Nouman Ali Khan – Ahruf, Qiraat, Quranic Grammar #8 The Quran Library
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This is pretty amazing, though. It's exhaustive. It's really
exhaustive. Like, this is like, Quran, Arabic language students,
Jannah, Jannah, honestly, yeah, I sometimes think, like, you know, I
could form a course, like a whole university course, just, just on,
just on this book. Yeah, honestly, I'm not even joking,
but any course that is going to teach Quranic language has to take
account of this book. So speak of Harold. From ayani, now it is time
to bring the monster, the big boss,
the final boss. That is a that is a goal in life. Yeah. From that
sounds amazing. Yeah, this is amazing, so you can see it again,
robbed
him. I think what I wanted to follow up on something that you
asked about last time,
at the beginning of Surat Al Rahman, is there a difference of
opinion about whether a Rahman, by itself, is an ayah, and in terms
of Yes, it is so in the kufen and
Shami Levantine must have there are 78 ayahs in Suratul Rahman,
and one of the reasons of that is that they stop here as the end of
an ayah, but various others considered AR Rahman or Alam Al
Quran as one ayah together. So these are the kind of things that
that do exist. And so this is one book that talks about that. It's a
classical book, but
has been recently published in this form, not an English title,
but I didn't see any English inside.
No, it's just, just, just, so you know what it is in English. And
you, oh, wow, yeah, yeah. And then nothing. Oh, okay, gonna be like
that, yeah? Actually, there's probably, like a little bit of,
yeah, like a page in the end this, like just a summary of what the
book is about. Okay, this is about starting and stopping,
so, or the number of ayahs, any sort of, yeah.
So that brings us on to talk about masahif, and then we could talk
about, and these are potentially huge sahif copies of the Quran and
Quran variant readings. Yeah, yeah. Make some space here to look
at a couple of beauties that I've got here. These are about masahiv
as well.
This is something I picked up in Qatar from the Museum of Islamic
art in Doha. It
just gives you a nice sort of that's actually the extra thing, I
think so these, it gives you a nice
sample of different script styles through the ages, the way that
they're written, some of the way that they're ornamented and
beautified, and how Ayas are divided. You know, with what kind
of markers, different script styles, beautiful. So, you know,
it's just, you know, it's incredibly delightful
to see manuscripts in person, or even, you know, you can find
digitized versions of these things now are much easier to find with
advent of modern technologies and even social media. Telegram is a
big one for for distributing manuscripts of all sorts of books,
including our script. Look at that.
Yeah. So these, these are probably all displayed in the in the museum
that, oh, this is the famous blue Quran. This is called
very, very
spectacular kind of
script in it. But these are different artistic styles. But
also, what's interesting about masahif and their history is, you
know, the specifics of how they're written, especially the very early
ones, has a lot to tell us about the preservation of the Quran
as we know the Sahaba wrote down
for themselves, or some of them, you know, officially and formally
for the Prophet saw them. And when they did that, there's some
difference of opinion about, you know, were they following
instructions from the Prophet saw them about exactly how to spell
certain words or not? As you know, I think the stronger scholarship
was inside of not that is to say they were following conventions.
And those were not necessarily stable, like even between America
and Britain, we have different spelling of words like color,
which we spell, C, o, l, o, u, r, and you spell incorrectly. So
these are things which their community. You spell you? You,
yeah, spelling correctly, yeah, okay, sure, who spelled it first?
So these are things where, who uses them better?
Yeah, who divides a nation based on them? Well again,
well us as well, unfortunately. So, um.
Yeah, you know, these, these writing conventions. It's, you
know, this is a beautiful book by Professor Muhammad
must in him, who's the author of that book that we talked about the
history of the Quranic text, yeah. And just before he passed away, he
managed to complete and publish this work in which
17, or, I think it seems to be 18.
Copies are compared and lined up of sort lisra, so that you can see
the main point you're supposed to get from this is look at the
remarkable consistency over time, but also how this from the most
ancient to Yes, yeah, from that sounds amazing. Yeah, this is
amazing. So you can see it getting robbed tonight. Every every word
you know, there is consistency, but also a development in how the
script is manifested. So he did this for the whole of suratle.
This is amazing.
And of course, you know, there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of
studies of early Messiah now it's becoming a point of interest where
you know that things are more available to look at. We can
actually look at them directly, or we can look at the scans of them.
In the past, there were some scholars who specialized in
documenting the differences between the masahi, because, as we
know, after that first stage of collection,
there was some processes of standardization, especially at the
hands of the third Khalifa Uthman, or the lahon Hu that he led the
process of gathering everyone upon an agreed script, and then copies
were only to be made from those ones, and all others were to be
burned, right, which people get freaked out about. But of course,
that's how we we treat masahik that have become worn out or not
to be used anymore. They are burned. It's more respectful than
you know what, throwing it in the rubbish or something. So that was
in order to say, look, this limits how the Quran is written, and also
limits how the Quran is to be recited, although within the
script, as you can see, you know, without this lacking dots, it's
lacking vowels. There are some earlier masaha that do have dots,
and those dots are sometimes distinguishing letters, or the
dots are used for vowels.
