Surah Al-Baqarah, The Cow

Surah 2 · 286 verses · revealed at Medina

Al-Baqarah is the longest surah in the Qur'an by a wide margin. At 286 verses it is roughly the length of the last thirty surahs put together, and it alone fills about a fortieth of the whole book.

It was also the slowest to arrive. Where a short Meccan surah might come down in one piece, Al-Baqarah was revealed across years in Medina, and its contents show it: this is the surah of a community that has stopped being persecuted and started having to govern itself. Marriage and divorce, inheritance, debt, trade, fasting, pilgrimage, warfare, the treatment of orphans and of the poor — the practical architecture of a society is laid out here. The single longest verse in the Qur'an, verse 282, is about writing down a loan properly.

The name comes from an episode in verses 67 to 73, where the Children of Israel are told to sacrifice a cow and respond with a string of questions about which cow exactly — a passage read down the centuries as a study in how people delay what they have been asked to do.

Two passages from this surah are among the most recited in the world, quite apart from the rest of it. Verse 255, the Verse of the Throne, is a single sentence on the nature of God that many Muslims recite after every prayer and before sleeping. The last two verses, 285 and 286, are a prayer of acknowledgement and of asking not to be burdened beyond endurance, and are customarily read at night.

Al-Baqarah also records the change of the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to the Ka'bah in Mecca, and returns repeatedly to Abraham — his building of the House, and his standing as a figure who belonged to no later community and is claimed by all of them.

It opens with three letters standing alone: Alif, Lam, Mim. As with Ya-Sin, the commentators did not agree on what they mean, and most concluded honestly that they did not know.

Surah Al-Baqarah on this site

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Surah Al-Baqarah, The Cow

Surah Al-Baqarah on this site

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