An-Naml
The Surah at a Glance A single ant speaks, and an entire army halts. A bird lectures a king about theology.
The Surah at a Glance
A single ant speaks, and an entire army halts. A bird lectures a king about theology. A throne crosses continents in the time it takes to blink. Surah An-Naml — "The Ant" — is the Quran's most vivid exploration of what power looks like when it is saturated with faith, and what happens when that power encounters creatures most kingdoms would never notice.
This is Surah 27, ninety-three ayahs revealed in Makkah, and it is named after an insect that appears for exactly one ayah (18) and is never mentioned again anywhere in the Quran. That naming choice tells you everything about what this surah values. In a surah filled with kingdoms and palaces and jinn who move thrones across the earth, Allah names the whole thing after the smallest voice in the room — the one who stopped Sulayman's army with a single sentence of concern for her community.
The surah belongs to a great Makkan narrative sequence, and its arc is surprisingly easy to hold. Here is the simplest version:
The floor plan in four movements:
- The Quran arrives as guidance, and Musa's story opens the prophetic sequence (1–14)
- Sulayman's kingdom unfolds — the ant, the hoopoe, the Queen of Sheba, the throne, and the palace of glass (15–44)
- Salih and Lut face communities that reject the signs standing right in front of them (45–58)
- A series of questions about creation rolls toward the final challenge: produce your proof, if what you claim is true (59–93)
With slightly more detail: the surah opens by anchoring the Quran as guidance for those who pray and give and believe in what comes next (1–6), then moves immediately into Musa at the fire — a prophet who doesn't yet know what he's walking into (7–14). From there, the surah's longest and most elaborate movement takes over: Dawud and Sulayman receive knowledge, Sulayman inherits a kingdom that includes the language of birds and the service of jinn, and then the drama of the hoopoe, the letter, the Queen's deliberation, the transported throne, and the palace of glass unfolds in extraordinary narrative detail (15–44). Two shorter prophetic accounts — Salih's people who plot in the dark (45–53) and Lut's people who choose desire over sight (54–58) — compress the pattern of rejection into tight, devastating scenes. Then the surah opens out into the widest lens: the creation of the heavens and the earth, the rivers between two seas, the one who answers the desperate when they call — all framed as questions that demand honest answers (59–75). The final passage turns to the Day of Gathering, the earth producing its testimony, and a closing command to the Prophet ﷺ: recite the Quran, and whoever is guided is guided for themselves (76–93).
The surah moves from intimate encounter (Musa alone at a fire) through the grandest kingdom on earth (Sulayman commanding jinn and birds) to the kingdom that dwarfs all kingdoms (Allah's dominion over creation and the unseen). Each stage asks the same question with increasing force: can you see who is really in charge?
The Character of This Surah
An-Naml is a surah of intelligent grandeur. It lives in a world of courts, conversations, deliberation, and display — but every display of power is calibrated to reveal the Power behind it. Where many Makkan surahs shake the listener with images of cosmic destruction, this surah shows them a palace and asks them to think carefully about who built it and why.
The emotional world here is wonder laced with challenge. The surah wants you to be amazed — by an ant's political awareness, by a bird's theological sophistication, by a queen's strategic wisdom, by a throne that arrives faster than thought — and then it wants you to sit with the obvious question: if all of this happened within Sulayman's kingdom, which was given to him by Allah, what does that tell you about the One who gives kingdoms?
Three features make this surah unlike any other in the Quran:
First, it contains the only instance of the basmala appearing inside the body of a surah. Every surah begins with "In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Especially Merciful" — but in An-Naml, the basmala appears again at ayah 30, inside Sulayman's letter to the Queen of Sheba. This means the formula that frames every surah in the Quran is here placed in the mouth of a human king writing a diplomatic letter. The ordinary becomes extraordinary: a king's correspondence carries the same opening as divine revelation.
Second, this is the Quran's most sustained portrait of non-human intelligence. The ant in ayah 18 speaks with collective concern, awareness of Sulayman's identity, and even a kind of diplomatic tact — she excuses the army by noting they would crush the ants "without perceiving it." The hoopoe in ayahs 20–28 delivers a theological assessment of the Queen of Sheba's kingdom that would be sophisticated coming from a human scholar: he identifies sun-worship, names Shaytan as the cause, and frames the whole thing as a failure to prostrate to Allah. No other surah gives this much voice and agency to creatures outside the human world.
