Surah At-Tariq, The Night Visitor

Surah 86 · 17 verses · revealed at Mecca

At-Tariq opens with an oath by the sky and by the night visitor, and then asks what will make you know what the night visitor is — answering that it is the piercing star.

What the oath is sworn to is a single short sentence: that there is no soul but has a guardian over it. The surah is seventeen verses long and everything in it turns on that line.

It then asks a person to look at what they were made from, and describes a fluid issuing from between the backbone and the ribs, and says that the One who made a person the first time is able to bring him back.

Its last section swears by the sky that returns and the earth that splits open, and says that this is a decisive word and not something said in jest.

It closes by saying that they are plotting and that God is planning too, and then, in the last line, tells the Prophet to give the disbelievers time — leave them alone for a little while. The surah is among the earliest revealed and the instruction it ends on is the one the Meccan chapters return to most often: wait.

Commentators have differed about what the piercing star is, some taking it as a particular star and others as any bright body that shows through the dark. The surah does not settle it, and the image works either way: something small and far off that nonetheless gets through.

Surah At-Tariq on this site

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

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