trigger warning this book triggers me this this translation is extremely awful uh and I don't say that lightly I mean this is an extremely awful translation it should never have been published of course when people come into the library there's a question that they always ask let me ask it so you've read all these books right so so um how isran different from and are they is a subset [Applause] ofum we are here in the quranic studies library in my home uh this is my personal Library which I have built up over some years and still building uh and it's also a library which I make available for researchers as much as I can and step by step getting more people inshallah to benefit from it uh through IB asur Center and broadly through all those who benefit through Bay Quran Foundation quran.com all sorts of places where the benefits of these books dissipate um and this is this is where they are stored and where the energy is held in potential aldah so I wanted this opportunity to talk walk through with my good friend Norman and uh explore what is in these books and what value they hold how they're useful how they're relevant and lots of other practical things that people wonder about when it comes to uh sourcing books and different editions and what to look for and how to get the most out of what you buy kind of happened Without You realizing it or did you intentionally want to have a library well it started off as obviously uh when going to seek knowledge studying abroad um especially when I had time to be longer periods abroad like studying in Egypt um yes more and more I need the books to to cover the topics that I'm studying so you get books that are given to you by your teachers or assigned to you specifically and then you see things that are relevant to that and important to that so especially in Egypt I would wander out into the bookstores round about Alazar and actually I do a bit like what we're doing here is I just look at things and take my time and just go through the shelves and thumb through the individual works and volumes I just allow myself to be curious about the titles you know and and there's so many things that just when you read the title you think oh a book a whole book just about that right right about that letter in the Quran there's a whole book which is like two volumes three volumes that's right or just on the ba or just on Ma or just on right so you realize that actually this Quran has so many Sciences it's oceans are so vast that there's so many things to say about it and even when you write the book about it it's not the last word on that subject right so yeah it happened gradually um I think you know plenty of dream about assembling a whole Library as it were but that came step by step I didn't rush to get these multivolume ones yeah and in fact I am you know I'm I'm very proud of my books alhamdulillah you know like people are proud of things in this dun this is a bit of the dun but at least it's connected to the I don't have a collection of fast cars but I've got some of the best books out there but some of these things you know you can be proud of this fancy Edition the best Edition sometimes people know oh that's an expense you're fancy you know you spent some money on that one yeah um but a lot of the times people Rush as well to fill up their shelves with these massive multivolume things yeah the things that I'm often more proud of than that is some of the small things that you your eye won't even catch um because I know for every book in this Library the story of where I found it when I found it why I picked it up why I bought it my impressions of it now of course when people come into the library there's a question that they always ask but let me ask it h so you've read all these books right so so um I would love to be able to say that I've read all the books but that's not how it works um you know I sometimes people talk about a library and they talk about an anti- library to me an anti library is a library but what they mean by that is it's a it's shelves full of things that you haven't read so that you look at them and you aspire to read them and you get run to them eventually or in other words it's a reference library right there are some things that I've read covered to cover I've thoroughly rinsed and which uh thoroughly rinsed me or you know at least let's say affected my thinking um and even some of those things I go back to some years later and open it up and I and I've forgotten that I've read it and then I see all the underlines and the notes and the scribbles and the questions and the frustrations that I've wrote in the margins because I do write in my books by the way I don't actually mind that I do it in pencil but I ever find something funny I'll write LOL and if if I find something if I have a question I'll write the question in the margin um and then later on if I find the answer to that question I'll I'll go back and write it under the question right because it might be within the same book I'm asking oh but what's he going to say about this other thing and then when I find it some pages later I'll say oh I'll go back and say well look on page 89 he talks about it there so you cross reference the books and you develop a relationship with them and I think relationship is a nice way to think about life with books um so yeah it's something the unappreciated children sometimes are the ones that secretly you love the most or I'm most proud of just finding something random that I know like nobody's got so there's going to be a lot of things here which if you find them interesting you'll be able to Google and find someone that's selling