Surah Al-Anbiya

Al-Anbiya ("The Prophets") is the 21st surah of the Quran. A Meccan surah of 112 verses, it is 73rd in the traditional order of revelation, after Ibrahim, and opens the seventeenth juz'. It owes its name to the succession of prophets it recalls: sixteen are mentioned by name, from Moses and Aaron to Zachariah and John, alongside Mary and her son.

Context

The surah answers the objections of the Meccans, who called the revelation "muddled dreams", a fabrication or poetry, and asked why the messenger was a man who ate food like them (21:3–8). Ibn Mas'ud counted it among the earliest surahs he had learned, with Al-Isra, Al-Kahf, Maryam and Taha (al-Bukhari).

Main themes

• An opening warning: "Mankind's reckoning has drawn near, yet they turn away in heedlessness" (21:1).
• The oneness of God: creation was not made in play (21:16–18); had there been other gods in the heavens and the earth, both would have been ruined (21:22); the heavens and the earth were once joined and God parted them, and made every living thing from water (21:30).
• Every soul will taste death, and people are tested with both evil and good (21:35); on the Day of Resurrection the scales of justice will weigh even a mustard seed's weight (21:47).
• Abraham smashes his people's idols and is thrown into a fire made "cool and safe" for him (21:51–70). Then come Lot, Noah, David and Solomon judging the case of the field (21:78–79), Job in his affliction (21:83–84), Ishmael, Idris and Dhu al-Kifl, Jonah calling out from the darkness (21:87–88), Zachariah (21:89–90) and Mary (21:91).
• All the prophets form a single community with one Lord (21:92).
• The end of time: Gog and Magog are let loose (21:96), and the sky is rolled up like a scroll, "as We began the first creation, so shall We bring it back" (21:104). The earth will be inherited by God's righteous servants (21:105), and the Prophet ﷺ was sent "only as a mercy to the worlds" (21:107).

In the Sunnah

Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas reported that the Prophet ﷺ said of Jonah's prayer in the belly of the whale, "There is no god but You, glory be to You; I have been among the wrongdoers" (21:87), that no Muslim ever makes it for anything without God answering him (al-Tirmidhi, graded sahih by al-Albani). Ibn 'Abbas reported that the Prophet ﷺ said people will be gathered barefoot, naked and uncircumcised, then recited 21:104, adding that the first to be clothed will be Abraham (al-Bukhari and Muslim).