The Many Faces of Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ

Although Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ (Q 112) is one of the shortest sūrah s of the Qurʾān, it has led to an extensive commentary on its structure and content in Muslim exegetical literature and in Western scholarship. This article takes the recent attempt to contextualize the sūrah in Western scholarship as a starting point and proposes new evidence for the nature of the religious milieu that shaped its form and content. It posits several “intertexts” of creedal expressions, which shed light on the discursive nature of the sūrah .