Surah Al-A'raf, The Heights

Surah 7 · 206 verses · revealed at Mecca

Al-A'raf is named after a high place between the Garden and the Fire, where people who belong clearly to neither stand and look on both.

The surah is the longest of the Meccan chapters, and most of it is history — a run of accounts of earlier prophets and what happened to the people they were sent to. Noah, Hud, Salih, Lot and Shu'ayb each appear in turn, and each account follows a similar shape: a warning given, a warning refused, and a people gone.

The longest of them is the story of Moses, from the confrontation with Pharaoh and the contest with the magicians through to the calf his own people made while he was away. The Qur'an returns to Moses more often than to any other prophet, and this is one of its fullest tellings.

Before all of that, the surah opens with Adam: the refusal of Iblis to bow, the promise he makes to lead people astray, and the loss of the garden. The arrangement is deliberate. What follows is the same refusal repeated by one nation after another.

It also contains the verse in which the descendants of Adam are asked, before they are born, whether God is not their Lord, and answer that He is. Commentators have taken it as the ground of the claim the Qur'an makes on everyone: that belief is a returning rather than a beginning.

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