Why Surat at-Tawbah Has No Basmalah, and Who Ordered the Quran

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Before walking through the verses themselves, some background on the sūrah that carries the story of Tabūk. Sūrat al-Tawbah is the only sūrah in the Qurʾān that does not begin with بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ, and it is among the very last revelations, we are in the ninth year of the Hijrah, with one year of the Prophet's ﷺ life remaining. Two-thirds of it deals with Tabūk. Note also that its first thirty-seven verses were not revealed at this point: they came down in Dhū al-Qaʿdah and the beginning of Dhū al-Ḥijjah of the ninth year, about a month before the Ḥajj season, and belong to that story. Verse 38 to the end is the Tabūk material.

❧Uthman's answer

The first explanation for the missing Basmalah is a report in Sunan al-Tirmidhī. ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, the compiler of the Muṣḥaf, was asked: why did you not write the Basmalah before al-Tawbah, and why did you place it immediately after al-Anfāl, when al-Anfāl was revealed at Badr and al-Tawbah at Tabūk, with the whole Madanī era lying between them? ʿUthmān answered that al-Tawbah was among the last sūrahs revealed, that it was not clear to them where it should go, and that they placed it with al-Anfāl because the subject matter is the same, qitāl, ḥarb, jihād; both sūrahs are primarily about fighting, and they left out the Basmalah because they did not know whether the two were one sūrah or two.

That answer raises questions, and this is an advanced class, so they are worth stating plainly. Some of the Tābiʿūn concluded from it that al-Tawbah and al-Anfāl are in fact a single sūrah, hence early reports that the Qurʾān has a hundred and thirteen sūrahs, not because one is missing but because two are counted as one. Qatādah, the student of Ibn ʿAbbās, is among those from whom this is reported. Remember that the Ṣaḥābah wrote neither the names of the sūrahs nor the verse numbers into the Muṣḥaf, all of that came a century or two later; they simply wrote بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ and you knew a new sūrah had begun. But hardly anyone agreed with that position, and the Ummah has since settled, there is no difference of opinion left on it, so we may call it ijmāʿ, that al-Anfāl and al-Tawbah are two distinct sūrahs.

❧Who arranged what

The report also raises the question of who did the ordering. Distinguish two things: the order of the verses within a sūrah, and the order of the sūrahs within the Muṣḥaf. On the first there is no dispute, the Prophet ﷺ set it, by revelation; verses would come down and he would tell the scribes to place this one here and that one there. You can feel it in any sūrah: there is a flow, a rhythm, a style, something that connects each verse to the next, as every ḥāfiẓ knows.

A digression on that point. There is a well-known German Orientalist alive today, Angelika Neuwirth, whose life's work is the Qurʾān and its naẓm, its structure and internal harmony; she received an honorary doctorate from Yale the same year the shaykh received his. She analyses consonants and what she calls the melodies and rhymes of sūrahs such as Qāf, terms a Muslim would not adopt, and demonstrates a parallel internal architecture running through them. As a student the shaykh watched her debate one of his own professors, a man who held that the Qurʾān was compiled later and not in its original form. Both of them non-Muslims, she told him flatly that this was clearly false, and proved it from her own structural analysis: the harmony within each sūrah shows preservation from the Prophet's ﷺ time. She does not believe the Qurʾān to be divine, she thinks its author was some kind of genius, but she defends its integrity passionately. Asked afterwards whether she knows Arabic: she knows it better than most of us in this room. That is the reality of the Mustashriqūn. Not everyone who studies Islam without embracing it is an enemy of it; some are hostile, Bernard Lewis is the classic example of the man whose writing shows real contempt, and others are genuinely sympathetic, curious from the mind and not the heart, and live out their lives as agnostics. There are even those who privately know Islam to be true but cannot bear the social cost of saying so publicly, the position of Abū Ṭālib. قُلْ إِنَّ الْهُدَىٰ هُدَى اللَّهِ; إِنَّكَ لَا تَهْدِي مَنْ أَحْبَبْتَ. Ordinary Muslims have no need to read such scholarship, trust the Muslim scholars, but those in academia must learn to tell the two kinds apart.

The order of the sūrahs is the contested one, and Allah knows best, but it does appear that the Ṣaḥābah settled it themselves, al-Fātiḥah, al-Baqarah, Āl ʿImrān, al-Nisāʾ, al-Māʾidah, al-Anʿām, al-Anfāl, and onward, for reasons that satisfied them. The evidence is that every Ṣaḥābī who kept his own copy had his own arrangement, and ʿUthmān's own words here point the same way: we did not know where to place it, the content matched, so we put the two together. Once the Ṣaḥābah standardised it in ʿUthmān's time, however, it became binding on us: whoever prints a Muṣḥaf is obliged to follow that order, out of respect for the ijmāʿ of ʿUthmān's compilation.

❧Ali's answer

The second explanation is narrated from ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, who was asked, by one of his sons, as the shaykh recalls it, why there is no Basmalah in this sūrah. He answered that this is a sūrah in which Allah severs His ties with the pagans; it does not befit Him to open it with His mercy. The sūrah begins بَرَاءَةٌ مِّنَ اللَّهِ, and barāʾah means a complete cutting-off, I have nothing to do with you, so it is not fitting that it be prefaced with al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm, and the rest of the sūrah is severe against those who reject Allah and His Messenger. Both explanations carry a measure of legitimacy.