A Technical Term for an Open Heart

Ash-Sharh's opening question, 'did We not expand for you your breast?' (94:1), uses the term sharh al-sadr, expansion of the breast, which later Islamic spiritual and psychological writing developed into a standard technical description of inward openness, readiness and ease in receiving truth, contrasted elsewhere in the Quran with a 'constricted breast,' sadr dayyiq, used to describe resistance to guidance or spiritual distress. The pairing of these two opposite conditions across different passages gave later Islamic writers a working vocabulary for describing spiritual states well beyond this surah's own brief, originally biographical reference to the Prophet's own experience.

Classical commentators read the expansion named here as more than emotional relief, connecting it to reports elsewhere in the biographical tradition describing a physical or visionary opening of the Prophet's chest at various points in his life, though this surah's own wording, addressed as rhetorical reassurance rather than narrative description, is read by most exegetes as figurative encouragement rather than as referring to any single specific episode, a distinction some classical scholars were careful to draw against more literal popular retellings.