4. An-Nisa

An-Nisa ('The Women'), 176 Medinan verses, is the Quran's principal legislation on family and social justice: the protection of orphans, the fixed shares of inheritance, the regulation of marriage and the degrees of forbidden kinship, and the just treatment of women, dependents and the vulnerable. It also treats the shortened prayer in danger and states that Jesus was not crucified but raised to God (4:157-158).

An-Nisa's inheritance verses (4:11-12), fixing shares for daughters, sons, parents, spouses and other relatives with mathematical precision, are treated by classical jurists as among the clearest legislative passages in the Quran, and became the foundation of the Islamic science of faraid, inheritance calculation, which developed into a specialised branch of fiqh in its own right. Al-Qurtubi's commentary reads the surah's opening command to give orphans their property and not exchange 'the good for the bad' (4:2) against the pre-Islamic Arabian practice of guardians absorbing wards' wealth, framing the whole surah's legislative programme as a corrective to specific abuses the early community had witnessed. The denial that Jesus was crucified, stating instead that 'it was made to appear so to them' (4:157), is one of the Quran's most consequential statements of Christology and has generated a long exegetical literature on what exactly happened at the crucifixion, including substitution theories in which another figure was crucified in Jesus' place.

An-Nisa's detailed rules on inheritance shares, marriage and the guardianship of orphans made it a primary source for Islamic family law (fiqh), and its verses remain central to contemporary debates over gender and reform within Muslim jurisprudence. The surah repeatedly ties legal detail to the fear of God and justice, opening with the reminder that humanity was created 'from a single soul' (4:1).

Modern reform movements within Islamic jurisprudence frequently return to An-Nisa's verses on marriage and guardianship, including the permission for plural marriage conditioned on just treatment (4:3) and the verse on discipline within marriage (4:34), both subject to extensive reinterpretation by scholars arguing that the surah's own ethical framing, justice, protection of the vulnerable, kindness, should govern how the specific rulings are applied rather than the literal wording read in isolation. Classical exegesis, including al-Razi's commentary, already debated the conditions attached to plural marriage, noting the surah pairs the permission immediately with a warning that perfect fairness between wives is unlikely (4:129), a juxtaposition later reformist scholars cite as textual support for restricting the practice. The surah's repeated grounding of legal detail in the fear of God gives its rulings a devotional as much as juridical character within the tradition.