Surah 'Abasa, He Frowned

Surah 80 · 42 verses · revealed at Mecca

'Abasa opens by saying that he frowned and turned away because the blind man came to him, and the one rebuked is the Prophet himself.

The account behind it is that he was speaking with several leading men of Mecca, hoping they would listen, when a blind Companion interrupted asking to be taught. The surah does not soften what happened. It asks what would make him know — the man might have grown in purity, or been reminded, and the reminder might have helped him. As for the one who thinks himself beyond need, it says, you attend to him, though it is not your concern if he does not purify himself.

That the passage was preserved at all is one of the arguments Muslims most often make about the Qur'an's authorship. A book composed to build a leader's authority does not open a chapter by correcting him over a small discourtesy to a poor man.

The rest of the surah turns to a person's own beginnings — created from a drop, then given proportion, then made the way easy, then caused to die and buried — and says that he has not yet done what he was commanded.

It ends with food: grain and grapes and fresh vegetation and olives and dates and dense gardens and fruit and pasture, and asks a person to look at what he eats. Then the last day arrives in three lines, and a man flees from his brother, his mother, his father, his wife and his children.

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