25. Al-Furqan

Al-Furqan ('The Criterion'), 77 Meccan verses, answers the objections of the Meccans to the revelation and its human messenger. It closes with a portrait of the ibad ar-Rahman, the humble 'servants of the Most Merciful' who walk gently on the earth, spend in moderation and pass the night in prayer (25:63-77).

Al-Furqan's title, the Criterion, refers in its opening verse to the Quran itself as that which distinguishes truth from falsehood, and al-Tabari's commentary reads the surah's sustained answer to Meccan objections, that Muhammad eats food and walks in markets like other men, that the revelation was not sent down all at once, as addressing the same set of doubts about prophetic authority raised across several Meccan surahs but gathered here with particular concentration. The surah's closing portrait of the ibad ar-Rahman, walking gently, responding to ignorance with peace, spending neither wastefully nor miserly, and pleading through the night for forgiveness (25:63-77), is treated by commentators as one of the Quran's fullest single descriptions of ideal character, often paired in devotional literature with the opening list of believers' traits in Al-Muminun. Verse 25:70, promising that God transforms the evil deeds of the truly repentant into good ones, is read as among the Quran's most expansive statements on the scope of forgiveness available even to those with a serious past.

Al-Furqan closes its portrait of the servants of the Most Merciful with a request many Muslims recite as a personal supplication independently of the surah's wider argument: 'our Lord, grant us from our spouses and offspring comfort to our eyes, and make us leaders for the righteous' (25:74). Devotional literature and marriage counsel frequently cite the verse as a model prayer for family life, read alongside its immediate context as the final, most personal item in a list otherwise devoted to humility, restraint and nightly devotion, so that the ideal character the surah has been describing closes not with an abstract virtue but with a concrete hope for one's own household.

Classical commentary reads 'comfort to our eyes' as encompassing both the immediate joy of a loving household and the longer hope that one's spouse and children will themselves live righteously, since a family's conduct was understood to reflect on and continue a believer's own legacy after death. The request to be made 'leaders for the righteous' is read by some exegetes as an aspiration to moral example within a household or community rather than a claim to formal religious or political authority, a reading intended to keep the verse's use as a general personal prayer rather than a title-seeking one.