Al-Anbiya ('The Prophets'), 112 Meccan verses, is a rapid gallery of earlier messengers, Abraham breaking the idols, Moses and Aaron, Job's patience, Jonah in the fish, Zechariah, Mary, all testifying to a single message. It declares the Prophet sent 'as a mercy to the worlds' (21:107).
Al-Anbiya's rapid procession of prophets, each treated in a few verses rather than an extended narrative, is read by al-Razi's commentary as a deliberate rhetorical strategy distinct from surahs like Yusuf or Al-Qasas that dwell on a single figure at length, compressing many lives into one argument that all revelation carries a single consistent message. Job's patience, summarised in a brief prayer acknowledging affliction and asking mercy (21:83-84), became in later Islamic literature a byword for endurance comparable to his role in Jewish and Christian tradition, despite the Quran's own account offering far less narrative detail than the biblical book of Job. The declaration that Muhammad was sent 'as a mercy to the worlds' (21:107) is treated across Islamic theology as one of the clearest single-verse statements of the purpose of his mission, cited independently of the surah's surrounding material in sermons, calligraphy and devotional literature.