Surah An-Nisa, Women

Surah 4 · 176 verses · revealed at Medina

An-Nisa takes its name from the women whose rights it sets out, and it holds the longest treatment of family law anywhere in the Qur'an.

It belongs to the years after the move to Medina, and much of it reads as the answer to a community that had just lost a great many men at Uhud. Widows, orphans and the property they had inherited were suddenly a pressing practical problem rather than a matter of principle, and the surah opens on exactly that: the care of orphans, and the warning against a guardian quietly swallowing what he was meant to protect.

From there it sets out the shares of inheritance in detail — who receives what, and in what proportion — which is unusual in a book that more often gives principles than arithmetic. It deals with marriage, with what makes a marriage lawful, with divorce and with the treatment of wives. Several of its rulings gave women rights of property and inheritance that were not theirs before.

The surah then turns outward, to the community's dealings with those around it: with people who said they had joined and had not, with agreements made and broken, and with the conditions under which fighting is permitted and where its limits lie.

Two verses from it are quoted more than most. One instructs that trusts be returned to those they belong to and that judgement between people be made with justice. The other tells the believers to stand firm for justice as witnesses before God even if the evidence goes against themselves, their parents or their kin. Both are read as applying well beyond the courtroom.

An-Nisa is the fourth of the seven long surahs that open the Qur'an, and at 176 verses it is one of the longest chapters in the book.

Surah An-Nisa on this site

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