Nouman Ali Khan – Surah Al Jumuah #23 Why the Quran Is Easy to Memorize
AI: Summary ©
The Quran is a complex and logically organized title designed to make students remember information. It is not a complete understanding of the nuances of the language, but rather a part of the culture of Muslims. The title provides insight into the transformation process and helps students pursue spiritual transformation through prayer, detox, and longer term maintenance. It is important to preserve the light of one's face and offers sponsorship for students to study the Quran.
AI: Summary ©
This coming to Jumuah is us
trying to strengthen our what?
Our
light,
To reinforce our light. Now, when you stand
in prayer every day, 5 times a day,
you recharge your light a little bit.
Okay? So in in cars, you need refueling
every day, but every every little longer you
need an oil change, and a little bit
longer you need a tune up.
Isn't it?
Before you begin this video, just quickly wanted
to let you know that so much of
the work on the Quran has been completed
on Bayinatv. I want you to enjoy systematically
studying the Quran from the beginning all the
way to the end in brief and then
in great detail. And to do that, I'd
like for you to sign up on bayinatv.com.
And once you appreciate what's going on in
bayinatv, I want you to become an ambassador
for it and share that subscription with friends
and family and give it as a gift
also. Thank you.
Task is to try and understand
the change of subject and the placement of,
this new final subject matter of Surat Al
Jummar. As you already know, Surat Al Jummar
is only 11 ayaat. We're gonna try to
cover ayahs number 9 and 10 today, and
conclude with ayah number 11 and an overview
of the Surah and some additional things inshaAllah
ta'ala tomorrow.
The thing that I want you to understand
is, you know, there are multiple ways to
understand what is happening inside of a surah.
The surah of the Quran is not like
a chapter in a book.
So I don't like the translation
surah 1, surah 2, surah 3 as chapter
1, chapter 2, chapter 3 like that.
Because chapters
by definition have a certain logic
that everybody's familiar with. A chapter 3 means
you've it's built on the ideas presented in
chapter 2.
Right? And it depends on them in some
way.
And if chapter 3 is going to need
something that is going to be mentioned again
from chapter 2, it won't mention the whole
thing you get, it'll just make a quick
reference
and then move forward. Right? So that's my
definition chapters are chronological,
and they have a certain developmental
order.
So you cannot start a book and go
to chapter 85,
if you haven't read the first 84 chapters.
It doesn't make any sense. But in the
Quran you know that we even kids know
at the end of the Quran, or at
the end of the Quran. And even though
those are the final chapters in the order
of the Quran,
they're not dependent on earlier material.
Right? So it doesn't really fit the definition
of chapter.
Surah's have their own unique identity.
The other thing is inside a chapter, that's
just the chronology of chapters. But even inside
a chapter,
you're supposed to have
a progression of ideas.
So you're supposed to have, you know, some
kind of a one subject
that one chapter deals with. Right? And then
you don't have If you wanted to have
multiple topics,
then you would turn them into multiple chapters.
That's what you would do.
What happens often in the Quran is, you
will have 1 surah, but the surah might
have 20 topics.
It might have 15 topics. It might have
8 different topics.
It doesn't feel like a chapter. It almost
feels like a book by itself.
Even if it feels on its own like
an entire book.
And even then understanding
why are these different
topics,
why are they all together
in this,
in this way? Why is this being called
a surah? So I'm not using the word
chapter anymore, I'm using the word surah. So
the surah has its own
logic. It's not the same as the logic
you find in books and chapters and poetry
and other kinds of literature. It's its own
unique standard.
And one of the mistakes we make
in studying the Quran,
is one we say, well because you're used
to use reading books
in literature, in poetry,
stories, novels,
science books, mathematics books, physics books, whatever books
you're reading and whatever subject you're reading, they
have a certain structure and a certain order,
right?
We have our minds are built and programmed
to process information that way. And We bring
those expectations
to the Quran.
