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Sura 26
Aya 1

Chapter 26

The Poetsal-Shuʿarāʾ ( الشعراء )

227 verses • revealed at Meccan

»The surah that mentions the aimless meandering of unbelieving Poets in their creative effort to versify, and how their own actions belie their artistic messages, though it exempts from this censure poets who are believers and act with justice and righteousness. It takes its name from verse 224 ff. concerning the poets (shuʿarāʾ). The surah talks about the disbelievers who belittle the Quran, and gives examples of God’s power and grace in nature. It recounts several stories of earlier prophets, the reactions of their people, and punishments that afflicted them, ending by confirming the divine origin of the Quran. It is not something brought down by the jinn, nor is it poetry.«

بِسمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحمٰنِ الرَّحيمِ

Muhammad Asad: In The Name of God, The Most Gracious, The Dispenser of Grace:

1
طسم

Muhammad Asad

THE WORD which suggested to the Companions of the Prophet the "title" of this surah is found verse 224. Some of the commentators are of the opinion that the last four verses (beginning with this very key-word) were revealed at Medina, but all the available evidence shows that the entire surah belongs to the middle Mecca period, having been revealed about six or seven years before Prophet's hijrah. Similarly, there is no cogent reason to assume, as Suyuti does, that verse 197 belongs to the Medina period simply because it mentions the "learned men from among the children of Israel since references to the latter abound in many Meccan revelations. The main purport of this surah lies in its stress on the unchanging character of man's weakness and proneness to self-deception, which explains why the great majority of people, at all times a in all communities, so readily reject the truth - whether it be the truth of God's messages or self-evident moral values and, in consequence, lose themselves in a worship of power, wealth what is commonly described as "glory", as well as in a mindless acceptance of slogans a prevailing fashions of thought.
Ta. Sin. Mim.1
  • The letters ta, sin and mim are among the mysterious, disjointed letter-symbols (al muqatta'at) preceding some of the chapters of the Qur'an (see Appendix II).