Surah 70 of 114 · Makkah
سُورَةُ المَعَارِجِ
Al-Ma'arij The Ascending Stairways
44 verses · revealed in Makkah
The context
Al-Ma'arij is Makkan and opens with something unusual: a man asking for the punishment to be brought on, as a challenge rather than a question. Several of the commentators connect the opening to a specific mocker in Makkah who demanded that stones be rained on them from the sky if the message were true.
The surah answers the demand by describing the scale of what is being asked for, and then by describing, at length, the people who are not asking for it. Its closing section is a portrait of the believer that runs almost as a list, and it is one of the two great lists of this kind in the Qur'an.
The name
Al-Ma'arij, the Ascending Stairways or the Ways of Ascent, from the third verse, which names Allah as Lord of the ways of ascent. The following verse gives the measure that the name implies: the angels and the Spirit ascend to Him in a day the extent of which is fifty thousand years. A man demanding that the punishment be hurried is answered with a figure that makes hurrying meaningless.
How it moves
- 1-18The demand, and the dayThe mocker asking for the punishment, the day of fifty thousand years, and the scene in which no close friend asks another about him, though they are shown each other.
- 19-35Man was created anxiousThe diagnosis: impatient when evil touches him, withholding when good does, and then the exception, those who pray, whose qualities are listed one after another.
- 36-44The rush toward nothingThe image of people hurrying toward the caller with their eyes lowered, humiliation covering them, which closes the surah where it began.
The themes
Impatience as the human default
Indeed, man was created anxious. The surah states it as a description of the species rather than as an accusation against individuals, and then names the one exception.
The exception is prayer
The list of qualities begins and ends with prayer, and everything else in it is placed inside that frame, which is a claim about what holds the rest together.
A known right in the wealth
The surah says the poor have a haqq ma'lum, a known right, in the wealth of the believer, which is a stronger word than charity.
Nobody asks after anybody
On that day no friend asks a friend, though they are shown each other. The isolation is described without any commentary at all.
The heart of it
Recited slowly, the diagnosis in verse 19 is the line most readers stop at, because it explains a great deal of an ordinary week. Impatient when evil touches him, withholding when good touches him. Almost every small failure of the day fits one of those two clauses.
The list that follows is worth reading as an examination rather than as praise. It is short. It is specific. It includes keeping trusts and giving testimony honestly, which are not the items most people would have expected in a passage about people who pray, and their presence there is the point.
Verses worth knowing
- 70:19-21Man was created anxious: when evil touches him, impatient, and when good touches him, withholding. The most useful description of the ordinary self in the Qur'an.
- 70:24-25In their wealth is a known right for the one who asks and the one deprived. Not generosity: a right.
- 70:4A day the extent of which is fifty thousand years. Given as the answer to a man demanding that things be hurried.
- 70:10-11No friend will ask about a friend, though they are shown one another.
On reciting it
No authentic report establishes a specific merit for reciting Al-Ma'arij. What gives it weight in practice is the passage from verse 22 to verse 35, which is one of the two places in the Qur'an where the qualities of a believer are set out as a plain list a person can check themselves against.
No virtue report
Read beside it
On the shelf
Surahs it travels with