My Lord, Increase Me in Knowledge

Ta-Ha closes with a short prayer placed in Muhammad's own mouth, 'my Lord, increase me in knowledge' (20:114), a verse that became, independently of the surah's narrative about Moses, one of the most widely memorised and recited supplications in Islamic educational culture, taught to students beginning a course of religious study and cited as scriptural grounding for the high value classical Islamic civilisation placed on the pursuit of knowledge generally, not only religious learning.

The surah's account of Moses at the burning bush is distinguished in classical commentary by its detail that Moses was told to remove his sandals in the sacred valley of Tuwa (20:12), a specific instruction absent from some of the Quran's other retellings of the same scene, and by God's own first-person self-description to Moses, 'I am God, there is no god but Me' (20:14), read by commentators as among the most direct statements of divine self-identification given to any prophet across the Quran's several accounts of prophetic commissioning. The prayer's brevity, only a handful of words in Arabic, is itself cited by teachers as a model for concise, focused supplication rather than lengthy or elaborate petition.