Third, the surah is conspicuously absent of any direct punishment scene. Salih's people are destroyed, and Lut's people are rained upon — but the surah relates these in compressed retrospective, almost in summary. The narrative energy, the slow dramatic unfolding, the dialogue and suspense — all of that is reserved for a story that ends in conversion, not destruction. The Queen of Sheba submits to Allah alongside Sulayman at the surah's dramatic peak (ayah 44). In a surah about power, the most powerful moment is a queen choosing faith. The surah's violence is offstage. Its conversion is center stage.
What is missing here is equally telling. There is no extended legal instruction, no community regulation, no rules for daily life. There are no direct addresses to the Quraysh by name. The surah is doing something different from warning or legislating — it is displaying. It builds a world so vivid and so layered that the argument emerges from the display itself: look at what a kingdom under divine guidance looks like, and then look at your own.
An-Naml sits in the middle of a remarkable Makkan family. It is the second surah in the Ṭā Sīn cluster — Ash-Shu'ara (26), An-Naml (27), and Al-Qasas (28) — three surahs that share the mysterious letters Ṭā Sīn (or Ṭā Sīn Mīm), that all open with declarations about the Quran, and that all feature Musa prominently. But each handles the prophetic material with a completely different lens. Ash-Shu'ara gives you seven prophets in rapid succession, with an identical refrain hammering after each one — its method is accumulation and pattern. Al-Qasas gives you Musa's full biography, from infancy to Midian to the fire to Pharaoh — its method is intimate narrative depth. An-Naml, the middle sibling, gives you Sulayman's court in extraordinary detail — its method is dramatic scene-building and conversation. Where Ash-Shu'ara persuades through repetition and Al-Qasas through biography, An-Naml persuades through spectacle. It shows you what a kingdom looks like when every creature in it — from the jinn to the birds to the ants — operates within divine order.
This surah arrived during the middle Makkan period, a time when the Prophet ﷺ and the early community faced a Quraysh establishment that wielded political power, trade wealth, and social prestige as proof of their legitimacy. The surah's response to that moment is striking: rather than dismantling their claims to power, it builds a portrait of power so much greater, so much more sophisticated, so much more aligned with reality, that Qurayshi prestige shrinks by comparison without ever being named.
Walking Through the Surah
The Quran as Light, Musa at the Fire (Ayahs 1–14)
The surah opens with two of the disconnected letters — Ṭā Sīn — and immediately declares that these are the ayahs of the Quran, a Book that makes things clear, guidance and good news for those who establish prayer and give zakah and are certain of the next life (1–3). Six ayahs of introduction, and the surah has already drawn its essential line: the Quran is for people who act on certainty. Those who do not believe in the akhirah find their deeds made attractive to them — they wander, and theirs is the worst punishment (4–5).
Then Musa appears, and the transition is immediate: "And you are surely receiving the Quran from One who is Wise, All-Knowing" (6) — and the very next word is idh, "when," plunging us into narrative. Musa sees a fire and tells his family he will bring them a brand or find guidance there (7). When he arrives, a voice calls out: he is in the sacred valley, and the one speaking is Allah, Lord of all worlds (8). He is told to throw his staff, and when it moves like a snake, he turns to flee. "O Musa, do not fear — the messengers do not fear in My presence" (10). His hand emerges white and radiant — one of nine signs for Pharaoh's people (12). And when those signs arrive, Pharaoh's people call them obvious sorcery — siḥr mubīn — even though they recognize the truth inwardly, out of injustice and arrogance (13–14).
The Musa passage here is remarkably compressed — fourteen ayahs for a story that takes hundreds of ayahs elsewhere in the Quran. The surah is not interested in Musa's biography. It is interested in the pattern: a prophet encounters a sign, the sign is undeniable, and the audience rejects it anyway out of arrogance. That pattern is the engine that drives everything that follows.
The Kingdom of Knowledge: Dawud and Sulayman (Ayahs 15–19)
The transition is seamless. From Musa receiving signs, the surah moves to Dawud and Sulayman receiving knowledge: "And We certainly gave Dawud and Sulayman knowledge, and they said, 'Praise be to Allah, who has favored us over many of His believing servants'" (15). The first thing they do with knowledge is express gratitude. The first word of Sulayman's kingdom is alḥamdulillāh.
