The Gathering and the Beautiful Names

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.