Surah Al-Jumu'ah, The Congregation

Surah 62 · 11 verses · revealed at Medina

Al-Jumu'ah is eleven verses long and is named for the Friday prayer, which it is the source of as an obligation.

The instruction is in verse 9, and it is unusually practical. When the call is made on the day of congregation, leave off trading and go. Then, in the very next verse, when the prayer is finished, disperse through the land and seek God's bounty — go back to work. The surah legislates for an interruption to business and then, immediately, for the return to it. There is no suggestion that the trading was the problem.

The occasion recorded for the closing verses is that a caravan arrived in Medina during the Friday sermon and most of the congregation went out to meet it, leaving a small group behind. The surah addresses this without severity but without pretending it did not happen.

The opening of the surah is about something else. It describes those who were entrusted with the Torah and then did not carry it, and compares them to a donkey carrying books — an image about the difference between possessing knowledge and being changed by it. Commentators have consistently warned Muslims to read that passage as addressed to them too, since a community can carry a book without carrying it.

Between these sits a short passage on the sending of a messenger among an unlettered people, and a phrase that has drawn attention ever since: and others of them who have not yet joined them. Everyone reading these pages fourteen centuries later is in the second group.

Al-Jumu'ah is customarily recited in the Friday prayer itself, together with Surah Al-Munafiqun, a practice recorded in Sahih Muslim.

Surah Al-Jumu'ah on this site

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Surah Al-Jumu'ah, The Congregation

Surah Al-Jumu'ah on this site

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