Sulayman inherits Dawud (16) — and immediately the surah begins cataloguing the astonishing scope of his dominion. He has been taught the language of birds (manṭiq al-ṭayr). He has been given from everything. His armies of jinn, humans, and birds are marshalled before him in ordered ranks (17).
And then, in a single ayah, the smallest voice in the surah speaks the line that names the entire thing:
Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said, "O ants, enter your dwellings so that Sulayman and his armies do not crush you while they do not perceive." (18)
An army vast enough to include three species — jinn, humans, birds — marching in formation, and one ant stops them. She addresses her community by name, identifies the approaching king by name, gives a clear tactical instruction, and offers an excuse for the army's potential harm: they would do it unknowingly. In a single ayah, this ant demonstrates awareness, leadership, compassion, and a generosity of spirit that assumes the best of the approaching power. Sulayman smiles, amused, and asks Allah to help him be grateful for what he has been given and to do righteous deeds that will please Him (19). The greatest king on earth pauses his march to make du'a — prompted by an ant.
The word that anchors this moment is yashʿurūn — "they do not perceive." The ant assumes the army would harm them only by accident, only through a failure of perception. Perception — shuʿūr — becomes one of the surah's quiet preoccupations. Who perceives, and who fails to? The ant perceives. The hoopoe perceives. The Queen of Sheba will learn to perceive. Pharaoh's people refused to. The Quraysh cannot.
The Hoopoe's Report and the Letter (Ayahs 20–31)
Sulayman inspects the birds and finds the hoopoe missing (20). His response is regal and measured — he threatens punishment unless the hoopoe brings a clear excuse (21). The hoopoe returns with information Sulayman did not have: "I have encompassed what you have not encompassed, and I have come to you from Sheba with certain news" (22).
What follows is a bird delivering a theological analysis. The hoopoe reports that he found a woman ruling over the people of Sheba, given a magnificent throne, and that her people prostrate to the sun instead of Allah (24). He names Shaytan as the one who has made their deeds attractive to them — using language that echoes ayah 4, where the same was said of those who do not believe in the akhirah. The hoopoe sees the connection the surah wants us to see: the same spiritual disease appears in different kingdoms across different centuries.
Sulayman's response is careful: "We will see whether you are truthful or a liar" (27). He writes a letter, and this is where the interior basmala appears: "Indeed, it is from Sulayman, and indeed it reads: In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Especially Merciful. Do not be arrogant toward me, and come to me in submission" (30–31). A human king's letter opens with the same formula that opens divine revelation. The surah places human authority and divine authority in the same frame — and the resonance between them is the argument.
The Queen's Deliberation and the Throne (Ayahs 32–40)
The Queen of Sheba is one of the most fully realized characters in the Quran. She consults her court, and their response is blunt: "We are people of strength and military might, but the decision is yours" (33). They offer her war. She chooses diplomacy, sending a gift to test Sulayman's character (35).
Sulayman refuses the gift — "What Allah has given me is better than what He has given you" (36) — and sends the envoys back with a warning. Then, in his own court, he asks who can bring him her throne before she arrives (38). A powerful jinn (ʿifrīt) offers to bring it before Sulayman stands from his seat (39). But the one who has knowledge of the Book — a figure whose identity has been discussed by commentators for centuries — says: "I will bring it to you before your glance returns to you" (40). And the throne appears, already present.
Sulayman's response, again, is gratitude: "This is from the favor of my Lord, to test me — whether I will be grateful or ungrateful" (40). Every display of extraordinary power in this surah loops back to the same place: shukr, gratitude, the recognition that power is borrowed.
The Palace of Glass and the Queen's Submission (Ayahs 41–44)
Sulayman has the throne altered to see whether the Queen will recognize it (41). When she arrives and is asked, her answer is magnificent in its precision: "It is as if it were the very one" — ka'annahū huwa (42). She will not commit fully to what she cannot verify, but she will not deny what her eyes tell her. She is someone who reads evidence carefully.
Then the surah's most visually stunning scene. She is told to enter the palace, and when she sees its floor — made of smooth glass — she assumes it is deep water and lifts her garments to wade through it (44). Sulayman tells her it is a palace paved with glass. And in that moment, standing in a palace that made her mistake glass for an ocean, she says:
"My Lord, indeed I have wronged myself, and I submit with Sulayman to Allah, Lord of all worlds." (44)
This is the surah's emotional and argumentative peak. A queen who ruled a magnificent kingdom, who worshipped the sun, who navigated Sulayman's tests with intelligence and grace, arrives at faith through an experience of perception corrected. She thought the floor was water. It was glass. She thought her kingdom was sovereign. It was a subset of a larger sovereignty. She thought the sun was worthy of worship. The Lord of all worlds is. Every layer of illusion peels away in a single scene, and what remains is submission — islām — spoken freely, without coercion, by a woman who came to it through her own intelligence encountering something greater than itself.
