9. At-Tawba

At-Tawba ('Repentance'), 129 Medinan verses, is the only surah that does not open with the Bismillah. Revealed late, it addresses the dissolving of treaties with the polytheists, the expedition of Tabuk, and the exposure of the hypocrites and those who stayed behind from campaign, alongside verses on repentance accepted and on the sincere among the community.

At-Tawba's declaration severing treaty obligations with polytheists who had repeatedly broken their agreements (9:1-5) is one of the Quran's most extensively debated legal passages, cited by some later commentators, out of context, as a general call to war, and read by classical exegetes including al-Tabari as conditioned specifically on the polytheists' own violation of prior treaties rather than as an unconditional command. The account of the expedition to Tabuk, a costly and ultimately unopposed march to the Byzantine frontier in the ninth year after the emigration, occupies much of the surah's later material, exposing through its narrative those who made excuses to stay behind and contrasting them with those who set out despite hardship. The surah's closing verses on repentance accepted, including that of three companions who stayed behind and were shunned for fifty days before forgiveness was revealed (9:118), give the chapter its title despite the severity of its opening material.

At-Tawba's lack of the opening Bismillah is unique and prompted early discussion: some companions treated it and the preceding Al-Anfal as closely linked, while others explained the omission by the surah's theme of severance. The debate is a window onto how the early community understood the ordering and boundaries of the surahs, matters that later occupied Quranic scholarship on the text's compilation.

Several classical explanations for the missing Bismillah circulate in the exegetical tradition: that the companion Uthman, overseeing the Quran's compilation, left At-Tawba and Al-Anfal without a dividing Bismillah because their close thematic connection, treaties and warfare, suggested to him they might originally have been a single surah; that the Bismillah signals peace and mercy, unsuited to a surah opening with the annulment of treaties; or, in a report attributed to Ibn Abbas, that the angel Gabriel had not specified where to place a Bismillah for this surah before the Prophet's death. None of these explanations commands unanimous acceptance, and the gap remains one of the few features of the standard Quranic text whose origin the tradition itself treats as unresolved rather than definitively explained.