“Sa Nurehimbaayatena, filafaq, wafeanfasahum, hatayatabayana la hum, inulhaq.” “We will show them Our signs in the universe, and in their own selves, until it becomes manifest to them that this (the Quran) is the truth.”(Surah Fussilat-53)
QUR’AN is a wondrous book that calls you to guidance.
This is the book if you judge; by it, you will be just. If you speak by it, you will be truthful. If you act according to it, you will be rewarded. If you call to it, you will be guided to a straight path. It is a protection to whoever clings to it and safety and surety to the one who follows it.” Hamza Yousaf God is at once Truth and Reality; the word Ḥaqiqah, which is related to the Divine Name al-Ḥaqq, means both truth and reality. This Ḥaqiqah manifests itself everywhere in the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic world. The verses of the Qur’an are calledayat, so that it can be said that the Muslim breathes in a Universe, in which the vestigia di (ayat Allah) are manifested everywhere. God has left His “signature” upon all things in a language, whose key is provided by Revelation.
“Religion fosters consciousness, which functionally regarded aims at inducing the believer to transcend his animal nature, or reach what for want of a better expression may be called a higher kind of life, a life that is, as the Qur’an puts it, ‘khayrunwaabqa’ better and eternal. No wonder then that the Qur’an calls itself by yet another, but a well-known name, al-Furqan (the discernment) for the good reason that here the revelation is geared to the master purpose of showing the establishment of a hierarchy of values. This can serve as a criterion for putting everything in its proper place and as a general basis for drawing conclusions. It does not only distinguish between right and wrong, orthodoxy and error, truth and falsehood, religion and paganism, it also makes a distinction, within the domain of orthodoxy, between those ‘who press eagerly forward, the foremost (muqarabun) and those who observe a certain moderation in their worship.”
Qur’an is also known as al-Huda, the Guide, since it contains the knowledge that the Muslim must possess in order to stay on the straight path (al-Ṣiraṭ al-mustaqim) and become aware of God’s Will as it concerns him. The Qur’an is also the umm al-kitab(the Mother of Books) since it is the prototype of all ‘books,’ and since the roots of all knowledge is contained in the eternal Qur’an. Another name of the Qur’an is dhikr Allah, ‘remembrance of God.’ The Qur’an is itself the reminder of God’s Truth and Presence and to recite it is to remember God.
“By divine design, the Qur’an will confront your ego, challenge your subjective truths, rub against resistance to surrender and shatter your limiting picture of who you are and who God is. By its very nature, parts of Qur’an will trigger you, because revelation is like a pure mirror. You see in it what you bring to it. If you come with hatred and separation, you will have hatred of your heart reflected back to you. If you come reflecting divine qualities of love, mercy, kindness and Majesty,you will experience a taste of God’s beauty,” writes A Helwa in ‘The Secrets of Divine Love.’ The words of Qur’an acts like spiritual flashlight that extinguishes the darkness of the moral and spiritual evil and purifies the soul. Just like the seed cannot become a tree, until it breaks its shell and lets the light in, we cannot be fully be transformed by the Qur’an healing power unless we remove the veils, which separate our hearts from God.
The mystics of Islam draw their inspiration from the word of God (Qur’an) and the very being of the Prophet (PBUH). Their poetry and stories are filled with both direct and indirect references to scripture. Only the Sufis have in fact been able to cast aside the veil of this celestial bride, which is the Qur’an, in order to reveal some of her beauty, which it hides from the eyes of those who are strangers to her. The Sufis speak of ‘seeking to be drowned’ (istighraq) in the verses of the Qur’an, which are, one of the most fundamental doctrines of Islam. What they are seeking is to use another Sufi term, extinction (fana) of the created in the uncreated, of the temporal in the Eternal, of the finite in the Infinite; and the recitation of the Qur’an has been throughout life, their chief means of concentration upon God, which is itself the essence of every spiritual path.
The Prophet (PBUH) said that every verse of the Qur’an has ‘an outside and an inside.’ As to the ‘outside’ of the verses in question, the exoteric ‘straight path’ is the path of not deviating from the law of Islam. On one occasion, when returning from a battle against the infidels, the Prophet (PBUH) said, “We have come back from the lesser Holy War to the Greater Holy War.” When asked, “What is the Greater Holy War?” He answered, “The war against the soul.” The Greater Holy War is an aspect of Sufism and it concerns none, but the Sufis. Qur’an says:- ‘Wage war on the idolaters totally and elsewhere. Fight them until there is no longer any sedition and religion is all for God.’(Sura 9:36). Maulana Rumi the luminous sage of radical love whose Masanvi stands out as an epic in Islamic spirituality unveils the beauty of the Qur’an. This unveiling is both sensual and intellectual. The metaphor is quite literally one of unveiling a bride at the night of union before achieving oneness to yield the infinite layers of inner meaning filled with pleasure, wonder and beauty. Rumi when his heart opened upand his being “burst through the seven worlds,” words of pearl-like wisdom and beauty flowed out of him. The very act of reading scripture and reading one’s own heart becomes a pursuit of pleasure and discovery. It is believed that Masanvi is Qur’an in Persian, as out of 60,000 verses, 6000 are direct interpretations of Quran.
—The writer is author of six books including “Islamic Spirituality and Mysticism, the Path and destination’ & ‘The Philosophy of Rumi and its relevance in the Present Times.
