Al-Balad ('The City'), 20 Meccan verses, swears by Mecca and the toil into which the human is born. It names 'the steep path' as the freeing of a slave, feeding the orphan and the destitute, and being of those who counsel patience and mercy (90:11-17). Classical commentators read the surah's oath by 'this city' as invoking Mecca's sanctity specifically at a moment when the Prophet himself, its own son, was treated as licit to fight against by his own people, an irony some tafsir works draw out explicitly from the wording. Its 'steep path,' defined through the concrete triad of freeing a slave, feeding the hungry orphan or the destitute stranger, and standing among the patient and compassionate (90:12-17), is read by classical commentators as deliberately anti-abstract, replacing a metaphysical description of moral effort with a checklist of specific, verifiable acts any listener could immediately act upon.
Classical commentators read the surah's repeated rhetorical question, whether the human thinks 'no one has power over him' (90:5), as addressing a specific complacency of wealth and status, since the passage is traditionally connected to a boastful Meccan figure who claimed to have spent great sums without any accounting, a claim the surah directly rebuts by insisting that God sees regardless of how freely resources are spent. Its closing division of humanity into 'companions of the right' and 'companions of the left' anticipates, in miniature, the same threefold and twofold judgement schemes elaborated at greater length in several of the longer surahs collected earlier in the Quran.