But you know, as we tend to see in the earliest masahiv, it's mostly
undotted,
so that allowed for some variation and some diversity in the reading
traditions that would emerge according to what people received,
according to what people transmitted, of the recitation of
the Quran.
So once that happens, then you've got these masahi, which in
different regions, because Uthman sent to four regions, or possibly
more, according to some reports, and each area like a sham, that is
to say what is now Syria and the surrounding countries.
And, you know, in Mecca and Medina and what's called Bahrain,
although I don't think this refers to the modern country Bahrain, but
this, these areas received masahiv, and then the people there
would recite, according to the must have. So in case there were
some ways of recitation that had been allowed before,
or things that had later been abrogated and replaced by the
final revision of the Quran that the Prophet saw them recited to
Jibril in the last year of his life. Then, you know, some of
these things may still have been circulating. And then everyone was
told, this is the must have that represents the final status of the
Quran. Everyone follows this within that there is some
variations allowed in the pronunciation of certain words.
This is becomes the Quran, right, right? But variation in terms of
the word order, well, that's not going to happen. Variations in
terms of okay. There was a phrase here that some people were
reciting No, that won't be allowed because we have agreed upon this
must have so these books like like Kitab al masahiv of Ibn Abi Dawood
and Kitab al mukhne of Abu Ahmad Dani, again, Spanish scholarship
here,
these documented the specific differences between the masahaf.
So they would go and see the masahiv in different places, and
they would write about what they saw, what they observed. And so
these are important early witnesses, which then, you know,
you get later scholars who are studying the masahiv based on now
uncovering things that had been lost for some time, or digitizing
and sharing them amongst the wider public right. And they're finding
more and more that these scholars who document they actually did a
really meticulous job, and they did a splendid job of actually
capturing what was going on with these.
This masahi, and that's, you know, that should give us a source of
pride. It should give us, you know, pride in our tradition, and,
yeah, an appreciation of their incredible work and confidence in
that tradition as well. Because sometimes people think, okay,
these people were just making all up. But the more that you see that
it's it's actually reflecting closely the realities on the
ground, then you realize that, well, we have a robust tradition,
a robust tradition. Yeah, that's that's a good word for it.
So then also, you know, uncovering and studying these masahav more in
detail can lead to conclusions like this is a recent book by one
of the leading scholars in this field, Ghana, muqadul, Hamid
an Iraqi scholar, and his book talks about ulumal Quran. I had
this Roman Quran shelf and Abu for this purpose, Bain al masa diri
when masahiv. So our books of ulum Al Quran are telling us some
things about the masahib, and it's telling us certain things about
the Quran in general, when we study this masahaf, to what extent
do we find that there is correspondence between the theory,
as has been documented, and the reality that's being studied?
So I haven't read through this book yet to
study it, but, you know, I think that, as a scholar, he would, and
anyone should be open to saying, you know, yes, looking at the data
might invite us to revise some specifics of things that we said,
like one of the most important things, and I don't know exactly
how he talks about it. Here is, it's very commonly said early
mosaic were undaunted and unveiled full stop. We take that for
granted, like, what this looks like. Yeah, but more and more,
we're finding that there are actually a number of first century
and early masahiv that were dotted to some extent, and they had
multicolored dots even to indicate different things and different
readings sometimes, then dotting maybe fell out of favor, then it
came back. But the point is, it existed
maybe earlier than people tend to, tend to, that's amazing.
