“Warn Your Nearest Relations”
وَأَنذِرْ عَشِيرَتَكَ ٱلْأَقْرَبِينَ
(26:214) Warn the nearest of your kinsfolk,
The question
When “And warn your nearest relations” was revealed, whom did the Prophet gather and warn — and what did he say there about a brother, vizier and successor?
Views answered: narrations of a general warning to Quraysh or the clans, the narration addressing ʿĀʾishah, Ḥafṣah and Umm Salamah, al-Ālūsī, who reconciles them as several occasions
Al-Mizan's argument
Al-Mizan reads the verse as showing that there is no exception or favouritism in the call: the Prophet's nearest kin are warned like everyone else. In the narrations he finds that the reports of a general warning to Quraysh do not match a verse that names the nearest relations; that the report in which the Prophet addresses ʿĀʾishah, Ḥafṣah and Umm Salamah cannot be right, since the verse and chapter are Meccan and he married them in Medina; and that what is reliable is that he gathered Banū Hāshim, the descendants of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib. He finds al-Ālūsī's solution — that there were several warnings on different occasions — surprising. He then gives the reports from al-Barāʾ, from ʿAlī through al-Suyūṭī, and from Abū Rāfiʿ in Majmaʿ al-Bayān, in which the Prophet asks who will be his brother, helper, heir and successor, ʿAlī alone answers, and the Prophet declares him his brother, vizier, inheritor and deputy.
Reading guide
Each part opens the commentary at that point.
- No exception for the Prophet's kin
- Narrations: warnings to Quraysh and the clans
- The report naming the Prophet's wives
- Why the general warnings do not match
- Why the report naming his wives cannot be right
- What is reliable — and al-Ālūsī's solution
- Al-Barāʾ: the feast for ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib's descendants
- “Who will be my brother … heir and successor?”
- Al-Suyūṭī's report from ʿAlī
- Abū Rāfiʿ's account in Majmaʿ al-Bayān
- ʿAlī: “This is my inheritor, vizier and deputy”
- “And the chosen ones among your kin”