Al-Hajj

Al-Hajj, "The Pilgrimage," is the twenty-second surah — 78 verses.¹ It joins passages from both Mecca and Medina and is classed as Medinan in the standard Mushaf. It takes its name from its account of Abraham proclaiming the pilgrimage to Mecca.

What it is about

The surah moves from the end of the world to the rites of worship and back to the struggle of a persecuted community. It opens with the Hour: "O mankind, fear your Lord. Indeed, the convulsion of the [final] Hour is a terrible thing," a day when "every nursing mother will be distracted from that [child] she was nursing."² It answers doubts about resurrection by pointing to the stages of human creation in the womb and to dead earth brought to life by rain.³ And it warns against shallow faith: "of the people is he who worships Allah on an edge. If he is touched by good, he is reassured by it; but if he is struck by trial, he turns on his face."⁴

Key themes

The pilgrimage and its meaning. God shows Abraham the site of the House and commands him to purify it for worshippers, then: "proclaim to the people the hajj [pilgrimage]; they will come to you on foot and on every lean camel; they will come from every distant pass."⁵ The surah explains the sacrifice that accompanies it in one of its best-known verses: "Their meat will not reach Allah, nor will their blood, but what reaches Him is piety from you."⁶

Permission to fight the oppressor. "Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought, because they were wronged." They are "those who have been evicted from their homes without right — only because they say, 'Our Lord is Allah.'" The surah adds that were it not for God checking some people by means of others, "there would have been demolished monasteries, churches, synagogues, and mosques in which the name of Allah is much mentioned."⁷

Blind hearts. "It is not eyes that are blinded, but blinded are the hearts which are within the breasts."⁸

Revelation protected. The surah states that whenever a messenger recited, Satan threw something into it, "but Allah abolishes that which Satan throws in; then Allah makes precise His verses."⁹ Classical commentators discussed this verse alongside the so-called gharaniq reports, which claim that words praising idols were once interjected into the Prophet's ﷺ recitation; many of them, Ibn Kathir among them, judged the chains of those reports unsound.

The fly. Against idols the surah sets a single image: "those you invoke besides Allah will never create [as much as] a fly, even if they gathered together for it. And if the fly should steal from them a [tiny] thing, they could not recover it from him. Weak are the pursuer and pursued."¹⁰

No hardship in religion. The surah closes by calling the believers to bow, prostrate and do good, and reminding them: "He has chosen you and has not placed upon you in the religion any difficulty. [It is] the religion of your father, Abraham. He named you 'Muslims' before [in former scriptures] and in this [revelation]."¹¹

Why it matters

Al-Hajj ties the pilgrimage to Abraham and gives its sacrifice a clear inner meaning: God receives the piety, not the meat. It contains what are generally held to be the first verses permitting the Muslims to fight — and grounds that permission in defending the persecuted and protecting houses of worship of every faith. It is also the only surah with two places where some schools of Islamic law prescribe a prostration of recitation. To read Al-Hajj in Arabic with translations and recitation, open it on Quran.com.