ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Adab as-Salat: The Disciplines of the Prayer Second Revised Edition Section Six: How To Be Benefited By The Qur’an Now that you have got acquainted with the subjects and the objectives of the Divine Book (the Qur'an), you will have to take into consideration an important point, as by doing so the door of being benefited by it will be opened to you, and the passage to knowledge and wisdom will be wide open to your heart.

This point is to look at this Glorious Book as an educational one, a teaching book by which you should be benefited, regarding it your duty to learn from it. By learning, teaching, benefiting and being benefited we do not mean its different literary, syntactical and morphological aspects, nor its eloquence and rhetoric and other stylistic points, nor being interested in its stories, tales and episodes from the historical point of view in order to get information about the past nations.

None of these is included in the objectives of the Qur'an, and they are, in fact, far away from the main objective of this divine Book. The fact that our advantage from this great Book is quite small is because we usually do not take it to be a book of teaching and education. We recite the Qur'an just for its reward. So, we pay attention only to our intonation when reciting it.

We want our recitation to be perfect and correct so as to obtain its reward, and then we stop at that and feel satisfied with it. Thus, we spend some forty years reciting the Qur'an without being benefited by it, except the reward for reciting it.

If we do look at its teaching and educational side, we concern ourselves with its eloquence and syntax and its miraculous aspects, or even somewhat higher, we engage ourselves with its history, the occasions of the revelation of the āyah s, the times of their revelation, which sūrah or āyah was revealed in Mecca and which in Medina, the differences in recitations and in the exegeses of the Sunnis and the Shī'ah and other secondary affairs which are outside the main objective and they themselves cause us to be barred from the Qur'an and to neglect remembering Allah.

Even our great commentators of the Qur'an are very much concerned about one or another of the said affairs, without opening the door of learning to the people. The writer believes that so far no tafsīr [exegesis] has yet been written to the Book of Allah.