Al-Anfal ('The Spoils of War'), 75 Medinan verses, was revealed around the Battle of Badr in the second year after the emigration. It settles the distribution of gains, teaches the ethics of warfare and treaty, and reads the unexpected victory as divine aid to those who trust in God.
Al-Anfal's opening verses, addressing a dispute among the Muslims over how to divide the spoils after Badr, are read by commentators as replacing individual claims with a rule that distribution belongs to God and His messenger, later specified into fixed shares including a portion set aside for orphans, the needy and travellers (8:41). The surah's account of Badr frames the battle, fought against a numerically superior Meccan force in the second year after the emigration, as proof that victory depends on divine aid and right conduct rather than material strength alone, a reading reinforced by its description of angels sent to support the believers (8:9). Al-Anfal's material on treaties and the conduct of war, including provisions for accepting an enemy's offer of peace (8:61), became a reference point in later Islamic legal writing on the ethics and law of warfare. Tradition gives the battle itself a specific and often-repeated count: roughly three hundred and thirteen Muslims, eighty-two of them Meccan emigrants and the rest Medinan allies, faced a Meccan force usually put at closer to a thousand, a lopsided ratio the surah's own language of divine aid was later read against.