Al-Qalam ('The Pen'), 52 Meccan verses, among the earliest revelations, swears 'by the pen and what they inscribe' and defends the Prophet against the charge of madness, affirming that he is 'of a great moral character' (68:4). It tells the parable of the owners of the garden who resolved to deny the poor their share and lost everything.
Al-Qalam is generally placed, alongside Al-Alaq, Al-Muzzammil and Al-Muddaththir, among the very earliest revelations, and Western scholarship following Theodor Noldeke's influential nineteenth century chronology of the Quran places it close behind Al-Alaq as the second surah revealed, an ordering broadly, though not identically, echoed in some traditional Islamic chronological lists. Its defence of the Prophet against the charge of madness (68:2), answered by the declaration that he stands upon 'a great moral character' (68:4), is read by classical and modern scholars alike as responding to a real accusation current in early Mecca rather than as a rhetorical figure. The surah's parable of the garden owners who resolved at night to harvest secretly, without setting aside the customary share for the poor, only to wake and find it burned to ashes (68:17-33), is read by classical commentators as a deliberately close echo of pre-Islamic Arabian storytelling conventions about hubris and sudden reversal, repurposed here to warn Mecca's own wealthy merchants. Its closing reference to the 'pen' in the opening oath is read by some commentators as invoking the pen with which the Preserved Tablet (al-lawh al-mahfuz) was written, linking a very early revelation to a cosmology more fully developed only in later Meccan and Medinan material.