Etiquette With the Quran

An enduring classic work on the etiquette that a Muslim must or should have with regard to handling and reciting the Quran (the Muslim scripture). The topics this volume raises include: ritual cleanliness, opportune times for recitation, the etiquette that students have with their teachers (and that teachers must have with their students), and variety of other issues that every Muslim should know and frequently ask about.

The translation of Al-Tibyan fi Adab Hamalat al-Qur'an is a welcome and valuable contribution to the English library of great Islamic literature. Its author, Imam al-Nawawi, needs no introduction to Western Muslims, and the translator, Musa Furber, is indeed to be congratulated on his choice of this work and its felicitous rendering into English. Its publication is a long-awaited event for both traditional Islamic knowledge and the point of that knowledge, which is practice.

Allah Himself has used the word tibyan to describe the Holy Quran, the source of all knowledge, which He says He revealed tibyanan fi kulli shay' or as a clarification of everything. That is, it exposits in detail the things no human being can know, not the mere physical and intellectual dimensions of man in the world, which anyone can find out, but the very context of man and his reality, the "why" of being itself, whence man came, why he exists, runs his full term, dies, and what he shall meet on the other side of the impenetrable veil of death. In the Quran, our reality itself is a sign, an ayah, something that points beyond itself for those who realize what it signifies, namely the tawhid or Oneness of Allah. The exposition of these facts in the form of a divine scripture, which no human being could possibly produce, makes it the Supreme Book for mankind.

The present work was designed and written to explain to men and women how best to benefit from the Book of Allah. The blessing of the Quran is that whoever recites it as it should be recited is changed by it, and brought by imperceptible degrees to see why everything is the way it is. The seed of this knowledge is a humble intention to draw nearer to the Divine, the soil in which it takes root are reverence, awe, and love, and its fruit is the certitude in the eternal truths of faith that bring felicity in this world and the next.

It is well known to everyone conversant with the Islamic disciplines that the learning of many things does not teach wisdom,and that traditional books do not reveal their secrets or bestow their benefits to those without the key to them. This key is adab, the "right way of doing things," rendered in the title as "etiquette," but in its comprehensiveness a perennial difficulty to translate into English. Books, especially sacred ones, give their knowledge to those of adab, and Westerners who know something about the sciences of Islam have been waiting for a book like this in English for a long time.