Two Rejections: Salih and Lut (Ayahs 45–58)
The surah shifts register sharply. After the long, luminous drama of Sulayman's court, it compresses two prophetic stories into tight scenes of refusal.
Salih is sent to Thamud, who split into two factions (45). Nine individuals in the city spread corruption and plot to kill Salih and his family by night, then deny any involvement (48–49). Their plan fails. Allah destroys them, and their houses stand empty — "a sign for people who know" (52).
Lut confronts his people's desire directly: "Do you approach men with desire instead of women? You are a people who are ignorant" (55). Their only response is to try to expel Lut's family from the city for being "people who keep themselves pure" (56). Allah rains upon them, and the surah asks: "How evil was the rain of those who had been warned?" (58).
These two accounts function as the negative image of the Sheba story. The Queen saw signs and submitted. Thamud and the people of Lut saw signs and refused. The surah has now shown both outcomes: what power and perception look like when they lead to faith, and what they look like when they lead to arrogance. The contrast needs no editorial comment. The stories do the work.
The Creation Interrogation (Ayahs 59–75)
The surah opens into its widest frame. A cascade of questions pours through — each one pointing to a dimension of creation that should, if the listener is honest, produce the same recognition the Queen of Sheba arrived at in the palace of glass:
"Is He [not better] who created the heavens and the earth and sent down rain from the sky, by which We cause gardens of delight to grow? You could not cause their trees to grow" (60). "Is He not better who made the earth a stable ground, placed rivers within it, placed mountains, and placed a barrier between two seas?" (61). "Is He not better who answers the desperate when they call upon Him and removes the hardship?" (62).
The repeated structure — amman ("is He not better who...") — builds a cumulative weight that mirrors the surah's earlier strategy in the Sulayman narrative. There, the argument was made through spectacle. Here, it is made through question after question, each one pointing to a reality the listener already lives inside but has not yet seen. The darkness of land and sea, the winds that carry good news before the rain, the origin of creation, the one who brings it back — these are ayahs of creation (āyāt kawniyyah) deployed as cross-examination.
Woven into these questions is the surah's recurring term: ilāh maʿa Allāh — "a god with Allah?" (60, 61, 62, 63, 64). Five times in six ayahs, the same phrase lands like a refrain. The surah is not asking whether other gods exist in theory. It is asking: given everything you just saw — given the ant, the hoopoe, the Queen, the throne, the palace, the rain, the mountains, the seas — given all of that, can you seriously propose that anything shares this sovereignty?
The Gathering and the Final Command (Ayahs 76–93)
The surah moves toward its close by turning to what the disbelievers dispute most: the resurrection. "This Quran relates to the Children of Israel most of what they differ over" (76). It is guidance and mercy for the believers (77). Allah will judge between them by His judgment, and He is the Mighty, the Knowing (78).
The Prophet ﷺ is told to place his trust in Allah, because those who are dead cannot hear, and those who turn away will not be guided beyond what Allah wills (80–81). Then a scene from the end of time: when the Word falls upon them, a creature (dābbah) will emerge from the earth and speak to them, saying that people were not certain of Allah's signs (82). On that Day, a group from every nation will be gathered — those who denied Allah's signs — and they will be asked: "Did you deny My signs without encompassing them in knowledge, or what were you doing?" (84). The Word will fall upon them for their wrongdoing, and they will not speak (85).
The surah's final passage returns to the signs in creation one more time — the alternation of night and day, the mountains that appear still but move like clouds (88) — and then delivers its closing commands. Whoever brings a good deed will have better than it. Whoever brings an evil deed will be cast into the Fire (89–90). The Prophet ﷺ is commanded: "I have been commanded to worship the Lord of this city" — Makkah — "and to recite the Quran. Whoever is guided is guided for their own benefit, and whoever goes astray — say: I am only among the warners" (91–92).
The final ayah: "And say: praise be to Allah. He will show you His signs and you will recognize them. And your Lord is not unaware of what you do" (93).
