Surah Az-Zumar, The Throngs

Surah 39 · 75 verses · revealed at Mecca

Az-Zumar is named after the throngs in which people are described as being led, at the end of everything, either towards the Fire or towards the Garden.

Its subject is sincerity — worship offered to God alone, with nothing else mixed into it. The surah returns to that word again and again, and its argument against the Meccans is not that their gods are weak but that they themselves admitted their gods were intermediaries, which is to say they knew.

It contains what is probably the most quoted verse of hope in the whole Qur'an: say, my servants who have wronged themselves, do not despair of God's mercy, for God forgives all sins. Scholars have written a great deal about how unconditional that sentence is, and readers have generally taken it at its word.

Elsewhere it describes the person who stands through the night, bowing and prostrating, wary of what is coming and hoping for his Lord's mercy, and asks whether such a person and one who does not are the same. It also asks whether those who know and those who do not know are equal.

Its account of the making of a human being in three darknesses within the mother, and its image of water sent down and led into springs and then into crops of varying colours that wither and are broken up, are among the most compressed passages in the book.

Surah Az-Zumar on this site

Every link below has been opened and checked to make sure there is something on the other side.

Read

Listen

Download as PDF

← Sad Ghafir →