it you might find that somebody has scanned it and there's a PDF available I don't know please don't ask me if if the PDFs exist I don't know because the fact that I've got the physical book means I don't care about the PDF of these books we about PDFs of books that you know I I don't have space for I didn't have a chance to acquire in in physical form but there's a certain La there is there's an enjoy there definitely is um from the physical but not just that even in terms of just how my brain works personally yeah if I'm reading PDFs I just can't really retain I don't have that relationship so I I I just cannot benefit from PDFs I found myself engaging with books similar ways like the same books that are many of these accessible online it's not the same kind of read when you're sitting there and just pouring over the page yeah and even just the sense of you know the right page and the left Page yeah you can try to recreate it digitally but you know this is at the start of the book this is at the end of the book if I'm looking for something I just somehow it'll be buried in my brain that it was over here somewhere and it was this yeah then I might be able to find the little Mark that I've made to relocate something because I don't take very good notes that's well we have that in common but I do it I do it in the books to some extent and uh and gained some experience in doing that so it began to work well for me the reason I couldn't take good notes is because so many thoughts are crossing my mind and it's just too much to write all that down so it slows you down it slows you down so you just write a word or two hoping that that will trigger the memory of the entire thought process yeah that it represents yeah I mean uh one thing I would say is that I I did sometimes see would uh get very excited about like lists of books you know the must have books and then go and just splurge and and buy everything and then later on either regret it or just not know that they possibly should regret it um because they might buy something based on hearing a rumor that such and such is the best Edition right but they're not equipped to read that book yet by the time they get around to it in 10 years a much better Edition has come out right so these kind of things I tried to avoid I waited well when it was in Egypt Alazar I waited till you know mostly it was in the last year that I did my big purchases of the big heavy things that were going to be have to shipped um I mean this isn't the whole of my library but this is the largest part of it inshah we'll see other parts um but also my personal library is heavily weighted towards quranic studies in unusual so I would say two-thirds of my books are in quranic studies one way or another and onethird is in everything elsei all sorts of things but um you you know alhamdulillah that's plenty as well but it's not anything compared to how much I have in quranic studies so when that was shipped from Egypt it was around a ton uh a ton of books that was shipped so you're not saying that as a figure of speech no it was it was about 1,000 kilogram yeah so I wouldn't have wanted to fill that with stuff that I didn't really want because you have to pay for for these things to uh to make their way here um so yeah I I'm fairly confident with what I bought this some important ters for example that I wish I had but I wasn't satisfied with the addition that's available so I've held off and and then some we're going to talk about that when we get there like what does to have insh additions that are satisfactory versus not right right but our plan is to kind of scan through this Library you've kind of broken it up into sections and divid it up and I think it's nice that you know you know our intention for doing this was to expose audiences uh students but also just the general public of the kinds of steady sections or stud areas that are uh that Quran students and Quran Scholars are engaged in because on the one hand it can seem really intimidating because it's too large of a world and on the other hand some people just say you know what forget scholarship I'll just read the translation and figure it out myself and those are both extremes um as if there's no further intellectual exercise needed who cares about scholarship and on the other hand you're equipped to do nothing Leave It All To the scholars so those are the two extremes but I think it's important for you know let's start talking about the the the general public I think the average Muslim should know that the Quran offers a remarkable amount of depth and people spent their entire lives trying to explore one area of its depth or another or another and so that's one of the things that hopefully will come out of this a sense of hum and also I think it gives us an appreciation that we belong to a a Heritage of so many Souls that dedicated their entire lives contemplating Allah's book in one way or the other right and that's just how much it has to offer this is they're not all saying the same thing there's no they're not redundancies there's overlap but these are actually unique strands of thought and exploration and some go right back to the earliest phases of of the umah yeah and some are very recent yeah um and then even the recent work sometimes is doing kma or service of the earlier works and representing them packaging them summarizing them and so on so it's an ongoing activity and this shows the directions that further study can take you know in all of these things and and Beyond so I mean this this book here this is a bit out of date now this is counting the uh works that have been published in Arabic in the