68. Al-Qalam

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.

Al-Qalam describes the hostility of the disbelievers toward Muhammad in strikingly physical terms: they would 'almost trip you up with their eyes when they hear the message' (68:51). A number of classical commentators read this verse as acknowledging the reality of the evil eye, an envious or malicious glance believed capable of causing harm, and cite it as scriptural grounding for a belief widespread across the pre-Islamic and early Islamic Middle East, one later hadith literature addresses directly with prescribed protective supplications; other classical and modern exegetes read the verse instead as a vivid figure of speech for intense hostility and read too much specific doctrine into it, so the verse's precise theological weight on this question is treated as genuinely disputed rather than settled by the text alone.

Islamic theology as a whole affirms belief in the evil eye's reality on the strength of hadith rather than this verse in isolation, while treating protective measures against it as compatible with, rather than a departure from, reliance on God, a balance classical scholars were careful to maintain against any suggestion that fear of the evil eye implied a power operating outside or against divine permission.