AN ARABIC RECITAL Let’s start by appreciating the connection of this Ayah to the one before. There, it was called Kitab; here, it is called Quran. It’s as though Allah is telling us that it's in a written form in the heavens, and it was turned into something to be recited in Arabic on the tongue of Muhammad ﷺ. 'We have sent it down' by way of Angel Jibril 'as an Arabic Quran' – so it's the story of the Hebrews, the Israelites, of Yusuf (as), which was told before in Hebrew, and now it's coming down as an Arabic recital. You could say that the Arabs have no business telling this story; it's not their story! But the Master of the Arabs and the Master of the Hebrews, it’s His business to tell you the story He wants to tell. So, He now retells the Israelite story of Yusuf (as) as an Arabic recital, then He further said: 'so that all of you understand.' The first meaning of that could be that the Israelites who were listening, who were there in Madinah, or were secretly feeding questions to Quraysh, should understand something when the Prophet ﷺ delivers the story in Arabic. He definitely did not get this from the Hebrew sources; so what's his source, and how did he get this? Nobody else has this. Clearly, it's coming from Allah. How else could this be so much clearer than even what we have in our (altered) scriptures? Another implication of this description: the Quran was meant to be recited. Allah could have sent it down like the Ten Commandments, like in the form of tablets; it could have come down in the form of paper; it could have come down as a book already printed and published, but Allah sent it down in the form of the spoken word. That means that the legacy of the Quran in this world is that it should not just be read: it should be spoken. When we follow the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, that means we have to speak the Quran to people. To an extent, we do this because we recite the Quran, not least in the month of Ramadan. But for the most part, we reduced the Quran to beautiful sounds that are being heard. Those beautiful sounds are critical because they are a part of the Quran, but the Quran didn't come for audible enjoyment; the Quran came as a message that should be heard. So, the Ummah should have become people that do the recital. Literally it's called the Recital, to be pronounced and heard. WHY ARABIC? Scholars have often explained that Allah made it in Arabic because the original audience was Arab – this is based on reading the plural pronouns 'you' here as referring to the Arabs who were being addressed directly. Of course, it was necessary for them to hear the message in their language. But there's a larger question here: Allah knew that when He says 'so all of you understand', and we read this in 2020 as a global community, it is not just the people of Makkah and Madinah who need to understand, but 'all of you' in Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, America, and across the planet. Isn't this a book for all of humanity? So how come it’s in one language? It’s not my fault that I'm Asian, or somebody else's fault that they're European, or somebody else's fault that they're African. Should it have come in different languages and dialects for each group of people? This is actually a deep question. The answer, for me, is a few things. First, that Allah prepared the Arabic language for the final revelation. The story begins with Isma'il (as) as you can find in the books of Seerah… but basically, Allah chose the Ka'bah to be in the desert, in an isolated place with no natural resources whatsoever until the coming of the Prophet ﷺ. So the Arab people were just herding sheep, and taking their camels across the desert for trade, but they were isolated, and the great empires of the world – such as the Roman Empire and the Persian Empire – nobody was interested in the Arab lands to extend their empire, because what are they going to do in the desert? What are they going to get from it? Trees? Agriculture? Are they going to get gold? Oil hasn't been discovered yet. They're just left alone, to their own devices, and their language becomes isolated for the most part. They do pick up some words from Persian and Greek, and when they do trade here and there, they pick up words and they incorporate them into their language, but not like what happens to the great international languages. Ironically, an easy example of the opposite nowadays is Makkah: when you go for Hajj or Umrah, and you visit the marketplace, you've got some Senegalese guy selling the prayer rugs and he's selling it to some Indonesian woman and he's telling her words in Urdu and she's responding in Bahasa Indonesia and he's speaking back in some mixture of English and Urdu. When cultures mix, language changes and deteriorates. You didn't have that phenomenon in pre-Islamic Arabia. They are isolated for the most part. When they go out at night, they just look at the stars because they’ve got nothing on earth to look at. The upshot of this is that they became very imaginative people, and their language full of imagery and expressiveness. In fact, if you look into the etymology of the word 'Arabic' عربي one of its meanings is to express yourself and all of your feelings in the most elaborate way. Arabic is a very expressive, rich and loaded language. The word عربة also meant a river that's overflowing. This is why they also used it for a guy