Sūrat al-Muʾminūn : A Reading and Reflection

The 114 suras of the Qur'an are an ‘excerpting’ and organisation of the revelations made to the Prophet Muḥammad from the time of the Call until his death. Each sura has its place in the Book in an ordering determined not by chronology, but by a pastoral and spiritual wisdom. They relate to, complement, and reflect back on each other like mirrors along a hallway. Their essential internal coherence and relation to each other is now a well-established thesis in Qur'anic studies. The reading of Sūrat al-Muʾminūn undertaken in this paper is in part pragmatic, in part intuitive. It discovers in it a simple, fluent, bipartite structure, its identity and character disclosed not only by its ʿamūd or miḥwār, but by the tone and aura that invest it. It aims to communicate something of spiritual vibrancy that is at the heart of every Qur'anic locution. In this discussion the sura is seen as comprising two parts. The paper shows how the concerns, issues, situations, events, and indeed the message of Part One are replayed with variations and shifts of emphasis in Part Two, bringing out the underlying inherent coherence of the whole. It draws attention to the varying dynamics of the flow of the text, the placing of thematically significant words and creation of semantic echoes direct and oblique over the two parts, and the distribution across them of doxologies and formulae of admonition and commination.