It is Finished

Salam brothers and sisters,
I completed the reading of the entire Qur'an last night. Interestingly, I finished it the night before my big job interview which will involve one the biggest decisions I have made in my life. I have been offered a job as executive assistant to the head of a very respected company in Beverly Hills, California.

As I mentioned in a prior post, I set out to read all of the Qur'an. I finally finished it and it feels great to have taken that step. It helped me to get a more pure idea of what Islam is all about. Before reading all of the Qur'an, I had read many individual verses and chapters out of context, which was helpful and insightful, but I felt I was missing something by not first reading all of the Qur'an in order to get the whole picture. After reflecting on it, I realized there were many misconceptions I had about Islam.

Although the Qur'an is a very long book, it is written in a way that when you read all of it, you get the main tenants of Islam stamped into your heart. This is probably because it is very repetitive. Much of the Qur'an is just repetitions of a small group of main themes. It was different from the bible in that when you read all of the bible all the way through, you remember bits and pieces but since not much is repeated in the same way and it contains so many detailed stories and messages, it does not stick in your mind except for some key stories or strong verses. While when you read the Qur'an from start to finish, the messages are carried and interconnected throughout the entire course of the book, so you can bring up with pretty precisely certain key elements of Islam.

Some of the themes that are touched upon very repetitively in the Qur'an are:

• Salat
• Zakat
• Not ascribing partners to Allah
• Paradise
• The Disbelievers
• The People of the Book (Jews, Christians, Muslims)
• The Pious
• The story of Moses and the Pharaoh
• The story of Nuh (Noah)
• The Story of Lut (Lot)
• The importance of belief in one God and good deeds
  
• God knows what we do in secret and in public
• God is merciful
• Repentance
• A story about a she-camel
• Those who reflect
  

At any rate, these are just some of the topics off the top of my head from my memory. I was not expecting the Qur'an to be this way. I expected it to be more like the bible with millions of different messages, parables, and stories, each surah very different from the next. Yet, in a way, the repetitive messages throughout the suwar just seem to be a system for how the Qur'an is put together and to express key points about Islam with consistency so we truly grasp them. While on the surface, many of the suwar may contain similar messages, they each have a different angle and a wealth of many messages if one just reflects. I think that is the difference between one who just reads to read or just skims the surface of life, and one who truly reflects and digs deeper.