(Revealed before Hijrah)
Being the 6th of the special group of the Surahs, which begin with Qaf and end with Al-Waqi‘ah, and which were revealed, more or less at the same time at Mecca, in the early years of the Call, this Surah has close resemblance with other members of the group in the subject-matter, and deals like them with the basic principles of Islam—Divine attributes, particularly with God’s Unity, with Resurrection and Revelation. In Surah Al-Qamar instances were given of the peoples of some Prophets of antiquity with whom the Arabs were quite familiar and who were punished for rejecting the Divine Message, and then the pagan Quraish were asked, would they not benefit from the sad fate of those peoples and accept the Qur’anic Message which was so easy to understand and to follow? The present Surah also gives the reasons why the Qur’an was revealed.
The Surah opens with the Divine attribute—Ar-Rahman, signifying that after having created the universe, God created man, the apex and crown of all creation, and that his creation was the result of God’s Rahmaniyyah (Beneficence). After man’s creation God revealed Himself to him through His Prophets and Messengers, because he could not attain the sublime object of his creation and fulfil his high destiny without being guided to his great goal by Divine revelation. Prophethood found its most complete and perfect manifestation in the person of the Holy Prophet Muhammad to whom God gave the Qur’an, the last and final code of Divine Laws for the guidance of the whole of humanity for all time. But God’s gifts to man did not end with his creation. He made the whole universe subservient to him. The heavens with all the celestial bodies, and the earth with all its treasures, the deep seas and high mountains, were all created for his sake. Over and above all that God endowed him with great intellectual and discretionary powers so that by sifting the right from the wrong he might follow Divine guidance and thus attain the object of his creation. But man seems to be so constituted that, instead of benefiting from the endless vistas of spiritual progress and development opened up to him by the Gracious, Beneficent and Merciful Providence, in his conceit and arrogance he ignores and defies Divine Laws and consequently brings down upon himself God’s displeasure. The disobedience and defiance of Divine Laws, the Surah hints, will assume a most heinous form in some time to come (which seems to be the present time) and man will then be visited with such destructive and annihilating Divine punishment as he had not known before. But whereas punishment which will be meted out to the guilty and the iniquitous will be most grievous and frightful, the Divine favours which will be bestowed upon the righteous and the God-fearing in that age of Mammon-worship and hankering after pleasures of the flesh will also be beyond measure or count, and thus both Divine punishment and favours would show that whereas God is 'Swift at reckoning, He is also the Master of glory and honour.' The Surah seems to deal particularly with the time when the power and prestige of Western nations will be at their highest.