Surah Qalam

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Sūrat al-Qalam (Arabic: سورة القلم‎‎, “The Pen”) is the sixty-eighth sura of the Qur'an with 52 ayat. The Surat describes Allah's justice and the judgment day. Three important themes of this Surah are response to the opponents objections, warning and admonition to the disbelievers, and exhortation of patience to the Islamic prophet Muhammad.[1] Chronologically, this is the first appearance of any of the "disjointed" [i.e., single] letters (muqattaat) which precede a number of the surahs of the Qur'an[2] while in Quranic Order this is the last surah to have the appearance of (muqattaat).[3]
Asbab al-nuzul (occasions or circumstances of revelation) is a secondary genre of Qur'anic exegesis (tafsir) directed at establishing the context in which specific verses of the Qur'an were revealed. Though of some use in reconstructing the Qur'an's historicity, asbab is by nature an exegetical rather than a historiographical genre, and as such usually associates the verses it explicates with general situations rather than specific events. Most of the mufassirun say that this surah was revealed at Mecca, at a stage when opposition to Muhammad had grown very strong and intense verbally.[4] At the same time, here seems absence of any physical violence towards Muslims.[5] According to some historians including William Muir,[6] ayaat 9 to 16 refer to Walid ibn al-Mughirah as his personality traits fit in the character defined in these ayaat and a tradition by Ibn Abbas that "We know of no one whom God has described in the derogatory way in which He describes him, blighting him with ignominy that will never leave him (the adverbial qualifier [ba'da dhalika, 'moreover'] is semantically connected to zanim, 'ignoble')".[7] Tafsir al-Jalalayn also highlights the correlation in 16th ayah: "Soon We shall brand him on the snout"[8][9] and his nose being chopped off by a sword at the Battle of Badr. However the target personality is not restricted to a single person as the ayaat describe a personality type and not a name[10] and the description starts with a plural form: "So do not obey the deniers
Surahs in the Qur'an are not arranged in the chronological order of revelation[12] because order of wahy or chronological order of revelation is not a part of Quran. Muhammad told his followers sahaba the placement in Quranic order of every Wahy revealed along with the original text of Quran.[13] Wm Theodore de Bary, an East Asian studies expert, describes that "The final process of collection and codification of the Quran text was guided by one over-arching principle: God's words must not in any way be distorted or sullied by human intervention. For this reason, no serious attempt, apparently, was made to edit the numerous revelations, organize them into thematic units, or present them in chronological order....".[14][15] Surat Al-Qalam is a Meccan sura[16] and meccan suras are chronologically earlier suras that were revealed to Muhammad at Mecca before the hijrah to Medina in 622 CE. They are typically shorter, with relatively short ayat, and mostly come near the end of the Qur'an's 114 surahs. Most of the surahs containing muqatta'at are Meccan. Henceforth apart from traditions, this surah qualifies to be Meccan typically. According to some classical traditions, commentaries and tafsirs the proposed order is 2nd in place right after Muhammad's first revelation.[17] The supporting argument of this surah being the second revelation is that Arabs were unaware of angels in the time of Jahiliyyah and news of Muhammad's first revelation made them curious about the sanity of Muhammad, thus to refute this idea God revealed the first seven ayaat of Surah Qalam.

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Dec. 19, 2019

Surah Qalam

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