(Revealed before Hijrah)
By common agreement the Surah was revealed at Mecca. According to ‘Umar bin Muhammad it was revealed while the Holy Prophet, during the Hijrah, was on his way to Medina. The verse, He Who has made the teaching of the Qur’an binding on thee will most surely bring thee back to thy ordained place of return (v. 86), clearly shows that the Holy Prophet was yet in Mecca when he was told that at first he would have to leave Mecca as a fugitive and then would come back to it as a conqueror. The preceding Surah had ended with the verse, So whoever follows guidance, follows it only for the good of his own soul; and as to him who goes astray, say, I am only a Warner, which meant that no force would be allowed to be used in the propagation of the teachings of the Qur’an. It was to establish truth of this Qur’anic claim that the present Surah was revealed.
The present is the third and last of the Chapters which belong to the Ta Sin Mim group. These three Chapters open with the same abbreviated letters and, therefore, possess a striking similarity in the subject-matter. They all begin with the important subject of the revelation of the Qur’an and end with the same subject. In Chapter 26th much space is devoted to the presentation by Moses of his Message to Pharaoh. In Chapter 27th pride of place is given to the manifestation that Moses saw of the Divine Glory and Majesty and to the spiritual experience which he had in the blessed Valley of Tuwa. In the present Surah, however, the different phases of Moses’s life have been treated in greater detail than perhaps in any other Surah—his being taken out of the sea in a miraculous manner, his infancy and childhood, his youth, his Hijrah and his Call—the implication being that the Holy Prophet, who was the like of Moses, would also have to go through similar experiences, though under different conditions and in different circumstances. The Surah opens with an account of the pitiable condition of the Israelites under Pharaoh—how by his policy of ruthless exploitation and suppression he sought to kill in them all manly qualities and how when their humiliation had reached its nadir, God raised Moses and through him brought about their emancipation by drowning Pharaoh and his mighty hosts in the sea before their very eyes. After the account of Moses’s life-story, the Surah refers to the prophecies that are found in the Bible about the Holy Prophet and proceeds to tell the Quraish that if they accepted him, they would enjoy all those spiritual and material blessings and benefits of which Mecca, as the Centre and Citadel of the new Faith, was destined to receive. But if they rejected him, they would incur the displeasure of God. The Surah then proceeds to say that when disbelievers, on account of their persistent rejection of truth are seized with punishment, they start condemning and denouncing their leaders who, they say, lead them astray and are the cause of their ruin. The leaders, on their part, disown them and even curse them for having blindly followed them. The real cause, however, of the rejection of the Divine Message, the Surah says, is that puffed up with material wealth and thereby lulled into a false sense of security, men of wealth and influence make light of God’s Prophets, mock at them and persecute them, ignoring the supreme moral lesson which is writ large on the pages of history that the rejection of Truth has never been allowed to go unpunished and disbelief has always landed its protagonists into ruin. Towards its close the Surah makes a pointed reference to a mighty prophecy which was implied in Moses’s flight from Egypt to Midian, in his sojourn there for ten years and his subsequent return to Egypt and in delivering the Israelites from Pharaoh. The prophecy was to the effect that like Moses the Holy Prophet of Islam also would leave his native place and go to live in a strange place for ten years and then would come back to the cradle of his Faith and conquer Mecca and establish Islam on a firm footing. The last few verses of the Surah sum up its subject-matter, and the Holy Prophet is told that he never had the remotest idea that he will ever be made the bearer of the Divine Message, but now that he has actually been entrusted with his great mission, he should call all mankind to the ways of the Lord, and trusting in Him and refusing to be discouraged or dismayed, should fight his way to success like the great and valiant votary of Truth he is.