THERE IS little doubt that this surah belongs to the middle group of Meccan revelations, and is almost contemporaneous with Maryam (which can be placed chronologically in the fifth or the beginning of the sixth year of the Prophet's mission). The title by which it has always been known - Al-Furqan - pithily circumscribes the main theme of this surah: namely, the statement that it is the innermost purport of every divine revelation to provide man with a stable criterion of true and false or right and wrong and, thus, with a standard of moral valuation binding on the individual and on the society. Consequent upon this proposition is the stress on the humanness of every apostle sent by God to man (verse 20), in rebuttal of the false argument that the Qur'an could not have been God-inspired inasmuch as Muhammad was but a mortal human being who shared the physical needs of all other mortals and took part in all normal human activities (verses 7-8). By implication, the revelation of the divine writ is shown as belonging to the same majestic order of God's creative activity as all the visible phenomena of nature (see, e.g., verses 2, 45-54, 61-62, etc.). But men do not easily submit to this divine guidance; hence, on the Day of Judgment the Prophet himself will point out that many of his own followers had "come to regard this Qur'an as something [that ought to be] discarded" (verse 30): a statement of particular significance for our time.