22. Al-Hajj

Al-Hajj ('The Pilgrimage'), 78 verses combining Meccan and Medinan material, sets out the rites Abraham was commanded to proclaim at the ancient House and the sacrifice, whose 'piety reaches God' rather than its flesh (22:37). It contains what is often identified as the first verse permitting the wronged to fight in self-defence (22:39).

Al-Hajj's mixed classification, combining verses commentators assign to the Meccan and Medinan periods within a single surah, is explained by al-Qurtubi as reflecting later revision of an originally Meccan core with legal material added after the emigration, part of a wider pattern the exegetical tradition recognises in several surahs whose thematic unity outlasted the piecemeal, occasion-driven process of revelation. Abraham's commission to 'proclaim the pilgrimage to mankind' (22:27) is read as the scriptural foundation for the Hajj's continuation as an Abrahamic rite even after Islam's arrival, with the Quran presenting Muhammad's community as restoring and purifying practices attributed to Abraham rather than inventing them anew. Verse 22:39, permitting armed resistance to those who have been wronged, is treated by classical commentators as marking the shift from the Meccan period's teaching of patient endurance under persecution to the Medinan period's acceptance of defensive warfare once the community had a state capable of waging it.

Fourteen or fifteen verses across the Quran are traditionally read as calling for a physical prostration by the reciter or listener, and Al-Hajj is the one surah where the exact count is itself a point of disagreement among the legal schools: most jurists recognise a prostration verse at 22:18, but the Shafi'i school additionally treats 22:77 as a second prostration verse within the same surah, a position the Hanafi school does not share, making Al-Hajj the surah most directly implicated in the broader disagreement over how many prostration verses the Quran contains.

Abraham's commission to 'proclaim the pilgrimage to mankind' (22:27) underlies the traditional understanding that the Hajj, though reshaped and purified in Islamic practice, continues rites the Quran presents as originally Abrahamic rather than newly instituted, a framing later Islamic scholarship used to explain why specific pilgrimage rites, the running between Safa and Marwa among them, are retained as prescribed worship rather than treated as pre-Islamic custom the new religion simply inherited. The disagreement is treated by jurists as a minor, acknowledged difference between schools rather than a dispute requiring resolution, since a worshipper following either position is considered to have prayed correctly according to their own school's ruling.