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.