who's got too much in his stomach and about to throw up; they use it for that too, why? When something is so rich, it's going to overflow. When you become a student of Arabic, one word in Arabic has so much meaning it's like a river gushing and overflowing, that's what it feels like. Allah made this language that way. Here’s another remarkable thing about Arabic. ‘Umar (ra) said تعلموا العربية فإنها تزيد في العقل, 'Learn Arabic because it enhances your ability to think.' That’s interesting, since ‘Umar was an Arab talking to Arabs; but during his rule, Islam was becoming internationalized, and Arabic was deteriorating already. When this happens, our ability to contemplate the richness of the words of Allah deteriorates. When Muslims took this duty seriously, Arabic became the language of the believers wherever they were. We didn't abandon the other languages, but rather the Persian kept Farsi and mastered Arabic; the Indians kept their local languages but mastered Arabic. Wherever Islam landed, Arabic went with it. So, Arabic was no longer the preserve of the Arabs. You consider the German language for the Germans, Urdu for the Indians… but the Arabic language is for the people of the Quran. It no longer belongs to an ethnicity. In fact, many of the most remarkable works on the grammar and rhetoric of the Arabic were written by non-Arabs, such as Sibawayh, Zamakhshari, Fakhruddin ar-Razi. The pivotal works in Tafseer that we lean on to understand the grammatical nuances of the Quran are non-Arabs, one after the other. And this is not to denigrate the Arabs, as those non-Arabs came to the Arabs and internalized it: وَآخَرِينَ مِنْهُمْ لَمَّا يَلْحَقُوا بِهِمْ in the spirit of 'others of them that haven't yet joined them' (62:3). THE ACCESSIBLE QURAN Now here’s a very important lesson. In the history of religions, you've got those where the religious leadership – whether it's the Pope, the priest, the preacher or the rabbi, or the swami, the pundit or whoever – the religious figure, the spiritual or scholarly figure who knows the secret word and takes care of the sacred monastery etc., they are the custodians of the religion, while the public doesn't actually know the religion. In order for the public to know anything, they must approach the gatekeeper; they go to that religious leader, and he or she will tell them what the religion means. They can't have direct access to it, or their access is very limited. This is one extreme, and I’ll illustrate the problem with an analogy. Imagine that you know basically nothing about cars, and you go to the mechanic shop to get your car fixed, and the mechanic tells you: 'You need a new engine and new tires and you need a new steering wheel and a new set of seats… basically, new everything.' Simply because you don't know any better, you have to take his word and follow his instructions. Is it possible that he can use his knowledge advantage to take you for a ride? Of course. But if you're an informed consumer, if you know a little something about cars, you can at least ask sensible questions. 'Why do I need a new engine?' You record his answer and seek a second and third opinion. You do some research, and if the man turns out to be dishonest, you can report him. In many religious traditions, and sometimes in Islamic contexts too, you find one or two people who know everything; if you question them, it's like you're questioning God Himself. It’s as if the religion belongs to the clergy and the population is held hostage by them. Yes, they trust and adore them, but you’d better not cross the line or you'll be declared a heretic or worthy of punishment, excommunicated and cast out of the grace of God! If the Catholic experience has represented a lot of this extreme, the other side can be found with the Protestants. They shook off the Church’s monopoly on reading and interpreting the Bible. They said 'We can read it ourselves, it's the Word of God we should have access to it.' Then you have a million people reading the Bible and a million different conclusions about what the Bible means, and more denominations emerging by the day. 'From my personal reading, I think the book is saying this…' and something as fundamental as who Jesus is has a different answer depending on which denomination you ask; it’s a free-for-all. What did the Quran do? How does it avoid the extremes we described, of either anarchy or in dictatorship in religion? How will Islam be protected? Allah says 'We sent it down as an Arabic recital.' So, first of all, there won't be confusions about translation or what a word might mean or Ayah might mean because everyone on Earth has to be discussing the exact same word. You have the same contexts and resources to interpret those words. Because of that, He didn't say: so that your religious leadership understands and then they can explain it to you. Who did He say is supposed to think and understand? 