And then the Quran does not meet those
expectations,
clearly.
And then it starts feeling like the Quran
is unorganized.
That it's because it doesn't follow the logic
that we're used to, it looks like it's
unorganized.
And 2 things happened in our history. One
thing that happened in our history is our
scholars,
they started accepting that idea. They started many
of them accepted the idea that the Quran
is actually not really
logically organized.
There's no point in exploring why is it
organized this way. Let's just study each ayah
as a lesson from Allah,
And the next ayah as a next lesson
from Allah. And the next ayah as the
next lesson from Allah. And sometimes we can
see that this ayah is connected to this
ayah. And we can describe the connection. Sometimes
we cannot see the connection, it seems like
it's completely disconnected. And there you'll find that
many scholars won't even discuss what just happened.
They'll just say, Now Allah is talking about
this.
But not say,
Why is He talking about this?
I wonder why what happened here? Why did
the subject change all of a sudden?
Even as an English reader of the translation
of the Quran, you might notice a very
abrupt,
shocking change in subject.
Immediately without warning. And you can feel it,
you can feel something just shifted
and it's
actually meant to almost disturb the reader.
Because the flow like when you listen to
recitation of the Quran, right? It has a
flow.
Right? It's just
especially a good reciter, they're reciting the Quran
and there's this endless continuous flow, you just
want them to keep on reciting.
Right? But then when you're reading the translation,
you're like, this is very cut up. This
is very disjointed. So it's actually doesn't seem
like it has a flow.
Now one way to understand
the way things are organized in the Quran.
I showed you some of the slides on
the end of a section and how things
are very uniquely organized
inside of a chapter, right? And that's not
easy to hear because it's not going the
or the order of a, b, c, d,
e, f, g. It's going a, b, c
and then a, b, c again.
Or it's going a b c and then
c b a
or something like that, which is more complicated
than just a b c d e f
g. It's not the same kind of structure.
But at the same time as that is
there and that's you know whatever surahs I've
worked on I've seen those kinds of structures
in all of those surahs. And I've tried
to you know explain
that kind of a design to the surahs
of the Quran. Many people have been working
on this and they've done some amazing amazing
work especially in the last 30 40 years.
Quite a bit of work has been done
on the structural analysis of the Quran. I
think it's very fascinating interesting work.
Some of this was done in classical times
by scholars very little but now it's become
an entire you can think of it it's
become an entire department in Quran studies by
itself.
But then there's another
part to the logic of surahs and that
is I like to call it linear coherence.
Linear coherence means when I start my speech,
between the start of my speech and the
end of my speech, there needs to be
a logical continuity.
Like a needs to make sense to move
into B, and B needs to make sense
to move into C, so you can see
the conclusion of my argument, right? Sometimes you
listen to a speech and the speaker is
talking about everything,
and everything was really cool, but at the
end of the speech you're like, So what
did he talk about? I don't know, but
it was awesome.
Well you don't remember because it wasn't
methodically structured. It wasn't organized.
You know but
a lecture in a class like when you
go to your professor at school, a good
teacher is going to have a plan. Here's
how I'm going to introduce the subject.
Then I'm gonna give examples.
Then I'm gonna do review, and then I'll
conclude by recapping the entire lesson.
But they'll have the a plan in their
head.
A, B, C, D and then come back
to A and finish it all up, right?
They have a lesson, it's called a lesson
plan. Now Allah says,
you know,
and we saw
here
He teaches them the book
and teaching
needs curriculum.
Speaking does not need curriculum. When you're speaking
to a friend, you don't need a plan,
you just talk.
But when you're teaching someone, you have you
a teacher does not think about what's on
their mind.
A teacher thinks about how do I get
this into the mind of my student that
it stays there.
Okay. Which is different from informing someone. Like
the news
on the radio, or the news online,
The news is not teaching you, the news
is just informing you. So it's a lot
of information,
it's not expecting you to remember that information.