What the Structure Is Doing
The surah opens with the Quran declared as guidance (ayah 1) and closes with the command to recite it (ayah 92). Between those two points, the entire surah has been a demonstration of why — what the Quran contains, what it reveals about the world, what it makes visible that was invisible before. The opening says: this Book makes things clear. The closing says: recite it, and Allah will show you His signs. The distance between them is the evidence.
The structural center of An-Naml is the Queen of Sheba's submission in ayah 44. Everything before it builds toward that moment — the ant's perception, the hoopoe's theological clarity, Sulayman's gratitude, the transported throne, the altered recognition test. Everything after it measures other responses against it — Thamud's refusal, the people of Lut's expulsion of the righteous, the Quraysh's inability to answer the creation questions. The Queen stands at the pivot because her story contains both the problem and the solution: she began in error (sun-worship) and arrived at truth (submission to the Lord of all worlds) through an encounter with power greater than her own. She is the surah's thesis made human.
A ring structure emerges across the whole. The Quran's guidance at the opening (1–6) corresponds to the Quran's recitation at the close (91–93). Musa's encounter with divine signs that Pharaoh's people rejected (7–14) corresponds to the gathering of those who denied Allah's signs (83–86). The creation questions in the second half (59–75) echo the kingdom of knowledge given to Dawud and Sulayman (15–19) — both are catalogues of divine power made visible. And at the center: the Queen, the glass palace, and a woman whose perception was corrected in an instant.
The keyword ʿilm (knowledge) threads through the surah quietly but persistently. Dawud and Sulayman are given knowledge (15). The one who brings the throne has "knowledge of the Book" (40). The destroyed houses of Thamud are "a sign for people who know" (52). The disbelievers are asked whether they denied Allah's signs "without encompassing them in knowledge" (84). The surah's argument about power is simultaneously an argument about knowledge: true power is the capacity to perceive what is real, and true failure is the refusal to know what is already evident.
And here is something worth sitting with. The surah's three non-human speakers — the ant (18), the hoopoe (22–26), and the creature that will emerge from the earth at the end of time (82) — form a quiet arc of their own. The ant speaks to protect her community from an approaching power. The hoopoe speaks to report a community that has lost its way. The creature will speak to indict a humanity that refused to believe. Three voices from outside the human world, each one addressing a failure of human perception, each one escalating in scope: a valley, a kingdom, all of creation. The surah named after the first of these voices is building a case that the natural world sees what humans refuse to see — and that one day, the earth itself will testify.
The connection between An-Naml and its twin, Ash-Shu'ara (26), illuminates both. Ash-Shu'ara ends with a long passage about the Quran's revelation and the poets who say what they do not do (26:224). An-Naml opens with the Quran as guidance and immediately enters the most elaborate narrative in the cluster — as if to say: you have seen what the Quran is not (the wandering of poets); now see what it is (a Book that contains the story of an ant who stopped an army, a bird who understood theology, and a queen who found God in a glass floor). The transition from one surah to the next is itself an argument about what revelation accomplishes that poetry cannot.
Why It Still Speaks
The early Muslims hearing this surah in Makkah were a small, persecuted community watching the Quraysh wield power, wealth, and social prestige as if these things were evidence of truth. The surah's response was to build a kingdom so much more magnificent than anything the Quraysh could imagine — a kingdom where birds report on foreign theology and ants give speeches and thrones cross continents — and then to show that this kingdom's greatest king paused his march to make du'a, refused a diplomatic gift because divine favor was better, and praised Allah every time something extraordinary happened. The message to the early community was: the power you see around you is nothing. Real power looks like this. And real power submits.
That argument has not aged. Every generation lives inside some version of the Quraysh's claim — that visible power, material success, and social prestige are self-validating, that they need no reference to anything beyond themselves. The surah builds its counter-argument through narrative rather than polemic: it does not tell you that worldly power is hollow. It shows you what power looks like when it is full — full of knowledge, full of gratitude, full of creatures who perceive what humans overlook — and lets the comparison do its work.
For anyone reading this surah today, the Queen of Sheba's arc may be its most intimate gift. She is not foolish. She is not weak. She is a sovereign who rules well, deliberates carefully, and resists being bullied. And she arrives at faith anyway — through an experience that corrected her perception so gently, so beautifully, that she submitted without losing any of her dignity. The glass floor did not humiliate her. It showed her something she had not yet seen. The surah suggests that this is how genuine faith often arrives: not through defeat, but through an encounter with something so real that the old framework quietly becomes insufficient, and you find yourself saying, like her, I have wronged myself, and I submit.
