Surah Al-Mu'minun, The Believers

Surah 23 · 118 verses · revealed at Mecca

Al-Mu'minun opens by saying that the believers have succeeded, and then lists, in seven short lines, what makes them so.

The list is humble and specific: they are attentive in prayer, they turn away from idle talk, they pay what is due in charity, they guard their chastity, they keep their trusts and their promises, and they are careful of their prayers. There is nothing heroic in it. The surah promises the highest reward for a set of ordinary daily habits.

It then describes the making of a human being — from an extract of clay, then a drop, then a clinging form, then bone clothed in flesh — and follows it with a phrase that has been quoted for fourteen centuries: then blessed be God, the best of creators.

The middle of the surah is Noah, then Moses, then a long unnamed account of a people who rejected a messenger, given in a form that lets the Meccans recognise themselves in it.

Its last pages are among the bleakest in the Qur'an. A man asks to be sent back to do right with what he left behind, and is refused; the request is described as a word he speaks and nothing more. The surah ends by telling the Prophet to say, simply, forgive and have mercy, for You are the best of those who show mercy.

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