033

This is Surah Al-Ahzab (Chapter 33, "The Confederates"), a chapter of the Quran revealed in Medina, here rendered in a 19th-century English translation notable for its archaic diction. The chapter takes its name from the Battle of the Trench (627 CE), in which a coalition of tribes besieged Medina, and it uses that crisis to draw a sustained contrast between true believers who held firm and hypocrites who lost faith or sought to flee. A significant portion addresses the Prophet Muhammad's household directly, establishing his wives as "mothers of the believers," imposing stricter behavioral and dress codes on them than on ordinary women, and granting Muhammad specific marriage privileges not available to other Muslim men—including the theologically notable sanction for him to marry Zainab, the ex-wife of his adopted son Zaid, explicitly to dissolve the prohibition on such unions. The chapter contains the foundational declaration that Muhammad is "the Seal of the Prophets," meaning the final prophet in the Abrahamic line from Noah through Jesus. It also includes early formulations of rules still central to Islamic practice: the curtain/screen separating the Prophet's wives from non-family visitors, modest outer dress for women, and the requirement to address adopted children by their biological fathers' names rather than treating adoption as equivalent to biological kinship.

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