So I mean, this links, of course, to the subject of of the karath
and harufa sabaha. It's a huge topic. We can't go into all of it,
but it is important to to know that these subjects are very, you
know, extensively discussed in our classical literature, yeah, and
then there's plenty of modern literature as well. It's
one of the Fascinations of the Western academics, right, yes, but
it's, it's also something which, maybe especially now, has started
to cause some, you know, ripples of controversy or confusion
amongst Muslim audiences, and partly because
they maybe haven't connected with literature or they haven't also
been acquainted with the early works, whether it's to do with
quraad themselves, or is to do with tafsir, because The tafsir
tradition itself engages thoroughly with Quran does? Yeah,
you would look at tafsir Tabari, for example, and he himself is
discussing
read like this. Someone read like that, and then he might just tell
you, and this one,
you know, this is why, and that's why, or this is the meaning that
follows from this. Reading that same from nobody was having a
faith crisis over it. No, is the incredible thing, even to the
extent that sometimes he would say about a certain reading, and I
don't like this reading. This is not very good. It's not very
fluent in Arabic. He would say that about some readings. And of
course, that might include readings that
you know fell out of favor anyway, but there are some of them that
remained in favor and became part of what we later know to be the
seven karat, because atabbari comes before the sevenization of
the seven. So Ibn Mujahid, the author of Kitab, is Sabah. You
know, he's the one who's who's created this formal process
whereby seven karat came to be known as the ones that you know,
are to be given more attention, and therefore form what we call
the canonical readings later on, Ibn Al Jazeera. This is, I've got,
you know, very
shabby edition, as we say in Egypt, not the same as shabby Shah
is means like, you know, for the for the common people like me,
whereas you get, obviously, very fancy editions as well,
this comes in three volumes like that. So in his work several
centuries later, he then has said, well, in addition to the seven,
there's another three that are deserving of being counted as
canonical readings. So it became the 10 Karat. And in all of that,
what they're doing is saying, these are ways of reading that
have been long established, respected, because the readers who
became famous for these readings, like Imam nafer, like Imam Asim,
like Imam Ibn haya or Abu Amr ibn kafir in Mecca.
Or,
you know, as we said, some of them, Nafa is in Medina,
so different regions, so Medina, Kufa, Mecca and also Hasham. There
were readers in these regions who were the top of their field in
transmitting the Quran. They were top of the field in grammar as
well. And this is actually important, because it means that
when they were reciting, they were very aware and skilled in
producing the best audio from what they received and what they
recited.
So it's no coincidence actually that
several of the canonical readers are also like the founders,
grammarians and linguists grammatical schools, right? Yeah.
So they were engaging in a kind of study of those karat and they were
selecting and they were advancing the best readings. So those things
became like the standardized readings. So we have seven Quran
expanded to 10 Karat. And all of that comes, of course, from
something which is called Al ahrava Sabah, right? I've got
quite a few books about ah I just picked one out to show you.
Mahan al ahrava Sabah. It is an issue and that has been discussed
at length throughout our history, and there remains quite
considerable question marks over what exactly is meant by these
seven letters or seven modes. What we do know from various a hadith
that you know are widespread and well known, is that the Prophet
SAW Salam explained that
Jibreel al Islam has given recited to him the Quran upon seven
letters, therefore is Allah has revealed it as such. Allah has
revealed it with these seven ways.
That's not the same as the seven Karat. That much we should make
clear, it's not the seven karat is the seven arruf, that much we
could say is not the case. Okay? But then precisely, what is it?
Was it like seven different ways of reading, something like seven
dialects. That's one point of view another point of view says the
seven actually refers to ways in which one reading can differ from
another you know, such as something plural or singular
you know, or being recited with this way or that way. These come
as seven ways of differing. That's actually a popular view amongst a
lot of the scholars, including Ibn jazidi himself and numerous modern
scholars as well. The point is, there's no way of fully settling
that. It remains a little bit of a question mark. How authentic is
this narration? Very authentic. Is that why it was like, that wasn't
even the issue. The issue was, how do we interpret it? Yes. And the
question, I guess, which, you know, it's not impossible to
answer, but I'm just saying where points of view can differ is,
what's the relationship between the afro Sabah and then what
became the Quran? Forget the number seven, Quran, yeah, yeah.
Because that's just, you know, Ibn Mujahid, that's his heart and his
wisdom to focus on seven, right, and later on 10. And maybe he
would, you know, some say he could have been influenced by the fact
that there was seven, ah to two, seven could be right. And some
people said you shouldn't have done that. You've confused
everyone. You made seven on top of seven, and then everyone will
think, ah for the Quran. Why have you done this? So then Ibn jazari
said, Okay, we'll just make a 10, and it doesn't matter. So Kara,
it's not the same as a Harv, that much we can say. But the variation
that is represented by the ahrof then turns into the variation
which is represented by the karat, that much I think is easy enough
to to explain.
So karahat, I'll move to the shelves over here. As I said to
you,
we have got,
in the early times, certain ways of studying the Quran that were
more, let's say, grammar based and linguistic based. This is an
important thing you just said, yeah,
you and I want to dig into this a little bit. So the earliest
commentaries on the Quran that we find in our history that are
published
are linguistic.
So,
okay, we can, we can combine that question with the next shelf here,
I've got no surf, right? So this
is an encyclopedia of commentaries of the Quran, right? So if we take
Suratul Baqarah, this is a recent compilation. It is extracted from
things like Imam as sutis Durham and Thor matur
a what they've done here, this, this is
produced in Saudi Arabia. What they've done is, under every ayah,
or every little section of an ayah, they'll count, you know, the
narrations that have come from, sometimes from the Prophet
sawsalam. So here there's nothing from the.
