Surah Ar-Rahman: the question asked thirty-one times
Surah Ar-Rahman read in three commentaries - al-Muyassar, al-Safi and al-Mizan: the surah that opens with a name, the question asked thirty-one times, the balance from its narrowest sense to its widest, the two seas and the barrier, and why perishing is counted among the favours.
Surah Ar-Rahman is the fifty-fifth surah of the Quran, seventy-eight verses long, and sits in the twenty-seventh part of the mushaf. Commentators differ over whether it was revealed in Mecca or Medina. Most people who know it at all know it for one verse — a verse that comes back, and back, until it is the rhythm of the whole surah.
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.
A surah that opens with a name
The first verse is not a sentence. It is a name:
The Most Merciful
Then three verses in one breath:
Taught the Qur'an,
Created man,
[And] taught him eloquence.
(Ar-Rahman 55:2, Ar-Rahman 55:3, Ar-Rahman 55:4)
Al-Muyassar reads the second verse as God making the Quran easy to recite, to hold in memory and to understand, and the fourth as the speech by which a person says what is in him — the thing that marks him off from everything else alive.
The order is the part worth stopping at. Teaching the Quran is named before creating man. The first of the favours this surah counts is not the body and not the food: it is that there is something said to a person, and a tongue with which to answer.
The question asked thirty-one times
The verse everyone knows is this one:
So which of the favors of your Lord would you deny?
It occurs thirty-one times, word for word — counted against the mushaf this site serves, not taken from a source: first at verse 13, last at verse 77. The surah names a favour, or draws a scene, and then asks the same question about it. The effect is of going down a list and being asked one thing at every line.
Al-Muyassar reads the favours as both religious and worldly, addresses the question to jinn and mankind, and adds the report that when the Prophet recited the surah to the jinn they answered at every refrain: we deny none of your favours, our Lord; the praise is yours. The address is in the dual throughout — your Lord, would you two deny — as the surah says outright near its end.
What al-Safi makes of "the favours"
Tafsir al-Safi, by al-Fayd al-Kashani, starts from that same apparent sense, quoting Tafsir al-Qummi: in the apparent sense it addresses the jinn and mankind. It then reports from Ja'far al-Sadiq a reading of the two favours the question is about: which of the two favours do you deny — Muhammad, or Ali?
Then it closes with a methodological note that is worth having in full, because it explains why al-Safi does not assign a different meaning to "the favours" at each of the thirty-one places: commentators, it says, have gone to the trouble of giving the word a different sense in every place in the surah, derived from whatever precedes it — we have set that aside, content with what is in this report.
So the agreement is that the address is to both orders of creation, and that the question is a reproach for denying a favour. What al-Safi adds is two named favours, and then an explicit refusal to itemise the rest.
The balance, from its narrowest sense to its widest
Three verses near the opening turn on one word:
And the heaven He raised and imposed the balance
That you not transgress within the balance.
And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance.
(Ar-Rahman 55:7, Ar-Rahman 55:8, Ar-Rahman 55:9)
Al-Muyassar reads the first broadly — God raised the sky above the earth and placed in the earth the justice he commanded and legislated for his servants — and the next two narrowly, as honest weighing between people: do not transgress and cheat the one you weigh for, weigh with justice, and do not short the scale when you weigh for people.
Al-Mizan, by al-Tabatabai, widens the first verse explicitly: what is meant by the balance is everything by which a thing is measured, whether a creed, a word or a deed — the scale that weighs loads being one instance of it, not the whole of it. It argues this from Al-Hadid 25, where God sends the messengers with the Book and the balance so that people may maintain justice, and concludes that the apparent sense is whatever distinguishes truth from falsehood, honesty from lying, justice from wrongdoing and virtue from vice — which is what a messenger brings from his Lord. It then notes those who confined the word to justice and those who confined it to the scale of weights, prefers the widest reading, and returns in the next two verses to the balance commonly known, the scale of loads.
Al-Safi glosses those next two verses much as al-Muyassar does — do not transgress, do not exceed fairness, do not short it, since it is the point for which it was set up — and then reports from Ali al-Rida a reading that takes the whole sequence as the Imam: the sky is the Messenger, whom God raised to himself; the balance is the Commander of the Faithful, whom he set up for his creation; do not transgress in the balance is do not disobey the Imam; establish weight in justice is establish the Imam with justice; and do not short the balance is do not deny the Imam his right, and do not wrong him.
Where they agree: that verse 8 forbids transgressing in the balance, and that the first half of verse 9 commands weighing with justice while the second forbids shorting the scale — all three take this to be the apparent sense of the two verses, about weighing between people.
