Surah Ash-Shura, The Consultation

Surah 42 · 53 verses · revealed at Mecca

Ash-Shura is named after a single phrase describing the believers as people whose affairs are settled by consultation among themselves.

Those few words have carried an enormous weight in Muslim political thought. They appear in a list of ordinary qualities — answering their Lord, keeping up prayer, spending from what they are given — and not in any passage about government, which is precisely why arguments about them have continued for so long.

The surah's larger subject is that the message brought to Muhammad is the same one given to Noah, Abraham, Moses and Jesus, and that the instruction in every case was to establish the religion and not to divide over it. It states plainly that division came after knowledge, out of rivalry, rather than from any confusion about what was said.

It contains the verse that nothing is like Him, which has been the anchor of Muslim theology on the question of what can and cannot be said about God.

Near the end come the lines on children — that God gives daughters to whom He wills and sons to whom He wills, and gives both together, and makes barren whom He wills. In a society that buried daughters, the order of that sentence was not accidental.

There is also the verse on forgiveness that pairs the permission to return an injury with the statement that whoever forgives and makes peace has a reward with God.

Surah Ash-Shura 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

← Fussilat Az-Zukhruf →