5. Al-Maida

Al-Maida ('The Table Spread'), 120 Medinan verses regarded as among the last revealed, sets out laws of lawful and forbidden food, ritual purity, oaths and justice. It is named for the disciples' request that Jesus bring down a table from heaven. It carries the verse many read as marking the perfection of the faith (5:3) and, in the Shia tradition, the verse of Ghadir associated with the succession of Ali.

Al-Maida's dietary legislation, listing what is forbidden, carrion, blood, swine, and what is slaughtered other than in God's name, alongside the general permission of the game and food of the People of the Book (5:5), became a central reference for the later development of halal food law across the Islamic legal schools. Al-Qurtubi's commentary on the surah's opening command to 'fulfil your contracts' (5:1) reads it as setting the tone for the whole chapter's emphasis on obligation, whether to God through ritual purity, to fellow believers through justice, or to non-Muslim communities through treaty. The Table Spread episode itself, in which the disciples ask Jesus for a table from heaven as a sign, appears only briefly (5:112-115) yet gave the surah its name, its brevity within the text a reminder that surah titles often derive from a single striking image rather than the chapter's dominant theme.

Regarded by many scholars as one of the final surahs revealed, Al-Maida carries a sense of consolidation: dietary law, the rules of ablution and purification, and the ethics of contract and testimony. Verse 5:3, 'this day I have perfected for you your religion,' is read in the Sunni tradition as marking the completion of the message; the Shia tradition connects the nearby verses to the event of Ghadir Khumm and the designation of Ali.

The verse of Ghadir Khumm, read by Shia exegetes as immediately preceding or following the declaration of religion's perfection at 5:3, is tied in Shia tradition to the Prophet's sermon at the pool of Khumm on the return from his farewell pilgrimage, in which he is reported to have designated Ali as his successor, an event Sunni scholarship generally acknowledges as historical while reading the sermon's content differently, as an exhortation to honour Ali rather than a formal appointment. Al-Maida's closing chapters on the Day of Judgement, including Jesus' own testimony before God that he never told his followers to worship him (5:116-117), are read across the tradition as the Quran's final and most direct engagement with Christian claims about Jesus' divinity, closing the surah's earlier legal material with a theological reckoning.