Where they differ: in how much the word carries in verse 7. Al-Muyassar stops at legislated justice; al-Mizan widens it to everything by which anything is measured and makes the physical scale one instance; al-Safi reports above that a reading which fixes the referent in the Imam. The difference is over the referent, not over the value: all three have it that what is required is a justice no one may transgress.
Two seas and a barrier
Among the things the surah counts:
He released the two seas, meeting [side by side];
Between them is a barrier [so] neither of them transgresses.
(Ar-Rahman 55:19, Ar-Rahman 55:20)
Al-Muyassar glosses this as the sweet water and the salt meeting with a barrier between them, so that neither overruns the other and loses what it is: the sweet stays sweet and the salt salt, in the very place they touch. Then, after the question again, what comes out of them:
From both of them emerge pearl and coral.
Al-Mizan begins from the wording: maraja means both mixing and releasing, and the first is the more apparent; the two seas are the sweet and fresh and the salt and bitter, as in Fatir 12, where the two are explicitly unequal and both yield fresh meat and ornament.
Al-Safi also begins from the apparent sense, reading the barrier as a partition by God's power that prevents the two from mingling and cancelling each other's properties. It then reports from Tafsir al-Qummi a symbolic reading — the two seas as Ali and Fatimah, neither overrunning the other, and the pearl and the coral as al-Hasan and al-Husayn — and follows it with something that bears noting: it attributes the same reading, via Majma' al-Bayan, to Salman al-Farisi, Sa'id b. Jubayr and Sufyan al-Thawri, with Muhammad as the barrier. The reading is not confined, in its transmission, to one school.
Where they agree: that the apparent sense is two seas that meet without mingling, held apart by a barrier of God's power, and that the pearl and the coral come out of them. Al-Muyassar says it, al-Mizan says it explicitly, and al-Safi puts it before anything else.
Where they differ: al-Safi adds a transmitted symbolic reading that al-Muyassar does not mention — and al-Mizan, itself a Shia commentary, stops at the natural sense here and builds no symbol on these verses. This is not one school against another; it is two commentaries within one school taking different paths.
Everyone on it will perish
Midway through stand the two verses most often quoted from the surah after the refrain:
Everyone upon the earth will perish,
And there will remain the Face of your Lord, Owner of Majesty and Honor.
(Ar-Rahman 55:26, Ar-Rahman 55:27)
Al-Muyassar reads it plainly: everyone on the face of the earth dies, and the Face of your Lord remains, of greatness and favour — affirming the attribute as befits God, without likeness and without specifying how.
Al-Mizan raises the obvious objection. The surah is counting favours; how is perishing a favour, that the same question should follow it? Its answer is that both the perishing of those on the earth and the dawning of the next order upon them are among the favours, because this life is preliminary to the purpose of the next, and moving from a preliminary to its purpose is a favour. That disposes, it says, of the question what favour is there in perishing, that it should be counted among the favours? — because what this perishing really is, as many verses explain, is a return to God by departure from this world, and not annihilation as such.
So the perishing here is a transition, not a nothing, and can be counted among the favours. A surah that spends itself counting favours will not let the reader assume that what is counted lasts: everything on the earth goes, one thing remains — which is what puts the rest of the surah, the two gardens and the two below them, where it is.
Is the reward for good anything but good?
One of its lines has passed into ordinary speech:
Is the reward for good [anything] but good?
Al-Muyassar reads it as a question with only one answer: is the recompense of the one who did well in this life anything other than being done well by, in the garden, in the next.
What the surah does not say
- It does not say that the favours it counts are limited to the ones named; the question returns after every item.
- It does not say that it is mankind alone being asked: the address is in the dual at all thirty-one places.
- It does not say that what remains is man in another form. What remains, in the words of the verse, is the Face of your Lord.
How it ends
The surah closes on the name it began with:
Blessed is the name of your Lord, Owner of Majesty and Honor.
It is a closed circle: it opens with ar-Rahman, the Merciful, and ends by calling that name blessed. Everything in between is the account of why.
Counted against the mushaf
- The refrain occurs thirty-one times, word for word: at verses 13, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75 and 77.
- It occurs in no other surah of the Quran in those exact words.
- Coral (al-marjan) appears in only two places in the Quran, both in this surah: Ar-Rahman 22 and Ar-Rahman 58.
- He released the two seas occurs in only two places: Ar-Rahman 19 and Al-Furqan 53.
A note on its reported merits
Surah Ar-Rahman is widely called "the bride of the Quran", and the reports behind that name are graded differently by different hadith scholars. This article is not the place to weigh them.
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.