1. Al-Fatiha

Al-Fatiha ('The Opening') is the first surah of the written Quran and, at seven verses, its most frequently recited passage: it is said in every unit (rak'a) of the five daily prayers. It is a prayer in the worshipper's own voice, praise of God the Merciful, Lord of the Judgement Day, followed by the plea to be kept on 'the straight path.' Tradition calls it Umm al-Kitab, the Mother of the Book, and as-Sab al-Mathani, the seven oft-repeated verses (a title the Quran gives at 15:87). It is used to open undertakings, as a healing recitation, and to seal supplications.

Al-Fatiha is unusual among the surahs in being addressed to God rather than spoken in God's voice, which is why classical commentators call it a conversation: the worshipper praises and petitions, and tradition holds that God answers each phrase in turn, a hadith qudsi preserved by Muslim in which God says "I have divided the prayer between Myself and My servant in two halves" and responds line by line to the reciter. Because it must be recited correctly in every rak'a, the earliest tafsir literature, al-Tabari's commentary among the first, devotes disproportionate space to its seven verses, parsing "Lord of the worlds," "the Compassionate, the Merciful" and "Master of the Day of Judgement" as a compressed statement of God's relation to creation before the plea for guidance even begins. Sufi practice extended its use beyond the ritual prayer: "reciting the Fatiha" for the dead or for a departed teacher became, and remains, a common act of dedication at gravesides and in remembrance gatherings across the Muslim world, functionally comparable to the way the Lord's Prayer or the Kaddish anchor devotion in other traditions without being doctrinally equivalent to either.

Though placed first, Al-Fatiha is generally counted a Meccan revelation and is often described as a summary of the whole Quran, holding praise, theology, and petition in seven verses. The traditional division of surahs into Meccan (revealed before the emigration to Medina) and Medinan is a classification of the exegetical tradition; modern historical-critical scholarship debates the precise dating and sequence of revelation. In prayer, the worshipper who cannot recite it is held not to have a valid prayer in most schools, which makes it the single most memorised text in Islam. Its final petition to be kept from the path of 'those who have earned anger' and 'those who have gone astray' has been the subject of extensive commentary.

Manuscript evidence bears on how fixed this most-recited of texts actually is. Early Quranic parchments such as the Sana'a palimpsest, and differences among the canonical recitation traditions (qira'at), Hafs, used through most of the Muslim world, and Warsh, dominant across North and West Africa, show minor variation in orthography and vocalisation rather than in the wording worshippers hear, part of why the text has drawn less textual-critical controversy than its theology has drawn exegetical attention, which centres on the closing verses: classical exegesis, including al-Tabari and later commentators, glossed "those who have earned anger" and "those who have gone astray" as references to Jews and Christians respectively, a reading with a long history in tafsir but one many modern scholars, Muslim and non-Muslim, treat as a later interpretive layer rather than a meaning fixed by the verse itself, since the Arabic names no group. Whether recited aloud or silently depends on which of the five daily prayers is in progress, a rule the Fatiha shares with the surah that follows it in each rak'a.