You can grab bits and pieces that you
find interesting, and you can move on. Maybe
95%, 99% of it, you don't care. The
news is telling you there's traffic over there,
there's an accident over there, there's this over
there, but there's one road that they mentioned
that that's the one you're taking, that's all
you care about.
You know, all that information, it disappears from
your mind. Because the news report is informing
you, but it's not teaching you.
But when a teacher teaches you, then the
teacher expects that you should be able to
remember and reuse
all the things that were taught to you.
You understand? So there's a deeper relationship
because in all of them someone's talking and
you're listening. A teacher is talking and you're
listening. A speaker is talking and you're listening.
The radio is talking and you're listening.
All of them is just you're take you're
getting taking data inside.
Information is going inside, but there's a fundamental
difference the moment we use the word teaching.
Now, for teaching,
a plan is really important.
That's the next part.
Teaching does not happen without a real plan.
A teacher has a strategy that by the
end of this lesson,
I have some goals I want my students
to walk away with.
Now what are the goals of the Quran?
The goals of the Quran
is one of them is
so that you make an effort to remember.
So Allah wants to put things in a
way that will make it easy for you
to remember. And of course, one of the
reasons the Quran is so
miraculously easy to memorize,
is actually because part of the design of
the Quran was, these lessons should be forever
remembered, and you shouldn't have to go and
open a copy of a book, and then
access these lessons. They should just flow out
of you on your drive home. You're just
reciting a surah.
That you memorized it and you're just reciting
it. Right? And for 1000 of years Muslims
have been memorizing parts of the Quran or
the entire Quran. Those lessons become a part
of them.
So, We made the Quran easy for remembrance.
By the way, making something easy is the
job of a teacher, isn't it?
Right? Because a speaker doesn't have to make
something
easy.
A king doesn't have to make something easy,
but a teacher has to make something easy.
Allah is speaking in the role of a
teacher.
The other thing that a teacher does,
that's the difference between a good teacher and
a bad teacher. A good teacher or let's
start with a bad teacher. A bad teacher
like we have many of those in the
world, they'll come and sit in the class
and say
to the kids, Read chapter 3.
And then they're doing their old thing.
Like just learn it yourself,
Oh the exams on chapter 5, study.
Are you gonna review it? Are you gonna
help us understand it? Are you gonna No,
the book tells you everything you need to
know.
In other words,
their idea is so long as you have
the information,
you deal with it. But what happens to
you growing up or even in university,
you're reading the text, you're reading the chapter,
you're reading all the information,
but it's just
isolated bits of data,
but you don't see how it makes sense.
It's not making sense to you, it's disconnected.
Then you go to someone who's a better
student, or someone who's a tutor, or someone
who's doing internship or whatever you say, Can
you help me understand this? And in 5
minutes they take this complicated chapter and what
do they do? They help you. You know
this idea, this is connected to this idea.
And then you say, you're sitting there in
the library going, oh it's like that.
Oh my God.
Why didn't they just do that? Why didn't
they just say that? Why did they make
it so hard? Many of you have had
those moments in your life
and then you've some of you sometimes you've
had a teacher in your life who's really
good at taking complicated subjects and making them
what?
Making them easy, right? So what does Allah
do? Allah actually teaches in a way that
makes things easy.
And so the Quran, somebody mentioned yesterday, the
sister from Italy, from The Place of Bad
Pizzas, mentioned yesterday
that, you know the Quran is simply you
know, in her own words she said that
the Quran is not presenting something in complicated
language, it's presenting it in very simplified language.
And that's actually true. Allah, the one who
knows more than any PhD knows and has
more vocabulary than any human being can ever
have, can use the hardest words possible.
And if Allah wants to talk to me
about Jewish history,
He has no more knowledge of Jewish history
than the Encyclopedia Britannica or the entire volumes
of Jewish history, and he knows the chapters
of history that have been lost. He knows
all of it. He knows the map of
the world better than anybody else.
