Surah Ya-Sin: what the surah is actually about
A reading of Surah Ya-Sin - its opening oath, the town and the man who ran from its far end, the signs in creation - and its disputed places in Tafsir al-Muyassar and in al-Safi and al-Mizan: what "Ya-Sin" means, and what "a clear register" is.
Surah Ya-Sin is the thirty-sixth surah of the Quran, revealed in Mecca, and eighty-three verses long. It is among the most recited surahs anywhere in the Muslim world — and one of the least often asked about. What is it about?
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.
Its Meccan standing, and the count of its verses
Al-Safi opens the surah by settling both at once: it is Meccan by everyone's reckoning, except — Ibn Abbas says — one verse revealed at Medina, "And when it is said to them, 'Spend from that which Allah has provided for you'" (Ya-Sin 36:47); and its verses are eighty-three by the Kufan count, eighty-two by the others.
The eighty-three is the count of the mushaf this site serves. The difference is in where the divisions fall, not in a word of the text.
The opening: what does "Ya-Sin" mean?
The surah opens with two disconnected letters, then an oath:
Ya, Seen.
By the wise Qur'an.
Al-Muyassar declines to settle what the letters mean here, referring the reader back to what was said at the opening of Al-Baqarah. What follows the oath is the spine of the whole surah: that Muhammad is sent, that what he brought is true, and that people are returning to their Lord.
Al-Safi first records a linguistic view — that it means "O man" in the dialect of Tayy — and then gives what the school holds as its own: that Ya-Sin is one of the Prophet's names. From al-Sadiq:
As for Ya-Sin, it is one of the names of the Prophet, and its meaning is: O you who hear the revelation.
He supports it with a report on how many names the Prophet has:
The Messenger of God has ten names, five of them in the Quran and five not in the Quran. Those in the Quran are Muhammad, Ahmad, Abdullah, Ya-Sin and Nun.
And he reports that al-Rida, in al-Ma'mun's assembly, asked the scholars present who was meant by "Ya-Sin", and they answered: Ya-Sin is Muhammad, no one has doubted it. On "Peace upon Elias" (As-Saffat 130) he narrates from the Commander of the Faithful:
Ya-Sin is Muhammad, and we are the family of Muhammad.
On that reading the two letters are an address to the Prophet rather than a symbol of unknown sense. Note that this last point turns on reading the Arabic of As-Saffat 130 as "the family of Ya-Sin"; the English translation this site serves takes it as the name of the prophet Elijah instead, so the connection is not visible in the English.
The town, and one man in it
The surah tells of a town whose people rejected the messengers sent to it. Then a single man appears, running from the far end of the town:
And there came from the farthest end of the city a man, running. He said, "O my people, follow the messengers.
His people kill him. The surah compresses what happens next into two verses, and what he says on the other side of death is not what one expects:
It was said, "Enter Paradise." He said, "I wish my people could know
Of how my Lord has forgiven me and placed me among the honored."
The first thing he wishes for, admitted into the garden, is that the people who killed him could know.
The signs in creation, and a variant reading of the sun
From the town the surah turns to the earth and the sky, and makes each ordinary thing an argument for resurrection: dead ground that comes back to life, night stripped from day, sun and moon each running a reckoned course.
And a sign for them is the dead earth. We have brought it to life and brought forth from it grain, and from it they eat.
And the sun runs [on course] toward its stopping point. That is the determination of the Exalted in Might, the Knowing.
Al-Muyassar reads "toward its stopping point" as a limit God set for it, which it neither passes nor falls short of.
Al-Safi records the same sense — "to a fixed limit at which its cycle ends" — and then narrates from al-Baqir and al-Sadiq a different reading of the Arabic, which turns the statement over:
"It has no stopping point," with the ra in the accusative — that is, it has no rest, for it is in perpetual motion.
So on the reading of the mushaf this site serves, the sun runs toward a stopping point; on the reading al-Safi narrates, it has no stopping point at all, being always in motion. A difference of one vowel changes what the verse reports — about as clear an example as there is of what the variant readings do to meaning.
It is not allowable for the sun to reach the moon, nor does the night overtake the day, but each, in an orbit, is swimming.
"A clear register": the Tablet, or the Imam?
One verse in the surah is quoted more than most, because it counts not only what a person did but what their doing left behind — and its last words are the most disputed phrase in the surah:
Indeed, it is We who bring the dead to life and record what they have put forth and what they left behind, and all things We have enumerated in a clear register.
The Arabic of that last phrase is imam mubin — literally "a clear imam", which is why what it refers to is argued over. Sahih International renders it "a clear register", taking one of the two readings.
