“Don’t worship Allah so He may give you. Rather, worship Him so He may be pleased. For when He is pleased, He will astonish you with His Gifts.”
By the dawn
And the ten nights
And the even and the odd
O you tranquil soul!
Return to your Lord, well-pleased and pleasing
[al-Fajr: 1-3; 27-28]
Loftiness is attained in accordance to one’s struggles,
And whoever seeks nobility, remains vigilant by night.
Whoever wishes to achieve without due effort,
Will waste their life seeking what’s impossible.
You search for glory and yet you sleep at night,
It’s only the seeker of pearls who dives deep into the sea.
– Imam al-Shafi’i, al-Diwan
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It refuses to be uttered wrongly.
As I was speaking to my teacher last week, we were discussing Qur’anic tilawah (recitation) and he mentioned something that I’ve always noticed but couldn’t explain why.
When people memorise or recite Qur’an, if they ever make a mistake unknowingly, it somehow surfaces in a way that stops them from getting past that passage. Either they’ll face a block, or their mind will go blank, or they’ll face unusual difficulty in the next part, or the recital just doesn’t feel right. You are alerted in one way or another that something is not right.
The nobility of Qur’an is such that it tries to tell you that you’ve made a mistake. It refuses to be uttered wrongly, so it forces you to stop, and go back. Stop, because you’ve uttered a word that was not said by al-Rahman, or you’ve recited the verse in a way that He did not wish for. And of course, the more in touch we are with reciting Qur’an, the more attentive we become to this phenomenon.
So next time you’re frustrated because you just want to memorise quickly, or recite the whole page but something is blocking you, or it doesn’t ‘feel right’, or you keep getting stuck… Stop and think (relax too!). It’s probably a message from Allah telling you to take a bit more time in perfecting His Words and not to rush. Don’t be upset, instead be happy because He wants you to spend more time with that portion of Qur’an.
How soothing <3