Right? He knows he knows the the places
that are ruins, that are buried deep inside
the ground, and we haven't even found them
yet. The nations that have been lost. He
knows them. We don't know them. He could
talk about them in much more sophisticated complicated
ways.
But he chose not to give us information
in the Quran. He chose to educate us.
And the goal, the first goal of education
is to remember.
And the second goal of education, it seems
to be in the Quran, is to change
the way you think.
Now so Allah is less concerned with the
volume of information.
Allah is more concerned with the way you
and I think,
actually.
So it this is really really cool and
really important. That means
we are we can be obsessed with knowledge.
I want to learn Arabic, I want to
learn tafsir, I want to learn hadith, I
want to learn fiqh, I want to learn
Islamic history, I wanna learn philosophy, I wanna
learn comparative religion, learn, learn, learn. Information, information,
information, information.
But actually at the end of every little
lesson, every single thing you learn in the
end, how did this change the way I
what?
How I think?
How did this change the way I think?
My world view has to enhance in some
way. With that in mind, I want you
to know that every surah of the Quran
has a certain point. It wants you to
get it wants to get a certain way
of thinking across to you.
This surah that we're studying, we're starting the
final section of the surah. It's made up
of 3
sections.
There are 3 sections.
In the first section, Allah described how what
His plan is
for that He gave to His Prophet salallahu
alaihi wasalam to make sure that the final
Prophet gives people the book and they have
a relationship with the their people have a
relationship with their book that is made up
of 4 components.
It's not one relationship, it's 4 relationships.
And then the ummah will grow but these
four elements of the relationship will remain forever.
They must remain in place.
That was the agenda of the first section
of
the surah.
This is what the a real relationship with
the book looks like. Okay.
The second section looked like it went somewhere
else completely. Where did we where did we
go? We went into Jewish history.
We went into people that were given the
Torah, and they didn't carry it the way
they were supposed to. Actually it's kind of
like the way you would translate that is
they carried it without carrying it.
Because if you I didn't describe this to
you at the time. Allah says
the example of those who were given the
burden of the Torah,
then they didn't carry it. By the end
of that sentence, did they carry it or
did they not carry?
They did not carry. But the example is
not of a donkey that does not carry,
the example is it of a donkey that
does carry. So Allah is saying, It looks
like He's carrying, but He's not really carrying.
He's carrying without carrying.
You understand?
So the lesson being taught was it may
here's an example of people that were given
a book, now you've been given the Quran,
people before you were not given Quran, they
were given their own Quran which was called
tawrat.
And they were supposed to follow a 4
step process.
But when they didn't follow that process, they
still had the book, they were still carrying
it, but not really carrying it.
So now that second section
was actually there to give us a case
study
what happens when people stop carrying the book
the right way.
And then we were told, these people when
you don't carry the book the right way,
some problems happen. One problem that happens is
you start thinking just because we have the
book,
Allah must really love us more than He
loves anybody else. So no matter how bad
we are, in the end we're still gonna
go to jannah anyway.
Right? And they developed that mentality,
and if we become distant from the book,
we will develop that mentality.
The second thing that happened with them is
they became really scared of death.
Like death was not a they didn't have
to love death but there was there's something
that terrifies them.
When
you accept the world view of the Quran,
then the first thing you realize is, Allah
the first one of the first things Allah
wants you to know is that you are
at this timeline, you are in this place.
Where did this story begin with Adam
and where is this story gonna end? It's
gonna end on judgement day in Jannah and
now. Right? And you're in the midpoint.
And what the Quran does is it makes
you realize your life didn't start when you
came out of your mom. Your life started
at the time of
Adam So your life is pretty long, it's
been going on for a long time. And
you're in an episode right now, and there
are next episodes coming. And now that you
know where you came from, you have a
better idea where you're
going. So it changes your perspective about life
and death.
It changes the perspective of who you actually
are.
Where did your life begin? What's your identity?
