Surah Hud, Hud

Surah 11 · 123 verses · revealed at Mecca

Hud is named after a prophet sent to the people of 'Ad, and the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said that this surah and its like had turned his hair white.

It is a surah about destruction. Noah's flood is told at length, including the son who would not board and the father who asked for him and was refused. Then come 'Ad, Thamud, the people of Lot, and the people of Shu'ayb, each with the same pattern and each ending the same way.

What makes it heavy is not the catastrophes but the detail around them. The Qur'an lingers on the conversations — a prophet reasoning with his own relatives, a people answering that they will not leave what their fathers worshipped, a man watching his household divide.

Between the accounts the surah keeps returning to the same instruction: stand firm as you were commanded, and do not go beyond bounds. That verse is the one usually pointed to when the report about the Prophet's hair is mentioned. The weight is in the demand, not the destruction.

It closes by saying plainly why these accounts are told at all — not as history for its own sake, but to steady the heart of the one receiving them. The surah is Meccan, from years when the small community had very little else to steady it.

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