar — a panel of commentators, King Fahd Complex.
- Tafsir al-Safi — al-Fayd al-Kashani.
- Al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Quran — al-Sayyid Muhammad Husayn al-Tabatabai.
The counts in this article are computed against the mushaf text this site serves, not quoted from a source.