You know, what's your relationship with reality? It
changes. And because that
changes, the way you look at history changes,
and also the way you look at the
future changes. And then you no longer, you're
no longer terrified of the concept of death.
You're not running from it, you're not trying
to stay alive forever,
you're not doing that anymore
because you know there's a meeting coming. This
your existence started with a meeting with Allah,
and your existence at the end of it
is also it also has a meeting with
Allah.
So where you began is where you're going
to end up. This is why we say
when a person dies,
We are we belong to Allah also means
we started with Allah and we're going back
to where we started.
The Quran says, the way He started you,
you're gonna come back.
Okay?
So He's, you know,
We will bring the creation back to where
the where the whole thing started.
This perspective
now doesn't make me feel like I am
terrified of death. It's just one chapter among
many chapters that are coming. There was there's
been many chapters before and there are chapters
coming after, right?
Now, so this is what happened with that.
Now the final section of the Surah,
it is now telling us
if you don't want to fall into the
same
mistakes that were described in section 2,
I'm going to give you a solution, this
ummah. I'm gonna give you a solution
that every time your relationship with your book
and with this revelation is getting rusty,
every few days later you will come together
and you will restore your relationship with the
Quran
and with Allah and you will be reminded
of a gathering that is coming which is
judgment day. By the way, this is surah
number 62.
In surah number 64
Allah will call judgment day Yawmul Jamer the
day of gathering Yawmul
Jummah and this day the Friday prayer is
Yawmul
Jummah. The purpose of Yawmul Jummah is to
remind me at the end of every week
of Yawmul
Jum'ah.
Okay. And in Yawmul Jum'ah, what do believers
do? They willingly come forward
in the presence of the reminder the word
of Allah. What does judgment day? Humanity will
come forward and Allah will speak to them.
Allah will speak,
isn't it?
And now the people who came towards Allah
willingly
are going to be given light
on judgement day. Now let's complete this imagery
the way the imagery is being designed in
these surahs. The first surah of the series
of these surahs was surah number 57, Suratul
Hadid.
And in Suratul Hadid Allah said a couple
of really cool things.
One of them related to Surat Al Jumwa
is, I
referenced this yesterday.
He is the one who sends down on
His slave, meaning Muhammad
He sends down on His slave clear ayaat,
clear miraculous signs from Allah. Meaning the Quran.
He sends Quran on Muhammad
So He can pull you
out of multiple shades of darkness into light.
He can pull you out of darknesses towards
light. Okay. So now the imagery is, if
you're coming closer to Allah, you're walking away
from darkness and you're walking towards
light. Now by This is 62,
in the surah we're studying. What does Allah
say?
Let me put this in other words, He
goes through this 4 step process with you
because He's getting you out of darknesses into
like this is how He does it.
This is so He's that's what was introduced
in surah number 57 is now being explained
in surah number 62.
And here Allah says, And they were utterly
lost. In kaluminqablu
lafiqbalalim
Mubin They were utterly lost. Imagine the imagery
of Musa
when he was lost in the desert with
his family, what was it that gave him
guidance? He in the distance he saw what?
He saw
light, right? So we're in the darkness,
we're in wadam, we're in wadaal and then
Allah gave light so that we have direction,
we have guidance. Now let's go back to
surah number 57. Allah says, Judgment day will
come and believers will wake up on judgement
day and they're going to
have
They will have light coming from in front
of them and from their right sides.
They'll have light coming out of them.
And
this light,
the one that's coming from us,
from ourselves and from our right, is actually
been described as the light of Iman, the
light of faith from our chest, and the
light of our good deeds
by our right hand.
Which is pretty cool because
is here.
And
is
here,
isn't it?
And that's the light that we're gonna need
on judgement day. Now that light in this
life we have to preserve it.
Okay. Allah says,
(QS.
3) At the end of suratul hadith He
says, He will put a light for you
that you can walk in.
