59. Al-Hashr

Al-Hashr ('The Exile'), 24 Medinan verses, concerns the expulsion of the Jewish tribe of Banu Nadir from Medina and the distribution of what they left. It sets the principle that wealth should not circulate only among the rich (59:7) and closes with the sequence of God's most beautiful names (59:22-24), recited as a litany. The surah is traditionally dated to the expulsion of the Jewish tribe of Banu al-Nadir from Medina in 4 AH, after they were accused of plotting against the Prophet's life, and its opening verses on the felling of their palm trees during the siege (59:5) preserve a specific, debated point of just-war ethics, since destroying enemy property in wartime was otherwise discouraged in early Islamic legal thinking, a tension classical jurists addressed by treating the act as a divinely sanctioned exception rather than a general rule. Its closing litany of divine names (59:22-24) is widely used as a stand-alone devotional recitation independent of the surah's historical occasion.

The surah's image of hypocrites urging allies to 'go out' with them while covertly abandoning them once fighting begins (59:11-12), read by classical commentators as directed at factions who had encouraged the Banu al-Nadir to resist expulsion, became a frequently cited scriptural case study in later Islamic political writing on the unreliability of opportunistic alliances. Its closing description of God as 'the Sovereign, the Holy, the Source of Peace' (59:23) opens the sequence of divine names later compiled into the widely used devotional list of ninety-nine names, though that fixed list itself derives from hadith compilation rather than from the Quran alone.

Al-Hashr praises the Ansar, the Medinan believers who hosted the Meccan emigrants, in terms later Islamic ethics treated as its highest single statement of generosity: they love those who emigrated to them, feel no want in their hearts for what the emigrants were given, and prefer them over themselves 'even though they were in privation' (59:9). Classical commentators single out this verse as the scriptural origin of the technical term ithar, preferring another's need over one's own even at real personal cost, distinguished from ordinary charity by requiring the giver's own genuine want.

The verse is cited across later Islamic ethical and Sufi literature as describing the outer limit of generosity rather than its ordinary expected form, and biographical accounts of individual Ansari companions, some reported to have given away a meal or a night's lodging to a guest while going hungry themselves, are traditionally read as illustrations rather than exaggerations of the quality this verse names. The praise is notable for singling out a specific historical community, the Ansar of Medina, by their communal conduct rather than describing an abstract or universal virtue disconnected from any named group.