How to Study Quran?
Thanks to Narges Aalizadeh from Iran for reading and editing this post
Quran is a text and book which Muslims, followers of the one who claimed to be a prophet named Muhammad, believe about 1400 years ago it was sent down to their prophet from Allah or God(the former is the special name for God in Arabic).
In this post, I share my thoughts as an amateur Quran researcher for others in the hope that these notes would be useful for others. I have not got any certificate or anything from religious schools or whatever. I am a simple programmer(Python and Javascript mostly) who sometimes does some research on this text.
Quran is like a deep ocean. If there is something in nature which can be compared to Quran, it would be a deep and big ocean.
If you had pleasure to read a mathematics or computer science text, you would know that you may not understand a text by reading it once or twice. Sometimes even reading a lot will not help. But when you you learn a mathematical concept in a chapter and read about it again in the other chapter, that’s what helps you understand it much better.
Quran is not about CS or Mathematics but still a very deep text. To understand a sentence in Quran these tips can help:
Know the words. Every single word matters. A word may have multiple meanings in Arabic. Just like in English but sometimes worse, perhaps a lot worse. Also sometimes a word in Arabic can be so precise. Like there is a word in Arabic which means a number from 6 to 9(see the beginning of the Surah (or Chapter) Rome).
Read and research on similar ayat. There are topics which Quran talks about them in various places. For example it talks about story of Moses and the King of Egypt, Pharaoh, in multiple Surat such as Taha(20th Surah) and Jonah or Yunes which is the 10th Surah. Sometimes an ayah or a series of ayat explain what a single ayah does not. As an example you may not know what does 73:15 talk about just by reading this single ayah. E.g. Who was that messenger?
Read and research on Hadiths. There are topics which the Hadiths, Muhammad’s sayings and doings, explain about. It’s always good to do a text search on different Hadith books such as Sahih Bukhari or Sahih Muslim or other books.
Please email me any comment you have:
fkz at riseup dot net