He'll provide a light for you that you
can walk in. Now the whole and then
later on, the same surah that calls judgment
says,
Believe in Allah, believe in His Messenger and
believe in the light that We sent down.
So now what is the light
in
Suratul Tahabun?
The Quran. So there's a light on judgment
day that I need to walk.
The Prophet is pulling people out of darkness
into
light. And the Quran now itself is being
described as
light.
And so this light can become weak.
In human beings, it can become weak. So
what did Allah do? He created multiple institutions
to
re trigger the light.
5 times of prayer,
the 5 prayers,
Allah describes the analogy of the person praying
before Allah in Suratul Noor, funny enough, the
Ayah or amazing enough, the Ayah of light,
the passage of light.
The believers chest is described
as a niche inside of a wall. In
old homes, they used to build a little
kind of mihrab looking
shape
cavity inside a wall, you could put a
candle in it
and the light hits the
curved wall and the light spreads to the
entire house,
right? And that niche,
Allah gave the analogy of that and said,
There's a lamp sitting in that niche and
it's spreading to the entire house. But that
lamp that Allah or that niche that Allah
was describing is actually the ribcage.
And the lamp
is actually
the heart,
the heart. And then the heart itself, Allah
gave it light when He created us, but
then Allah sent a new light, What's
the light? The Quran itself and this outside
light
illuminates and lights it up and Allah calls
that
light on top
of light. That's the analogy that Allah gave
us in Surah An Nuh. Now,
having understood all of that, every time we
come and by the way that's in that
ayah,
Interesting.
Here you're gonna see, you know,
and next night you're gonna
see Everything's connected.
There's really amazing intertextuality.
He says,
People
who money or business and sales and trade
does not distract them from remembering Allah
and establishing the prayer.
Establishing the prayer.
There are homes in which Allah has allowed
that His mention should be made
and they should be elevated. Which homes is
Allah talking about?
The masjids,
the masajid. He's talking about the masajid.
Now
when we come to Jum'ah,
if you understand all of this imagery that
I'm giving you of light and a faith
and how that's gonna become turn into This
is spiritual right now light right now. It's
gonna tell it turn into real light on
judgment day.
Where's actually gonna be real darkness, it's actually
gonna be a light coming out of us
on judgment day. Okay. So
this coming to Jumuah is us
trying to strengthen our what?
Our our our light,
to reinforce our light. Now when you stand
in prayer every day, 5 times a day,
you recharge your light a little bit.
Okay? So in cars you need refueling everyday,
but every every little longer you need an
oil change, and a little bit longer you
need a tune up,
Isn't it? You should eat healthy everyday,
but then every so often you need to
go to the dentist,
And then every so often more you need
a full on cleaning.
And every there's a there's immediate maintenance,
there's a little bit longer term maintenance and
there's super long term maintenance, isn't it? What
spiritual maintenance everyday for the Muslim?
It's the 5 prayers. That's what cleans up
the heart little by little. That's the daily
detox little by little.
Then every week there needs to be a
major detox.
Okay. Which is what?
That's Jum'ah.
That's Jum'ah.
And
what's amazing about Jum'ah
is
that if you study, there's only a few
Khutbah's we have properly recorded of the Prophet
And I have a theory on why that
is. Most of the time even the Khuddah
part he was just telling people Quran.
He already knew that.
He was just reminding of the Quran. Literally,
you know he was gathering people,
and Jum'ah was
aya number 2 convention.
It was a gathering of just living aya
number 2 every week.
Quran was being reinforced,
Quran was being reintroduced
to the community and Allah is telling us
in this last section that if you maintain
the spirit of the Friday prayer
because again everything Allah gives us has a
letter and has a spirit and preserving the
light inside is actually about the spirit of
it, isn't it? If you can preserve the
letter and the spirit of the Friday prayer,
you will not fall into the same trap
that the people described in section number 2
fell into. That's why you should take this
very very serious.
Assalamu alaikum everyone. There are almost 50,000 students
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