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A Baby in a Basket on the River, and a Prince Raised by His Enemy

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A Baby in a Basket on the River, and a Prince Raised by His Enemy

Hizb 39 closes An-Naml with brief further mentions of Lot and of Salih and Thamud, then closes affirming that only God knows the unseen and describing signs of the coming Hour, including a strange creature the text says will emerge to speak to people, a passage later commentary has read in various ways without full agreement on what it describes.

The hizb then opens Al-Qasas, the Story, with the fullest account anywhere in the Quran of Moses's birth and early life: Pharaoh's oppression of the Israelites and his killing of their male infants, Moses's mother instructed to set him adrift on the river in a basket, his sister following at a distance to see where he would be found, and Pharaoh's own wife adopting him against her husband's inclination, unknowingly returning him to his birth mother's care for nursing soon afterward.

The hizb follows Moses into adulthood, his accidental killing of an Egyptian man in a dispute, his flight to Midian, his years of labor there in exchange for marriage to one of a righteous man's daughters, and his eventual return toward Egypt, closing as he approaches the site of his prophetic call once again.

Because this material has no close parallel anywhere else in the Quran, huffaz reviewing it typically rely on the story's own strong narrative sequence, mother, river, sister, palace, return, rather than on the rub al-hizb quarters themselves, to hold the episode's order correctly in memory.

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