73. Al-Muzzammil

Al-Muzzammil ('The Enshrouded One'), 20 Meccan verses, is an early revelation calling the Prophet, wrapped in his cloak, to rise in the night for prayer and measured recitation of the Quran (73:1-4). Its long final verse eases the vigil for the community and commends charity. Along with Al-Muddaththir, this surah is placed by the traditional Egyptian standard chronological order, and by Noldeke's independent Western reckoning, among the handful of earliest revelations, its command to rise for night prayer generally read as addressed to the Prophet alone in the first Meccan years before the five daily prayers were later instituted.

Western scholarship since Noldeke and Schwally has also noted that the surah's address, 'O you wrapped in your garment,' echoes a pre-Islamic Arabian idiom in which a kahin, a soothsayer or seer, wrapped himself before uttering oracular speech, a resonance classical Islamic exegesis does not raise but which modern historians of the Quran's language treat as a plausible register the earliest audience would have recognised. The surah's closing verse (73:20), considerably longer and generally regarded by scholars as a later Medinan addition to an otherwise early Meccan text, eases the original demand for extended night vigil into a more general encouragement, explicitly permitting illness, travel and hardship as reasons to recite only what is manageable, a rare case within the Quran of a single surah preserving, in its own wording, a visible adjustment of an earlier instruction for a later community's circumstances. This verse is also the source of the standard Quranic instruction to pay zakat alongside prayer, one of relatively few such explicit pairings outside the Medinan legal surahs.

Al-Muzzammil instructs the Prophet to recite the Quran 'with tartil,' generally rendered as slow, clear, measured recitation (73:4), the same term that gave its name to tartil, the entire later Islamic discipline of unhurried, correctly articulated Quranic recitation as distinct from rapid or careless reading. Classical commentators read the instruction as addressing both the practical need to receive and retain revelation accurately during the earliest period of transmission and a lasting model for how the text should always be voiced afterward, so that a single early command shaped a discipline still taught formally to reciters many centuries later.

Later scholarship on tajwid, the rules of correct pronunciation and articulation developed from this and related instructions, treats tartil as the foundational value the more detailed technical rules exist to serve, correct articulation in service of unhurried, reflective recitation rather than technical correctness pursued for its own sake. The instruction is frequently cited at the opening of tajwid textbooks as the Quranic warrant for treating recitation as a discipline requiring deliberate practice rather than simply reading aloud as one would any other text.