The Vision and the Cursed Tree
وَإِذْ قُلْنَا لَكَ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ أَحَاطَ بِٱلنَّاسِ ۚ وَمَا جَعَلْنَا ٱلرُّءْيَا ٱلَّتِىٓ أَرَيْنَـٰكَ إِلَّا فِتْنَةً لِّلنَّاسِ وَٱلشَّجَرَةَ ٱلْمَلْعُونَةَ فِى ٱلْقُرْءَانِ ۚ وَنُخَوِّفُهُمْ فَمَا يَزِيدُهُمْ إِلَّا طُغْيَـٰنًا كَبِيرًا
(17:60) When We said to you, ‘Indeed your Lord encircles those people,’ We did not appoint the vision that We showed you except as a tribulation for the people and the tree cursed in the Quran. We warn them, but it only increases them in their outrageous rebellion.
The question
“We did not make the vision which We showed you but a trial for men, and the cursed tree in the Qur'an as well” — what was the vision, and what is the cursed tree?
Views answered: exegetes who take the vision to be the night journey and the tree to be Zaqqūm (from a report from Ibn ʿAbbās), al-Zamakhsharī (al-Kashshāf), those who take the vision to be the dream of entering Mecca, Abū Muslim, who takes the tree to be the Jews
Al-Mizan's argument
Al-Mizan notes that the verse does not spell out the vision or the tree, and reads them from the context and the Qur'an: the vision and the tree are trials that would come upon the people, and the tree is cursed in the Qur'an itself — a “tree” being a family or line. The cursed tree is therefore a group of hypocrites who would outwardly be Muslims and grow within the community, whose deeds in Islam God showed His Prophet in a dream, consoling him that it was a trial; this is confirmed by what some Sunnī sources narrate and the Ahl al-Bayt narrate unanimously. He then refutes the view that the vision was the night journey and the tree Zaqqūm — the night journey was not a dream, and Zaqqūm cannot be called cursed in the Qur'an — answers al-Zamakhsharī's Badr explanation, the dream of entering Mecca (seen after the migration, while the verse is Meccan), and Abū Muslim's view that the tree is the Jews. The narrations report the Prophet's dream of the Umayyads, the children of al-Ḥakam, climbing his pulpit like monkeys.
Reading guide
Each part opens the commentary at that point.
- What the verse leaves unexplained
- What the context shows
- A tree “cursed in the Qur'an”
- A group of hypocrites within the community
- The Prophet's dream, and the consolation
- Confirmed by the narrations
- The view that the vision was the night journey
- The objections to it
- Why Zaqqūm cannot be the cursed tree
- The report from Ibn ʿAbbās
- Al-Kashshāf's explanation
- The dream of entering Mecca
- “The cursed tree is the Jews”
- Narrations: the dream of the pulpit
- ʿĀʾishah to Marwān: “You are the cursed tree”
- Not a hidden interpretation