✦ AT A GLANCE ✦
الشورى
Ash-Shuraa
✦ Why this name
The Consultation — ash-Shura, from verse 38, where the believers' affairs are decided by mutual consultation.
✦ When it came
Meccan. The community is small and has no state — and is being told that when it does have one, decisions are made together.
✦ The story
The surah contains the Quran's most careful sentence about Allah's nature: *"There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the Hearing, the Seeing."* Comparison is refused in the first half and hearing and sight affirmed in the second — the whole theology of divine attributes in eleven words.
Its social vision sits in one line: the believers are described as those who respond to their Lord, establish prayer, decide their affairs *by consultation among themselves*, and spend from what Allah provides. Consultation is placed between prayer and charity, as though it were one of the same family of acts.
And on injury: retaliation may be equal, *"but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation — his reward is with Allah."* The reward is deliberately left unnamed.
✦ How it unfolds
- AYAH 1-15
Nothing like Him
The heavens almost breaking apart from above, angels asking forgiveness — and the verse that refuses all comparison.
- AYAH 19-31
Provision measured
Provision given in measure, because unmeasured wealth would ruin people.
- AYAH 36-43
By consultation
The believers described — prayer, shura, charity, and the pardon that outranks equal retaliation.
- AYAH 51-53
How revelation comes
Three ways Allah speaks to a human being, and none of them is face to face.