So the first one is mentioned is Ibn Abbas, struggling
to read this upside down.
So we could see here,
under this part, there's a sub Ibn azul narration, tasir ayah,
something from Ibn Abbas, and then something from the next
generation. That's why it's a different color, Abu la Aliyah,
and then Qatar rabir.
So sometimes you would see, okay, this is starting from the taba
inside Ibn Jubair.
Sometimes you got things from the Sahaba Ibn Abbas, again, ibn Umar,
and then the tabain al hasal Basri. So this, these narrations
were circulating,
right? So it wasn't necessarily
just in book form, but they were narrations that they're hadiths
that are being transmitted. So for sure, we can, in a certain way,
say that is the earliest thing, right, not people sitting and
doing grammatical analysis. But then when it comes to the
compilations and writing, some of them were Hadith based like this,
and others were studying the Quran from a linguistic perspective. So
here is manil Quran of Al Farah.
You can see that he's a century and a half after Hijra.
And this is around, you know, this is slightly after the time when
you've got tafsir of makatil, because tafsir mukhatil makatl
died in 150 of the Hijra. So it's around that same time, but
certainly before a Tabari.
So in Maan and Quran of Al FARA, it is, in a way, looking at the
Quran from the perspective of a grammarian and explaining it in
terms of its language and its grammar in, you know, in
tremendous depth, including the issues of the Quran, because the
Quran were intimately connected with the discussion of grammar,
right? Because they're saying, Okay, some people are reciting it
like this, well, grammatically that would be understood like
this, and the other ones are doing it like that. This develops into a
genre, which we call tau Ji hilkarat, sometimes called EHDI
jazul Karat. Sometimes it's called eilal karat, sometimes called
Mahan al karaat. But the term that I tend to use for the whole thing
is tau Ji Hi Karat. That is to say, every reading to explain its
basis, linguistic basis, tafsir basis, how does it fit with the
meaning?
But in these early books, you know, to a large extent, it's,
it's a very grammar based discussion, right? It's not about,
for example, what's the isnad of this reading? That's just not the
point that they are addressing.
Ibn mujahide is talking about, you know, who are the readers and how
did they read and transmit? But these ones are analyzing it that
can, I mean, a century and a half later, we're discussing the
grammar and the linguistic implications and what we can learn
from that in the meanings of the Quran. And it's interesting that,
you know, a lot of times, contemporary approaches to tafsir
assume that the most authentic tafsir is going to be at tafsir,
and that's the real the classical ulama, the earliest ulama. That's
all they did. And the linguistic approach is not an authentic
approach. It's not it doesn't have a basis in our history. It's a
later invention. It's a even a deviation from the correct
meanings, etc.
This is happening, and you simply can't do without the linguistic
approach. I mean, rather than thinking of it as something that
comes after, I see it as something comes before, not so that it's
independent, but the first thing you need to do is study the words
as words and the constructions as constructions, right? And then
once you've seen the possibilities within that, you can see okay,
narrations and explanations and received interpretations. How do
they affect these possibilities? Do they rule some of those
possibilities out? Right? Because, just because somebody said, Oh,
this means that it doesn't mean they're telling you. It means only
that they can mean it by way of example. The first thing is to
understand the general sense, right? Then the narrations are
compared with that, and they inform and you know, like, you
know, have Taqwa of Allah. What does that mean? You know, like,
pray, pray, yeah, just you fast. The fear of Taqwa of Allah is
prayer and fast? No, there's a you're telling someone, hey, you
know you
here's a good way to start off, pray and fast. So I gotta do
nothing else. I have my pork sandwich the other day because
Taqwa is there prayer and fast, yeah, according to the tafsir,
there's no such Yeah, I just made that up.
Yeah, yeah, sandwich. So yeah, there's obviously, why do we
talking about this? Then if you can find a narration where
something's been defined by specific terminology, and then you
say, Well, this is what the the wording means. Uh.
Then, one, it's Allah's word and we're caging it. Two, even the
people that were saying it aren't necessarily saying this is all it
can mean. Yeah. And if you if you think like that, that's not
naturally how anybody thinks like you know, we talk to our kids and
they say, Hey, be good. What do you mean? Don't eat the cookies.
