Surah Al-Ma'un, Small Kindnesses

Surah 107 · 7 verses · classification disputed

Al-Ma'un asks a question in its first verse — have you seen the one who denies the reckoning? — and then answers it in a way nobody would predict.

It does not describe someone arguing against the afterlife. It describes someone pushing an orphan away, and not urging others to feed the poor. The surah's test of what a person actually believes is not what they say about belief. It is what happens when a hungry child is in front of them.

The second half turns to people who do pray, and is harder still. Woe to those who pray, it says, and then explains: who are heedless of their prayer, who do it to be seen, and who withhold al-ma'un.

That last word gives the surah its name and has been translated many ways — small kindnesses, common necessities, neighbourly assistance. The commentators listed what they thought it covered: lending a bucket, a pot, a tool; salt; water; the everyday things nobody would think to refuse. The surah ends by naming the refusal of these as the final item in its indictment.

The structure is the point. It begins with someone who denies the Day and ends with someone who prays regularly, and it puts them in the same surah, under the same warning, on the same evidence: how they treat people with nothing.

Its placement is disputed, and unusually the dispute runs through the middle of it — some authorities held the opening verses Meccan and the later ones Medinan.

Surah Al-Ma'un on this site

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Surah Al-Ma'un, Small Kindnesses

Surah Al-Ma'un on this site

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