Insights and Lessons from Al-Baydawi’s Anwar at-Tanzil on Al-Isra Verse 7

We now reach Imam Al-Baydawi on verse 7 of Surah Al-Isra — the sixth and final commentator on this verse. True to Anwar at-Tanzil, his treatment is compact but exact: he names the rhetorical figure precisely (izdiwaj), distils the variant recitations, and closes with the historical identification of the invaders and the narration of the boiling blood of Yahya.

Here is the verse:

﴿إِنۡ أَحۡسَنتُمۡ أَحۡسَنتُمۡ لِأَنفُسِكُمۡۖ وَإِنۡ أَسَأۡتُمۡ فَلَهَاۚ فَإِذَا جَاۤءَ وَعۡدُ ٱلۡـَٔاخِرَةِ لِیَسُۥۤـُٔوا۟ وُجُوهَكُمۡ وَلِیَدۡخُلُوا۟ ٱلۡمَسۡجِدَ كَمَا دَخَلُوهُ أَوَّلَ مَرَّةࣲ وَلِیُتَبِّرُوا۟ مَا عَلَوۡا۟ تَتۡبِیرࣰا﴾ [الإسراء ٧]

“If you do good, you do good for yourselves; and if you do evil, it is against them [yourselves]. So when the promise of the latter [time] came, [We sent enemies] to disfigure your faces, and to enter the Masjid as they entered it the first time, and to destroy utterly all that they overcame.”

Let me arrange every point and draw out the lessons.

1. “If You Do Good… and If You Do Evil” — Reward for the Soul, Burden Against It

Al-Baydawi’s compact gloss draws the two halves into perfect balance:

“‘If you do good, you do good for yourselves’ — because its reward (thawab) is for it [the soul]. ‘And if you do evil, it is against it’ — for its evil burden (wabal) is upon it. He mentioned it [only] with the lam [saying ‘for it’ rather than ‘against it’] for the sake of pairing (izdiwaj).”

So the lam in “for it” was chosen — even though the meaning is “against it” — to pair the second clause with the first (“for yourselves”) in matched, symmetrical wording.

KEY LESSONS:

• Reward and burden each return to their owner: thawab for the soul, wabal against it. Al-Baydawi names both sides precisely — the reward of good and the evil burden of sin both land on the same place: your own self. You are the sole heir of your good and the sole bearer of your evil.
• The verse says “for it” instead of “against it” deliberately — to keep the two halves a matched pair. This is izdiwaj: the Quran shapes the wording so that “good is for you / evil is for (i.e., against) you” reads as a perfect, balanced couplet. The elegance is purposeful — the symmetry itself drives home that the same scale weighs both your good and your evil.

2. “When the Promise of the Latter Came” — The Promise of Punishment, and the Omitted “We Sent Them”

Al-Baydawi specifies which “promise” this is, and supplies the unspoken verb:

“‘So when the promise of the latter came’ — the promise of the punishment of the latter time. ‘To disfigure your faces’ — i.e., We sent them to disfigure your faces, that is, to make them show the marks of harm in them. [The verb ‘We sent them’] was omitted because its earlier mention indicates it” — i.e., “We sent against you” already appeared in verse 5.

KEY LESSONS:

• The “promise” here is specifically a promise of punishment. Al-Baydawi pins it down: not a promise of blessing, but of ‘uqubah (chastisement). Always read which kind of promise a verse is unfolding — mercy or consequence; both are equally certain, and this one was a sworn appointment with punishment.
• The catastrophe’s verb is left unspoken — “We sent them” understood from verse 5. The sentence “So when the promise of the latter came…” trails off, its dreadful answer supplied by the earlier “We sent against you.” The eloquent omission lets the reader’s own mind complete the sentence of doom — and the grief, as the verse says, shows on the very faces of the punished.

3. The Variant Recitations (Qira’at)

Al-Baydawi lists the readings of liyasū’ū with his usual economy:

“Ibn ‘Amir, Hamzah, and Abu Bakr read ‘liyasū’a’ in the singular — the pronoun referring to the promise, or the sending, or Allah; and Al-Kisa’i’s reading with the nun (linasū’a) supports it. And it is read ‘linasū’anna’ — with the nun and the ya’, and the light and the heavy emphatic nun; and ‘lanasū’anna’ with fatha of the lam [the lam of oath] — in [all] four aspects, as the answer of ‘when [it] came.'”

And the grammar that follows:

“The lam in His saying ‘and to enter the mosque’ is connected to an omitted [verb], which is ‘We sent them.'”

KEY LESSON: Every recitation preserves a true layer of the one event. The disfigurement is attributed — across the readings — to the invaders (who did it), to the promise (the appointed disaster), to the sending (the dispatch), and to Allah Himself; and the oath-emphatic readings (“We shall surely disfigure…”) stamp it as an absolute, sworn certainty. All causation returns to Allah, while the human agents remain fully responsible.

4. “To Destroy Utterly All That They Overcame”

“‘And to destroy’ — i.e., to annihilate. ‘What they overcame’ — what they dominated and took control of; or the duration of their dominance. ‘With utter destruction.'”

