Etiquette With The Quran


The Tibyan About the Book
Without argument, Imam al-Nawawi is one of the most well known scholars and spiritual masters in Muslim history. He was a consummate scholar of several disciplines, including law, Prophetic traditions, Quran exegesis, and grammar. His works and profound personal circumspection have inspired millions of believers on spiritual and intellectual planes. He was born in Greater Syria, where he also died in 1277 at the age of 45.

The Foreword of Sh. Nuh Ha Mim Keller:
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 li 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 tawhidor 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.

Nuh Ha Mim Keller
Amman
10 June 2003


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First nine copies are signed by Sidi Musa Furber!

Etiquette with the Quran
by Imam al-Nawawi (230pp)
translated by Musa Furber

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