27 An-Naml (The Ants)

Mecca Period

THE PROPHET and most of his close Companions used to refer to this surah as Ta-Sin (the

letter-symbols which precede its first verse). In later times, however, it came to be known as An-Naml after a word occurring in verse 18, which, because of its association with Solomonic legends, caught and held the imagination of countless Muslims who listened to or read the Qur'an. As pointed out in my note 77 on 21: 82, the Qur'an often employs such legends as a vehicle for allegories expressing certain universal ethical truths; and it employs them for the simple reason that even before the advent of Islam they had become so firmly embedded in the poetic memories of the Arabs - the people in whose language the Qur'an was expressed and to whom it was addressed in the first instance - that most of these legends had acquired, as it were, a cultural reality of their own, which made a denial or a confirmation of their mythical origin utterly irrelevant. Within the context of the Qur'an, the only thing that is relevant in this respect is the spiritual truth underlying each one of these legends: a many-sided, many-layered truth which the Qur'an invariably brings out, sometimes explicitly, sometimes elliptically, often allegorically, but always with a definite bearing on some of the hidden depths and conflicts within our own, human psyche.