Surah Al-'Alaq, The Clinging Form

Surah 96 · 19 verses · revealed at Mecca

Al-'Alaq contains the first words of the Qur'an ever revealed, given to the Prophet in a cave outside Mecca when he was forty.

The first five verses are the ones every Muslim child learns as the beginning of everything: read, in the name of your Lord who created — created the human being from a clinging form — read, and your Lord is the Most Generous, who taught by the pen, taught the human being what he did not know.

That the first command of the religion is to read, and that the second thing named after creation is the pen, has been pointed to by Muslim scholars for fourteen centuries as the charter of learning in Islam.

The rest of the surah came later and is about a particular man who used to forbid a servant of God from praying at the Ka'bah. It asks what would happen if the one being forbidden were rightly guided, and whether the one forbidding knows that God sees. Then it warns him, naming him only by a lying and sinful forelock, and tells him to call his associates.

The surah ends with an instruction to the Prophet not to obey him, but to prostrate and draw near. It is one of the places in the Qur'an where a reader prostrates.

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