'All of you.' Now, naturally and sensibly, there are going to be degrees of understanding. Some people can only think a little bit and understand a little bit. So, they need to go to those who have spent a lot more time thinking and understanding: we call them scholars. They'll go to them and ask them questions, but as informed consumers of guidance. They also think and understand for themselves, even if not to the level of someone who studied hard for twenty years. So, when they ask a question of the 'clergy' – a scholar, an imam, a shaykh – and they get an answer which doesn’t seem to make sense in light of this Ayah, or alongside what I previously learned, you can say: 'With respect, that doesn't make sense to me; I don't understand; please explain it.' I'm not convinced because I can't stop thinking. I have to be a person of thought. I hate the word 'democratize', but we can call this open-source religion; or transparency in the learning of Islam. REFORMING OUR CULTURE So, though it might seem counter-intuitive, all of that actually goes away when we say: 'No, Allah should have sent me the Quran in Pashto, or Punjabi; I don’t want to learn Arabic. I don’t want to follow the Arabs.' We already clarified that this language is not a thing for the Arabic, but it is for the Quran and its people. Secondly, Allah owns all languages; so, if I speak Urdu, it doesn't mean I own Urdu. All languages are children of the language taught to Adam (as), so He gave us the Arabic Quran so that we as an Ummah have a common basis for thinking and understanding. All our knowledge and our wisdom can be built upon that foundation. Imagine what happens to an Ummah when we abandon our direct connection with the Quran by neglecting study of the Arabic language! Let’s consider the reality in much of our culture. We say let’s recite some Surahs, let's have my kid quickly read the whole Quran aloud with a teacher at our home, and then we do a ‘Finish the Quran party’ – it looks like a birthday party. You’ve… finished the Quran? You might be finished, but the Quran doesn't get finished! There’s this underlying mentality that the Arabic sounds are the Quran. No, the Arabic LANGUAGE makes the Quran, not just Arabic sounds. Just imagine: we have schools and mosques around the world where kids are memorizing the Quran… can you imagine every man, woman, every child, every young boy, every young girl, every teenager or preteen, and they're memorizing the Quran while understanding every word that they recite every single day? Can you imagine the effect on their hearts, on their character, as they're just reviewing the Quran on their way to school? They're not just reviewing it because they have to lead Taraweeh so they’ve got to get the sounds right; they're reviewing it because they feel and believe that Allah is actually talking to them through this Book. What kind of overall effect would it have on the Ummah? These would not be just memorizers of the Quran; then, these would be true Carriers of the Quran. There is a difference between memorizing it and carrying it. And He says: 'We gave this as an Arabic Quran so that all of you can understand.' So, I hope you appreciate the kind of renaissance and restoration that can come to the Ummah when we really emphasize the learning of the language of the Quran. It means that we as a people have direct access to our scripture. My wish for the Ummah, my own children and the kids I see around me, and people around the world, is that people like me should become irrelevant because they have access; they don't have to wonder what this word means. They can do that research themselves, they can ask each other, and have study circles in which they contemplate the word of Allah among themselves. What an amazing thing that would be! THINKING AND UNDERSTANDING One more comment about 'think and understand'. Everybody thinks, and you can have all kinds of thoughts; your thoughts can go in any direction, but the right kind of thoughts lead towards understanding, as the wrong kind of thoughts lead towards misunderstanding. The wordتعقلون actually combines thought and understanding; it implies control over one's emotions. It’s as if to say: 'We gave you an Arabic Quran because the Arabic of this Quran is going to empower you; it's going to be so moving that it will direct your thoughts in the right direction.' Then you will have the ability to stand against your own urges, your own anger, your own fear, your own anxiety, your own lust, your own selfishness. Any emotion that we have inside, it can put the brakes on it: لَعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ. So, We gave you an Arabic Quran that is for the mind and the heart. In a place in the Quran in Surat Al-Baqarah (2:73-74), Allah said: 'Then your hearts became hard', after He said لَعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ.They were supposed to use their عقل (mind), but their hearts became hard – this shows that ‘aql is related to the heart, too. The word for ignorance, جهل jahl also means the inability to control one's emotions. We have to become thinkers. It is not just knowledge that is emphasized in the Quran, since a person can have a little knowledge, but they think properly and they understand properly. Conversely, a person can have abundant knowledge but never use it to think properly. When Yusuf (as) started facing his trials, he had not been granted abundant knowledge; he had been a student of Ya’qub (as) at a very young age, but then he’s kidnapped, then thrown in jail, and there’s little opportunity for formal learning. What he knows is what his father taught him as a child. Yet in his adult years, his thinking is clear; his understanding is clear; his control over emotions is mighty because he understands revelation in that way. That’s what Allah has given us in the Arabic Quran.

posts are based on Bayyinah's lecture series. Link to corresponding video: