Surah Muhammad, Muhammad

Surah 47 · 38 verses · revealed at Medina

Muhammad is one of only four surahs named after a person and the only one named after the Prophet himself.

It was revealed early in the Medinan period, when the community had just been given permission to defend itself, and much of it deals with conduct in war. It sets out how captives are to be treated — freed as a favour afterwards, or ransomed — and requires that the fighting end when the war ends.

Its other subject is the people in Medina who had joined outwardly and not inwardly. The surah watches them closely: the way they looked at the Prophet when a chapter about fighting was revealed, the way they asked afterwards what he had just said, and the way they spoke to one another when they were on their own. It says their marks would be known in the way they speak.

In the middle is a description of the Garden that is unusually concrete — rivers of water that does not spoil, of milk whose taste does not change, of wine that is a pleasure to drink, and of clarified honey. It is one of the passages that shaped how the afterlife is pictured in Muslim writing.

The surah ends on money rather than on war: that those asked to give are the ones who hold back, and that if anyone withholds, he withholds only from himself.

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