And there is the ant. Tiny, unnamed, speaking once and never again — but speaking with such clarity and such care that the entire surah bears her name. In a world that measures worth by visibility and volume, An-Naml proposes that the most important voice in the room may be the smallest one, the one that sees the danger no one else sees, the one that speaks to protect others, the one whose single sentence stops an army. The surah does not allegorize this. It simply tells you it happened, and lets you sit with what it means about who gets heard and who gets overlooked and what God thinks about the difference.
To Carry With You
Three questions from the surah:
The ant assumed Sulayman's army would harm her community without perceiving it — the harm would come from carelessness, not cruelty. Where in your life does your power, however small, cause harm you have not yet perceived?
The Queen of Sheba arrived at faith through a correction of perception — the glass floor revealed that what she saw was not what was real. What are you looking at right now that might not be what you think it is?
Sulayman's response to every extraordinary gift was shukr — gratitude, spoken aloud, directed to Allah. When was the last time something remarkable happened to you, and your first instinct was to thank the One who gave it?
One-sentence portrait: An-Naml is a surah that builds the most magnificent kingdom in human history and then names itself after an ant — because the ant could see what the kingdom was for.
Du'a from the surah's own words:
Rabbi awziʿnī an ashkura niʿmataka allatī anʿamta ʿalayya wa ʿalā wālidayya wa an aʿmala ṣāliḥan tarḍāhu wa adkhilnī bi-raḥmatika fī ʿibādika al-ṣāliḥīn.
My Lord, inspire me to be grateful for the blessings You have given me and my parents, and to do righteous work that pleases You, and admit me by Your mercy among Your righteous servants. (From ayah 19 — Sulayman's own du'a, prompted by the ant.)
Ayahs for deeper work (quranic-tadabbur):
Ayah 18 — the ant's single speech. The grammar of her address, the word yashʿurūn, and the extraordinary compression of an entire community's salvation into one sentence make this one of the most linguistically dense ayahs in the Quran.
Ayah 40 — "I will bring it to you before your glance returns to you." The identity of the speaker, the nature of the "knowledge of the Book," and what the instantaneous transport of the throne argues about the relationship between knowledge and power.
Ayah 44 — the Queen's submission. The glass floor, the moment of misperception, the theological leap from corrected perception to islām, and the phrase aslamtu maʿa Sulaymān — she submits with Sulayman, not to him. The grammar carries the theology.
Going deeper into this surah calls especially for Quranic Narratives, Structural Coherence, and Inter-surah Connections. Explore these and other Quranic sciences on our Sciences of the Quran page.
Virtues & Recitation
There are no well-authenticated hadith specifically about the virtues of reciting Surah An-Naml as a whole. Narrations that circulate attributing specific rewards to its recitation — such as the hadith claiming that the reader will receive ten good deeds for every person who believed or disbelieved in the prophets mentioned — appear in collections of fabricated narrations and are graded mawdu' (fabricated) by hadith scholars including Ibn al-Jawzi in al-Mawdu'at and al-Suyuti.
Within the surah itself, ayah 30 contains the only basmala that appears inside the body of a Quranic text, and this has generated significant discussion in the classical tradition. Some scholars of Quranic recitation have noted that this interior basmala means the surah contains 14 instances of the divine name Allah within its ayahs plus one basmala — making it one of the surahs where the divine name is woven into a diplomatic and narrative context rather than a legislative one.
The surah is part of the Ṭā Sīn / Ṭā Sīn Mīm cluster (Surahs 26–28), and classical scholars including al-Biqa'i in Naẓm al-Durar treated these three surahs as a unified sequence best studied together. There is no specific traditional practice of reciting An-Naml at a particular time or occasion, though its Sulayman narrative makes it a natural companion to Surah Sad (38) and Surah Al-Anbiya (21), where Sulayman's story also appears.
Sulayman's du'a in ayah 19 — Rabbi awziʿnī an ashkura niʿmataka... — is one of the most widely recited supplications in Muslim devotional life, appearing in du'a collections and recommended after moments of blessing. The same du'a appears in Surah Al-Ahqaf (46:15), where it is placed in the mouth of a person who has reached forty years of age and reflects on what they owe their parents and their Lord.
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