Al-Muyassar takes it as a book: everything is enumerated in a clear record, which is the mother of books and to which they return — the Preserved Tablet. It reads their traces as what a person set in motion and what outlived them — a righteous child, knowledge that stays useful, a charity that keeps giving; and, on the other side, the harm they started. It adds a practical conclusion: a sensible person audits himself, so as to be an example in good both in his life and after it.
Al-Safi records that same view first, then adds to it:
It is said: it means the Preserved Tablet. And al-Qummi: it means in a clear book.
Then he narrates from the Commander of the Faithful:
By God, I am the clear imam. I distinguish truth from falsehood, and I inherited it from the Messenger of God.
So in al-Safi the two sit side by side: the clear imam is the Preserved Tablet, or it is the Imam in whom God enumerated the knowledge of all things. He adds a report from the Prophet supporting the second: "there is no knowledge but that my Lord taught it to me, and I taught it to Ali… and every knowledge I have learned I have enumerated in the imam of the God-fearing."
Al-Mizan — the second Shia commentary this site serves — goes with al-Muyassar:
…and their enumeration in the clear imam, which is the Preserved Tablet.
And it builds a structure of records on that:
That is because He establishes in His speech a book enumerating all things; then for every nation a book enumerating their deeds; then for every person a book enumerating his deeds.
A book that enumerates everything — "no moist or dry [thing] but that it is [written] in a clear record" (Al-An'am 59); a book for each nation (Al-Jathiyah 28); and a book for each person — "We will produce for him on the Day of Resurrection a record which he will encounter spread open" (Al-Isra 13). Al-Mizan argues that the verse itself separates the two: a recording of deeds, and an enumeration in the clear imam — different verbs, and different scope. As for why it is called an imam, al-Mizan's answer is that because it holds the decree that must come to pass, it is followed by creation, something they are led by — hence the word. And it says in as many words that taking it to mean the pages of deeds "is nothing".
So the picture here is not one school against another: the Sunni commentary and the second Shia commentary are on the same side, and al-Safi carries both views.
The shortest verse about the garden
Describing the people of paradise, the surah spends one verse, and it holds nothing but a greeting:
[And] "Peace," a word from a Merciful Lord.
How it closes
It ends where it began — with resurrection, argued from the simplest premise: the One who made a thing the first time can make it again.
His command is only when He intends a thing that He says to it, "Be," and it is.
So exalted is He in whose hand is the realm of all things, and to Him you will be returned.
Where they agree
- That the surah is Meccan, and that its spine is the message and the resurrection.
- That on the reading of the mushaf, "toward its stopping point" is a limit God set for the sun — stated by al-Muyassar, and recorded first by al-Safi.
- That the clear imam is the Preserved Tablet — stated by al-Muyassar, recorded by al-Safi, and argued for by al-Mizan.
- That "their traces" covers what outlives a person, for good or ill, and not their deeds alone.
- That the surah's closing lines argue the resurrection from the power of "Be, and it is".
What each commentary adds
- Al-Muyassar refers the disconnected letters back to Al-Baqarah, confines the clear imam to the Preserved Tablet, and draws the practical lesson: audit yourself, so as to be an example in good after you are gone.
- Al-Safi makes Ya-Sin a name of the Prophet meaning "O you who hear the revelation", supports it with the report of his ten names, records the variant reading "it has no stopping point", and sets beside the Preserved Tablet the Commander of the Faithful's "By God, I am the clear imam."
- Al-Mizan sets out three ranks of records in the Quran, separates the record of deeds from the clear imam by scope and by the verbs used, and explains the word imam as what creation is led by.
Counted against the mushaf
- The surah has eighty-three verses by the Kufan count this site serves, and eighty-two by the others — a difference in where the divisions fall, not in the text.
- The word mubin, "clear", occurs seven times in the surah: "a clear imam" (12), "the clear conveyance" (17), "clear error" (24 and 47), "a clear enemy" (60), "a clear Qur'an" (69), and "a clear adversary" (77). The description in the disputed phrase runs through the whole surah rather than standing alone in it.
- "Ya-Sin" occurs nowhere else in the Quran but this verse; "Il Yasin" appears only at As-Saffat 130, which is the verse the Commander of the Faithful's statement rests on.
A note on the surah's reported merits
A great deal is said about the special merit of reciting Ya-Sin, and the reports behind those claims are graded differently by different hadith scholars. This article is not the place to weigh them, and this site quotes only the commentaries it serves in full. For that question a reader is better served by specialists; for this surah, by reading it.
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 — Sayyid Muhammad Husayn al-Tabatabai.
Related: