Welcome and Program Overview
Assalāmu ʿalaykum wa-raḥmatu -llāhi wa-barakātuh. Alḥamdulillāh. I want to first express to you how excited and happy I am to see so many of you here. I know that many of you have driven long distances to come and attend this program, and I pray to Allah that He counts all of this as ibādah for Him and that He includes us among those whom the hadith mentions—that the best of you are the ones who learn the Qur'ān and then teach it.
For this entire week, if you are committed to coming the entire week with me, we are going to be studying Sūrat al-Jumu'ah. We will be studying just one sūrah of the Qur'ān, and it is only eleven āyāt. It is not long at all. But even though it is only eleven āyāt, we are going to take a whole week to study this Sūrah. Someone asked me on the way here whether I was going to be very high-level or whether I was going to address the rest of us. I need to address that question directly.
The Balance Between Depth and Simplicity
My job is to study the Qur'ān as deeply as I can and to address some of the hardest questions I can investigate with my team, with other researchers and scholars. That is the easy part of my job. The hard part of my job is to learn all of whatever I can learn, and then to simplify it so that human beings can understand it. Scholars and students often speak a kind of alien language that the rest of us do not understand. I need to make sure that I explain things to you in a way that makes sense to you, that you can grasp.
There are two different things I must balance. One, you want to talk about complicated things, but two, you want to talk about them in simple language. This balance is necessary because life is complicated. There are some complicated things we need to talk about. When people gain more knowledge, they often start using more complicated language—university professor language—and then nobody understands. Those discussions remain in certain circles in society, and everybody else is left out. This is the problem I felt myself, and I feel that pain for all of you. What I try to do in these lectures, inshā'allāh, is yes, we will take a deep look—as deep as I can do, at least. There are still endless oceans left after whatever I am able to do. But whatever I try to do, I will try to simplify as much as possible.
Lecture Format and Break Schedule
I am going to speak to you for about forty to forty-five minutes at a time. The moment I see some of you traveling into the spiritual world—and some of you do this in very creative ways—I will take a break. I will give you guys a break of five to seven minutes. I believe Maghrib is around 9:20, so we have about two hours before Maghrib. Tomorrow onwards, I will start exactly at 7:00 because I want to make the most of the time we have. There will be a five to ten minute break, during which you can come up to me or I can go to that middle area so I can hear from both the brothers and sisters. We can have some conversations and take whatever questions you have. The breaks are dedicated for questions, discussions, and comments. Those are the most valuable times. Pictures can wait—I am here a whole week, we will figure out a system, and we will do all the pictures you need to do. No problem. But in the breaks, I would rather focus on conversations.
Approaching the Qur'ān with Reverence
Now let me tell you what I expect from you this week. I want you to use your imagination. If you walked into a historical palace, an ancient palace, you would see people walking in with their cameras, making videos of every door and every decoration, the ceiling, the windows, the artwork on the wall, the calligraphy—tourists saying, "Oh, this is amazing," because this represents the work of a great king of the past. Just imagine for a moment: every time you enter a Sūrah, you are entering into one of Allah's palaces. This Sūrah from Allah is a gift sent from above the seven heavens to humanity. You are entering something that the world did not have access to. This came from way, way above, and it came as a gift to humanity.
Understanding Qur'ānic Repetition and Unity
What happens in the Qur'ān? If you have even read the Qur'ān in translation, you will know the Qur'ān has a lot of repetition. The Qur'ān talks about Judgment Day, then it talks again about Judgment Day, and again about Judgment Day. The Qur'ān talks about one prophet like Mūsā, then talks about him again and again and again. There are many subjects in the Qur'ān that keep repeating. When we look at that, we say, "Oh, I already know that part. I already read that before. I have seen that before. Show me something new. Where is the cool stuff? Where is the new stuff?" Because we are always into something new, right? And now because of TikTok and Instagram and all this other stuff and YouTube reels, we are addicted to something new. You cannot watch one clip, then see an older clip, and not get annoyed if you see something you have already seen. We have become addicted to newer forms of entertainment.
But the way I want you to think about this—the way I describe this to my students—is that every sūrah is like a palace designed by Allah. There is another palace designed by Allah. They may have similar bricks or they may have similar windows. But does that make them the same palace? No. Are the doors being used exactly in the same way? Is the flow exactly the same? Is the exterior and the interior exactly the same? No. Every bit of art has its own unique identity, does it not? Think of an easier example nowadays. Forget about architecture. Think about cars. There is one manufacturer, clearly a couple of big manufacturers in this town, and they have lots of different models. Those models have a lot in common, do they not? But each model has its own unique identity too, does it not? It has its own features. It is unique in its exterior, interior, mechanics, and technology. There is some variation all the time.
Immersing Yourself in One Sūrah
What I want you to think about when you study the Qur'ān is that you are not trying to study the entire Qur'ān. Just give yourself to one Sūrah. Really, give yourself to one Sūrah. This sūrah is super short—not even two pages. It is really, really short. What I want you to do this week is read this sūrah over and over again. Read it before this lecture. Read it after this lecture. Just read the sūrah and ask yourself: What is Allah saying here? What does He want from me here? What does this mean? Whatever questions come to your mind, start documenting your questions about this Sūrah. The questions I want to discuss with you in this week—I will take some of your other questions too. But I do not want to hear questions about nail polish or halal meat from McDonald's or things like that. Those questions will be there before this program and those questions will be there after this program. But you know what? Let us surrender our questions to the Qur'ān for a week. I am calling it Qur'ān week because I want this to be a week of just Qur'ān for you. You just immerse yourself completely into it.