Okay, I'm gonna kick my brother then, because I'm already good,
because I'm not eating the cookies. So I'm gonna stick to
pencil in this electrical socket, and, you know, set the microwave,
put my socks in the microwave, and, you know, sounds like you've
got experience. I've, uh, yeah, destructive tendencies, but no
point. But I still good because I didn't eat the cookie. You didn't
eat the cookies. This is what I'm saying. But then you grew up and
you ate the cookies. Yeah,
cool, yeah, for sure, there's, there's subtlety in how the
mathsor
tafsir affects the meaning and how Sure. So the point is that you
have to, actually, you know, capture the sense of what the
language gives in order to know how to adjust that based on
narrations. So just briefly, I would say that there is a whole
genre of works like this. One is is by someone who's on the level
of the students of Ibn Mujahid. So this is a big three volume to
SABR. Okay, so here, you know, he's explaining, you know each
reading and variation, and you know the basis of it and the
linguistic basis of it, and even the meaning basis of it and the
tafsir basis. So it's very in depth
in order to understand
what these Kara ads are and how they exist together and they, and
this is important part. We're just very comfortable about this
multiplicity. They didn't try to eliminate it down to one correct
reading.
They didn't also exaggerate and say, you know, all seven readings
are, you know, in all senses, equally authoritative in all ways,
in all times. They had their preferences based on other
evidences. Sometimes in a particular way, they would say,
Okay, this, this reading is clearer, this reading is better
supported. And that became taboo later on, to have that kind of
approach, because, because you're settled, okay, yeah, yeah, things
settled onto these seven and then 10 karats to the extent that,
you know, it just wasn't normal anymore for people to critique any
reading or to prefer, even when reading, it was seen as a purely
transmission based thing, but at this phase, certainly it was
transmission based, but also the analysis and preference, yes. So
you know, as someone who reads the genre, so I don't panic as much as
some people do when they come across one quote here and there,
but these are some of the classical doji works in Kara.
Okay, I also have here some modern works of doji. You know, some of
them take a particular approach, like take, for example, this doji
al Balaji qurania.
So this is, this is pretty nice, but it's organized in order of
balada topics,
a full Mudra,
yeah,
and you've got also imahafi. Allah, Be a be mahaviva Dil din.
Allah, yeah. Allah, okay, okay, all right, yeah, yeah, yeah,
the Nullah actually.
Okay,
so here it would be a case of, like, what kind of balagi effect
is derived from this reading as other reading of the same ayah,
right?
And one of the while you're looking at that, one of the big
works in the field is more at I think it's like, is it 10 or 11?
Williams, it's 11, including the
index.
And this.
This supplants an earlier work which is called more Jamal
karahat,
which is also good, but this one is much more in detail. But what I
don't like about the introduction here is that nobody's ever done
this before. Yeah, they talk as if there was no work before the
gather all the Qur'an like this, whereas
there's literally one that's called mohajima karat, and it's
quite famous. And I used to have them both on my shelf next to each
other, but I packed one away for now,
so that this feels more valid when you read. No one's ever done it,
yeah. But
that other one had nice kind of tables, vertical tables, which is
quite cool. But this one, you know, just it's got far more
detail about each reading, the basis of the reading, who read it,
and which books of tafsir and books of karat that it can be
found in, very exhausting. So this is a fantastic resource.
So is something which I take an interest in, from also translation
perspective.
When I first signed up to do my PhD and I went to meet my
supervisor, who's professor.
Muhammad Abu Halim, the famous Quran translator. My proposal at
that time was to
was to talk about the impact of the 10 canonical readings on
translation of the Quran. Okay, very interesting, but
he did not really like the idea
for various reasons, but, you know, I decided to change just to
make things smoother. So I became tafsir of the Quran, through the
Quran is what I studied,
but I still kept my interest on this, and I've been working on it,
and now also working on translating the Quran.
And you know, any translation of the Quran should you know
thoroughly depend upon the works which were specialized in
discussing the difference in meanings between the
Quran like these and the classical Toji who works and the modern Toji
who works, right, right? All right. Let's also talk about Arab
my favorite. We talked about, sort of the development of, you know,
Mahan Al Quran and Arab Al Quran. And then, of course, there's later
on modern works.
We also have the one by Darwish. I have that back to be as well. This
is a modern scholar, Hamid Ali Taha dura,
which is a tafsir in Arab together. So Arab of the Quran is,
is a really,
you know, important field. I've got a few different looks that are
relevant to us, and
we're going to come to this one. I know you're, oh, yeah, that's the
one.
So it's a very important field, because knowing
you know the position of each word and letter in the sentence, you
know, has a huge effect of meaning.
And so this is quite a nice, you know, Elmo Arab Quran. This, you
know, the science of doing Arab of the Quran. And I have other books
which talk about, you know, the effect of different Arabs on on
meaning and on rulings and things like that.
And then you've got this very boss of a book, muguni lebih and Kutub
al ahrib. So the labeeb is supposed to be the smart person.
So this is the mogini of that smart person. If you're smart
enough to read this book and study it, understand it, then he won't
need the books of Arab. He won't need
all these many volumes, because, at the end of the day, these
volumes, they do also capture some of the different possibilities and
diversity. You know, one of the worst things to assume is that,
well, there's one thing called Arab Quran, right? And actually,
some people have got the idea, because they use the Quranic
Arabic corpus
online, and now they got Arab figured out and and
they think that, that, you know, there is one Arab of the Quran
that's completely untrue.
