(Revealed before Hijrah)
Being one of the earliest revelations the Surah constitutes a strong proof of the Qur’an being the revealed Word of God, and also of the serial arrangement of its Chapters as having been adopted under Divine direction. For, while the Surah was revealed very early at Mecca, sometime in the first four years of the Call, it has been placed almost at the end of the Qur’an. The order in which the Qur’an exists today is different from the order in which it was revealed. It is, indeed, a miracle of the Qur’an that the order in which the various Chapters were revealed was best suited to the needs of the period during which they were revealed, but they were arranged as its component parts in the order which was best suited to human needs for all time to come. The promise contained in this Surah was made at a time when the Holy Prophet was hardly known outside Mecca and his claim that he was the last Deliverer of humanity was looked upon by his compatriots as unworthy even of serious consideration. The promise was in emphatic terms. The words, 'We have bestowed upon thee, abundance of good,' show that the promised good had already been given to the Holy Prophet. It was in the fitness of things that, in order to prove the Divine origin of the Qur’an, the Surah should have been revealed at a time when, humanly speaking, there was hardly any possibility of the fulfilment of the promise and should have been placed at its end when the promise had already been fulfilled.
The connection of the Surah with the preceding one consists in the fact that whereas in that Surah some prominent moral sins of the hypocrites were mentioned, in this Surah some corresponding virtues of the righteous believers have been referred to, viz. generosity, observance of daily Prayers, devotion to God, and willingness to make sacrifice for national causes.