KEY LESSON: Everything they had seized was marked for annihilation — for as long as the invaders held the upper hand. On one reading the object of destruction is all they had conquered; on the other, the ruin continued throughout the whole period of their dominance. What a people seizes through transgression can become exactly what is destroyed — and the devastation can stretch across an entire era, not a single blow.

5. Who Were the Invaders? — The Persian Party-King Judarz

Al-Baydawi gives a distinct historical identification:

“That was by Allah giving power over them to the Persians once again: a king of Babylon, of the Party Kings (Muluk at-Tawa’if), named Judarz — and it is said Hardus — raided them.”

KEY LESSONS:

• Al-Baydawi sides with the Persian Party-King identification of the second invader. Where Al-Qurtubi (Caesar), Ar-Razi (Constantine), Ibn Ashur (Vespasian and Titus), and the note in al-Kashshaf (Titus son of Vespasian) place the second punishment with the Romans, Al-Baydawi names a Persian Party-King (Muluk at-Tawa’if) of Babylon — Judarz (or Hardus). This is the very view Al-Alusi reported from al-Kashf as “the truth” (his “Birdus / Juzur, of the Party Kings”). So the commentators genuinely diverge on the identity of the second instrument — a Roman emperor, or a Persian Party-King — even as they agree on the core lesson.
• The specific name matters less than the recurring pattern. Whether the avenger was Roman or a Persian Party-King, Judarz or Hardus or Qaysar — the constant is that Allah raised up an instrument of vengeance against a people who had exhausted His warnings. (As Ar-Razi put it, and Al-Alusi endorsed: “no purpose of exegesis hangs on knowing their specific identities.”) Attend to the law, not the name.

6. The Boiling Blood of Yahya

Al-Baydawi closes with the narration of the prophet’s unsettled blood:

“It is said: the commander of the army entered the slaughter-place of their offerings and found in it blood boiling. He asked them about it, and they said: ‘The blood of an offering that was not accepted from us.’ He said: ‘They have not told me the truth,’ and killed thousands of them over it — but the blood did not subside. Then he said: ‘If you do not tell me the truth, I will leave none of you.’ So they said: ‘It is the blood of Yahya.’ He said: ‘For the like of this your Lord takes vengeance on you.’ Then he said: ‘O Yahya, my Lord and your Lord has known what befell your people on account of you — so subside, by Allah’s permission, before I leave none of them.’ And it subsided.”

KEY LESSONS:

• The blood of a murdered prophet would not settle until the truth was told and the reckoning paid. No lie about a “rejected offering” could still it; thousands of deaths could not still it — only the honest confession, “it is the blood of Yahya,” and the vengeance that followed. The blood of the righteous cries out to Allah and will not be quieted until He answers it. Be terrified of shedding innocent blood; it does not forget, and neither does Allah.
• A foreign commander understood what Bani Israil had buried: “For the like of this your Lord takes vengeance on you.” The invading general grasped the gravity of a prophet’s murder more clearly than the people who committed it. Sometimes the outsider perceives the weight of a crime that its own perpetrators have grown numb to.
• The blood subsided only “by Allah’s permission.” Even the resolution was by divine leave, not the commander’s power — and it came when the vengeance was complete and the prophet, in effect, granted release. Allah governs the entire arc: the crime, the long wait of the unsettled blood, the reckoning, and the final stilling — all by His permission alone.

The Master Lesson from Al-Baydawi on Verse 7

Al-Baydawi’s compact, exact treatment crystallizes the verse into a few clear truths:

🌙 Reward and burden each return to their owner — thawab for the soul that does good, wabal against the soul that does evil — and the verse phrases it as a perfectly matched pair (izdiwaj): good is for you, evil is for (against) you.

🌙 The “promise” was a sworn appointment with punishment — its verb of catastrophe left unspoken (“We sent them,” understood from verse 5) — and the grief of it was made to show on their very faces.

🌙 Everything they had seized was marked for utter destruction, for as long as the invaders’ dominance lasted.

🌙 The avenger was a Persian Party-King (Judarz / Hardus) — Al-Baydawi’s distinctive identification, the view Al-Alusi called “the truth” — though the commentators differ (Roman emperor or Persian Party-King), agreeing only that Allah raised some instrument of vengeance, whoever it was.

🌙 The blood of the murdered prophet Yahya would not be stilled until the truth was confessed and the reckoning paid — and even then it subsided only “by Allah’s permission.” The blood of the righteous is never cheap and never forgotten.

In ahsantum ahsantum li-anfusikum wa in asa’tum fa-laha. Fa-idha ja’a wa’du-l-akhirati liyasū’ū wujūhakum wa liyadkhulū-l-masjida kama dakhalūhu awwala marratin wa liyutabbirū mā ‘alaw tatbīrā.

“If you do good, you do good for yourselves; and if you do evil, it is against them. So when the promise of the latter came, [We sent enemies] to disfigure your faces, and to enter the Masjid as they entered it the first time, and to destroy utterly all that they overcame.”

Good and its reward belong to its doer; evil and its burden belong to its doer — the verse pairs them in perfect symmetry. A people that met Allah’s blessings with corruption and the murder of its prophets had its gains utterly destroyed and its grief written on its faces, by an instrument of Allah’s choosing — and the unsettled blood of the prophet it killed would not rest until the reckoning was paid. So do good, for its reward is wholly your own, before the promise of the latter arrives.