Al-Fajr ('The Dawn'), 30 Meccan verses, swears by the dawn and the ten nights (often read as the first ten of Dhu al-Hijja). It recalls the fate of Ad, Thamud and Pharaoh, rebukes the love of wealth and neglect of the orphan and the poor, and ends with the call to the 'tranquil soul' to return to its Lord well-pleased (89:27-30). Classical commentators divide over the 'ten nights' sworn by in the opening oath, most identifying them with the first ten days of Dhu al-Hijja, the pilgrimage month, on the strength of hadith praising righteous deeds performed during that period above almost any other time, though a minority reading connects them instead to the last ten nights of Ramadan. The surah's closing address to the 'soul at peace,' called to return to its Lord 'well-pleased and pleasing' (89:27-28), supplies, alongside the self-reproaching soul named in Al-Qiyama and the commanding soul named in Yusuf, one of the three Quranic terms later Islamic spiritual writing organised into a standard threefold scheme of moral development.
Classical commentators read the surah's central complaint, that wealth given is mistaken for divine honour and its withholding for divine humiliation (89:15-16), as a deliberate correction of a common but mistaken equation between material fortune and God's favour, insisting instead that both prosperity and hardship can equally be forms of testing rather than verdicts on a person's standing before God. Its earlier catalogue of destroyed peoples, Ad of the pillars, Thamud who carved the rocks, and Pharaoh of the stakes (89:6-10), groups three separate narrative traditions told at greater length elsewhere into a single compressed roll call intended as cumulative rather than individually detailed warning.