It's a matter, just like we talked about Waqf e nanti that, you know,
you can look at it, does this sentence and here start there,
that's related to Arab as well. That's right, it is the mubtada
and the khabar. Or this is mubtada and at fubayan, Dali Kal kitab.
Therefore, is it that is the book, or is it that book, for example,
right? Is it Badal, or is it habar? So, this would be, this
would be all, you know, aspects of Iraq. And this book,
it is an Arab of the entire Quran, or is it Ali, is the moving in
libib and Kutub al arib. So it's not a book of Iraq.
It talks about the rules, and, you know, a large part of it is
actually talking about the specific hurf and their different
usages, all of this stuff. I translated the gist of it, because
the gist of it is in Quran of a SUTI. Chapters 40 and 41 are taken
from this book. So I've translated that. It means that we translated
the gist of Bucha. So Charlotte, my translation of that will be
your mokni,
yeah, Uli Al Bab,
if you wanted to reconstruct his Arab. This is extracted from that
book, Arab, Quran, Karim, min, mokni labeeb. So they, so they
reconstructed, according to which is he actually gives the Arab of
and they put it in must have order.
But he doesn't do Arab of every ayah. You know, it's more about
it, but it's enough to get you a full view of his methodology. And
yeah, that will give you, like you want to see what his opinion was
on the Arab of the thing right there, yeah.
But it's it awesome. It's awesome. Yeah,
so rufil Mahony, yeah, so speak of haruf and miyani. Now it is time
to bring the monster, the big boss,
the final boss. That is a that is a goal in life.
In fact, I'm gonna.
Yeah, I'll bring this over as well, because there's a there's a
classical work, which I recently, you
know, there's this book channel, and apart from this, what we're
doing, there's this, I can't remember what it's called, but
there's a in Arabic. There's a channel where this man, I consider
him, a hype man for for Islamic library.
He basically, he talks about these different books, and he just is so
enthusiastic that, like, I watched this video about this, and I was,
like, immediately placed an order and bought it.
So this is by Al bakuli, and it's kind of a classical version of
what we're about to see in dilasatul Quran,
where somebody has kind of
gathered the different things that are going on in the Quranic
language and ordered it according to these thematic groups, and
they've given examples of it. This is amazing.
It deserves truly to be called Amazing.
Bad Maura, different Zealand, Admiral Jumel, bad Maja min had
filmma, Harakat Mahi Wale daastri.
So it's just gathering the different phenomena in Quranic
language, and giving you the examples and allowing you to study
it.
Wow.
So then in the 20th century, we've got this one, dirasad Quran,
yeah, yes, by Muhammad Abdul. This is amazing, and it comes in 11
volumes, and it comes in three parts. It consists of three parts,
I think
the ISM feral, and other, what part? Yeah, so
I'm in the other this, this volume is at the what I'm guessing,
because it's got either here,
yeah, so you could say that. And he mentions as well that he's
taken mugunnabi When, you know, he's expanded much more. I think
basically his approach was, he went through the whole Quran, and
under each ayah, you know, carefully documented what's
happening in this ayah, grammatically and who said what?
And their various opinions about, you know, this, Haru and so on. So
he first studied the Quran fully, like that. Bear in mind, this is
before the age of computers, right? So he's documented like
that. Then he reordered and rearranged it according to the
topics. So, so then it's the physical act of doing this mind
boggling. People didn't used to do things by halves, you know.
But this book is, is not as well known as it should be. And this
is, this is just,
I don't even know what to say.
It's, it's still quite difficult to navigate because it's in all
these volumes. But my hope is that, you know, in quran.com we
can do a service to the Ummah by taking this material and making it
searchable, making it,
you know, possible to study each letter and each Ayah according to
the information that's sitting here, because it cross references,
you know, yeah,
this is I forget, lost in this and just live inside this book.
So this is the second section, and it concerns a file, verbs,
basically.
So again, like he's going verb by verb,
yeah, I mean this he gives you. So again, these are sections where
islamahat, something's out, yeah, and there are, see that. Well, the
problem is, then they're they've not vowed it. So we see that, is
it fatala Or maybe, or for but the point is that the edition is
lacking something really, I see,
you have to look at it. You have to figure out which one was okay.
It's you bashiro fajarna to Hamilton.
Yes, you'll see that. Yeah, yeah. So the edition does not do justice
to what content is, I mean, this should be reissued, and, you know,
but Inshallah, we can digitize it. And I think that does, that does
the job. This is pretty amazing, though. It's exhaustive. It's
really exhaustive. Like, this is like, uh, Quran, Arabic language
students, Jannah, Jannah. Honestly,
there's so much work that you would have to go all over the
place that it's just, yeah, I sometimes think, like, you know, I
could form a course, like a whole university course, just just on,
just on this book. Yeah, honestly, I'm not even joking,
but any course that is going to teach Quranic language has to take
a.
