Surah As-Sajdah, The Prostration

Surah 32 · 30 verses · revealed at Mecca

As-Sajdah is short — thirty verses — and takes its name from verse 15, at which a reader or listener performs a prostration. Fourteen or fifteen places in the Qur'an carry this, depending on the school; this is one of them, and it is the one after which a whole surah is named.

The surah's subject is the distance between how the world looks and what it is. It describes the making of the human being from something despised, and the breathing into him of spirit. It describes a day with God whose measure is a thousand years of the counting people use. And it puts a question to those who say that once they are scattered in the earth and lost in it they will be made new — and answers that the angel of death, who has been given charge of them, will not lose them.

Between these passages sits the verse the surah is named for, and then a description of the people it applies to: those whose sides part from their beds, calling on their Lord in fear and hope. The image is of somebody getting up in the night when they could have stayed asleep, and the surah says plainly that no soul knows what has been kept hidden for such people.

As-Sajdah is recited, together with Surah Al-Insan, in the dawn prayer on Fridays. That practice is recorded in both Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, and is among the better attested of the customs attached to particular surahs.

Surah As-Sajdah on this site

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Surah As-Sajdah, The Prostration

Surah As-Sajdah on this site

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