Read the Qur'an Through 100 Verses
Read the Qur’an Through 100 Verses Read the Qur’an Through 100 Verses © Paul Ellis All rights reserved Second edition, 2019 To my dear wife The Prophet said, “Whoever recites one hundred verses in one night it will be as if he spent the night in worship.” [Musnad, Ahmad Hanbal] Introduction For better or for worse, the Qur’an is one of the most important books in the history of mankind. A quarter of humanity asserts that it contains the words of God Himself. Societies across a vast tract of the earth, stretching almost uninterrupted from the Atlantic coast of North Africa to the South Pacific, cite it as their spiritual, moral, political and legal compass. Given current demographic trends and population movements, it seems inevitable that large urban areas in Western Europe will soon also turn Muslim majority. Yet astonishingly, despite the Qur’an’s undoubted importance, barely any non-Muslims, and surprisingly few Muslims, have ever taken the time to actually read it. In fairness, several factors make the Qur’an a difficult read. The text was composed in Arabic as rhyming verses to be memorised and recited, and it loses this quality when translated and presented as printed prose. Stories within the Qur’an are usually only referred to briefly, or at best partially told, on the assumption that they would be well known by their audience: an assumption that does not apply to a modern readership. Many key Arabic words have no precise English equivalent, and some passages only make sense within a certain context, understood by Muslims in terms of the life of Mohammed as it is recorded elsewhere.
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