Of this book and make use of it, and at the very least as a
reference.
Yeah, this is even like the fauide of the Ozan as they apply on the
ayat. And it's all the data there, right? So somebody, sometimes,
people will tell you, Oh, well, this particular Siva has that
meaning, yeah. So he'll document it, and you can see, and you can,
you can assess how that's working and in what ways and what context
is working, yeah. This is a remarkable, like, okay, when you
study self theoretically, conjugations and applications,
this is like, applied. This is all the way through and through
replied
Fischer being fahana.
Wow. So yeah, he also says that you have to take into account the
different karaths in order to really talk about Quranic
language. Yeah, you can't be, as I say, Hafsah normative. And just
imagine that the Quran is just one reading or one narration, which is
the reading of house,
speaking of the shawad, as he mentions. There are some karath
that are studied purely for their language, but they're not recited.
So in the karath, we have what are called karat mutawatira, as I call
them, canonical readings. That is to say, those are the ones that
are accepted as being Quran, the 10 karat right beyond that, you
have Kara, which are karatshadha. That means they are rare,
irregular, rare, different ways of putting it, but they're non
canonical. I think is perhaps a clearer way of distinguishing
canonical readings non canonical readings. So those are sort of
supplementary. They are referred to and looked at by scholars
because there were things that people were reading. So they
contain linguistic information, and sometimes they might contain
within them something that helps you to grasp which meaning is
intended in the canonical reading. So the shawad have a relevance,
and there is a whole genre as well of tau Jihad Qura at shawad, and
the study of them from linguistics. Oh, wow. Okay,
yeah, I have a shelf full of that as well.
But for the most part, my attention goes linguistic.
Study of the Quran has been, I think, undermined, oversimplified,
you know, Islamic materials, Islamic dawah, Islamic education,
reaching the masses is a wonderful thing, but it's a double edged
sword. Our job is to try and simplify the deen so that the
world can understand what God is saying and what this message is
about. But on the other hand,
we are this this religion is remarkably precise, because it
sits
designed this faith in a way that
people would pour their the best of their minds to grasp at the
most precise meanings, like the corruption in a religion happens
when
proper understanding and scholarship is behind a barrier,
right? So, for example, people that controlled the Christian
narrative right, the hierarchy of the church decides what something
means, and their discourse is disconnected from the populace.
They'll just tell you what God says. You don't get to investigate
that.
The thing now is, well, somebody's coming along and saying, I'm doing
tafsir Quran the Quran, right? And they're just butchering so many
rules of Arabic, of linguistics and of tafsir Quran, the Quran,
while they're making such claims and so many of the claims they're
making like
they don't, they wouldn't survive in an environment where
scholarship was given its due like these resources are there that can
utterly destroy the claim that's being made with Like profoundly
well documented evidence. But the problem now is, first of all,
Quranic studies doesn't get the attention that it should get.
Second of all, when it does get it, people that are studying it
are in one corner of society, and then the people that are talking
about the Quran are disconnected from them, many of them right,
because what becomes popular is not what is scholarly. What
becomes popular is what's easy to understand. And that's not a bad
thing. I'm not saying everybody should understand skull. I can't
understand scholars sometimes, like it's it's hard to digest.
It's highly academic, and it's frankly boring. How you expected,
you know, 15 year old, 20 year old, to get this stuff, but there
has to be. This is where I see, like our work in bayina, so
important as we have to have our the due diligence done to
scholarship, and then we have to do due diligence to present this
in easy language, but we have to create access to both, like
somebody hears this.
In simplified language, should be able to say, where did you get
this from? Okay, let's, you know, here's the source code, here's,
here's the materials, here's the, you know, here's the inner
workings that allow for this discussion to happen. And more and
more. I mean, I don't think we're there yet. That's our vision, but
I think more and more
we have to, we have to open up access to both of these worlds.
And I think what that's going to do, maybe not in our time, maybe
not even in our generation with that, but that's, I think enough
people are going to say, you know, what I want to be part of? You
know, I got introduced to it from this simplified distilled version,
but I want a taste of the scholarly juice that this
heritage. I want. I want to get a, you know, a drink from that
fountain. So I think we're going to inspire people to go towards
Quran based scholarship, and I think it's going to change the way
Quran is perceived. But what, what I what I hope we can do is
actually, really build that bridge between the popular narrative and
the scholarly world, and that, I think, is the most important,
because that's, I think the failure of past religions is the
scholarly remained in the scholarly circle and the masses
remained they. What was popularized for them was something
that was disconnected from scholarly work. Sometimes there's
context in which, you know, looking into things in a more
scholarly level conflicts with faith. You know, the faith belongs
to the simple people, whereas elm, as we conceive it, is supposed to
be something that leads you into deeper and deeper faith, what is
certainly the case, to be fair and to be, you know, to be just in our
analysis here is that sometimes looking into topics in a scholar
level, including things like arov and karaad, which we were talking
about, right, sometimes can can present a problem to your
preconceived,
simplified account of things, right? And for some people, that's
difficult. Like some people find it difficult when I tell them,
what do you mean? There's more than one way to read the Quran,
even if you say to some people,
there probably wasn't a spider and a dove at the cave of Thore when
the Prophet SAW was speaking Hijra. Is that I've heard that
story all my life, you know, I'm just saying, okay, there could
have been. There's no reason for it not to be. But who told us the
story? You know, who narrated the story? Have you ever thought about
that? You know, did the spider tell us? Did the dove tell us we
don't have the narrations from from anyone who's actually
recounting the story? Except it's a story. So things like that. You
know, some people find that uncomfortable, like, How could
there not be a spider in it of let alone you know you've been told
all your life and you've been repeating not one letter, not one
vowel, is different. Anywhere you go in the Quran, you will never
hear one difference or change. Well,
there's something called the Qur'an. If you at least expose to
that much, you find that strange, but then so many things that when
you explore them, more and more, your preconceived notions can be
challenged and and that actually, in scholarship is a good thing,
but it allows you to the mass level. It's a crisis. It allows
you, if you do it in the right way, to get to deeper levels of
faith. So So on that note, what I think that needs to happen is
there needs to be a revolutionary approach, revolutionary because it
doesn't exist right now that we encourage regard for scholarship,
critical thinking, and we get away from
taglines in Islamic studies like we use these, like slogan type,
Islamic phrases, and we build our Islamic account on them, and we
build quite a bit of it on, like you said, stories and, you know,
really, unfortunately, sometimes myths,
and we get further and further away from what the Quran intended
for its followers, for and what the legacy of Rasul sai Salam was,
this was supposed to be. It's actually, you know, the more I
look at comparative religion and history,
there's lots of similarities between us and the Jewish people.
Historically speaking, there's lots of similarities between us
and what happened in some ways, but the Quran is incredibly
different, like it is the first time I would argue in human
history that your faith is compelling you to investigate,
right? The faith narrative compels you to comply. For us follow deen
is El man elm is Deen that right? This is unique. And anything that
threatens that is threatening Islam itself. And now we're seeing
strands of that within the Ummah, within within the Muslim
community. There's no, no, don't investigate or no, we don't want
to know too much. Just tell me this much, and that's good enough
for me. And we've created a culture.
Out of that, but, but no, but I really want my child to know
engineering, and they should. They should know robotics when they're
in the in the fourth grade. They should know something about app
development by the time they're in seventh grade. Yeah, you want them
to explore that same attitude of exploration and what's what's
happened culturally. But what I do want my child to do is learn to
read the Quran with an imam with a Qari, and just tell them some
stories. Islam is done. But what I think we need now is really a
revolutionized approach to what you taught them just to read the
engineering book aloud. Don't tell them what any of the words mean,
exactly, exactly. So I think that
a new re engineering of Islamic education needs to happen, you
know. And you know, at least we can maybe inshallah put a dent in
our lifetime in the Quran space, like in Quran based education,
what can we do
to create a pathway for people Inshallah, like
it was still feeling, I mean, I mean it'll be not, I mean daunting
task ahead, task ahead, but inspiring. Because, honestly, the
young people around the world, even elders, there's a thirst for
this people. People want to serve all those book people want to
explore. And I think, Inshallah, just, you know, I think some of
our followers, viewers, are going to see the names of all of these
books, and some of them are like, that is amazing. I was going to
others, this is too much. I can't do this. Can we just do a cartoon
video instead, like an illustrated guide to
one thing at a time, really, one thing at a time, yeah, yeah,
that's okay. This is not for everyone, but I think some will be
inspired, and some know that they have the academic promise, and
they have the potential to inshallah take this up. As one of
my hopes, actually, out of this series of videos is it inspires
people to engage in Quran scholarship,
Inshallah, Ghana.
All right. Wrap up here. Yeah, let's do that.
How would you like to explore the heart of the Quran, Surat Yasin,
guided by an important Mufasa of the 20th century, Muhammad Al
Tahir Ibn Ashur. We've put on a special course at the Ibn Ashur
center, going through Surat Yasin with a new translation and a new
commentary based on the important insights of this great exegete.
Head on over to Ibn ashur.com/academy
to find out more. Wa salawale Kumar, Ahmed Allah, a.