field of quranic studies up until 2009 so so so from the earliest from the earliest but but bear in mind that this is referring to anything in the the era of publishing as opposed to things that are in manuscript form and so on so that's been happening since the early but only publishing means once the printing press exists got now we have published T um and published Quran books or whatever so I like this you know I I bought this um just again sort of to to be able to appreciate the breadth of of different subjects that are covered in the study of the Quran yeah and you know then then this other one is University papers yeah up until 2004 this is um specifically University dissertations uh Masters and PhD thesis and you know in Arabic only yeah this is in the this would be within Arab universities I should think um so so these are very nice but they're very out of dat now that's up until 200 2009 and 2004 yeah yeah so obviously there's much much more um I would imagine we were just um speaking with professor abdan in Marcus in and we had this preview of uh a new electronic database that they're going to launch yeah um which is going to Encompass you know all pretty much any paper out there any yeah other languages and so they were talking to us about trying to help with some of the languages especially English but the more that that database gets populated the more also that people are able to access resources so if anyone you know Muslim researcher non-muslim researcher whoever is looking at a particular topic they should be aware of everything that exists that is relevant to it yeah right because a lot of time it happens and I might point out a few books that I've seen where it happens in the introduction the author says and nobody ever has written anything and literally on the Shelf I have two or three other works that are exactly the same it's not just authors that say that you know I get emails like that brother I have discovered something about this Ayah that no one has ever yeah discovered or I know something about the Quran or about whatever else so yeah but in a more academic sense there are people that uh make claims like this it was interesting that even at the EXA convention that you were just at at the end um one of the concluding comments by you know the organizers where next time you submit your papers researchers please uh submit a bibliography because many of you act like nobody's ever talked about this subject before and you're the first one to deal with it uh please site your sources yeah yeah and and just that's a discipline that you're taught in Academia and you know it it belongs to True Elm as well right that you should uh that you should have a sense of the the isnad for what you're saying or let's say all things that preceded you in this that led to you being able to say what you say that way you have a sense of adding to knowledge right you're coming at the end of it um right so I think the first topic then in a way relates to this broad introduction that we're talking about which is the subject of Quran so my let's define that first Quran is okay I'm sure there's like a proper definition but a basic definition is all the The Sciences and areas of study that pertain to the Quran so when we Define it in that way then you could say everything in Myan is in Quran um but there is a genre of works that are titled as Quran okay which in that way are attempting to be encyclopedic um so in terms of this is not in chronological order but in terms of encyclopedic works the first one that qualifies for that is here of so this is chronologically the earliest in terms of those works that attempted to gather all the subjects in so like when you say it's encyclopedic that can sound a little vague let's just even though you're not going to be comprehensive like a short list of some of the topics that Quran text would cover what would they be so before this period before you have a Zari and then we have right you had plenty of individual books which talked about certain Sciences so these are some works that precede them um but this is also it's called of abush now the thing is this one you can see is much smaller and this is much older this is um yeah this is three centuries before uh Su two centuries before oh wow R roughly speaking so science is related to the so this it's not very big uh we also have um I think Al's book cf's book somewhere in my in my collection here so these also yeah this is a she of uh ATI but again it's smaller so it's telling you this less things been covered and in Le in less depth right so by the time you get to ATI he and know he took the Buran and numerous other works this whole book here about the sources of what is it yeah so so is very common in Islamic universities and yeah as a as a primer for you know Quran is you know is at the same time quite an advanced book uh you've translated a good chunk of it haven't you I translated a quarter of this book yeah so it has the first volume which was translated this called the perfect guy to The Sciences of the Quran but but trigger warning this book triggers me this this translation is extremely awful uh and I don't say that lightly I mean there's plenty of translations that I would have some criticisms of but this is an extremely awful translation it should never have been published and in fact the the Publishers know that I've told them but others have told them as well um so I do not recommend to buy this but if you see a volume two buy that one because that one is my uh my work uh but that's that's not out at the the time we're speaking uh but volume two spans from chapters 36 to 42 so I mean in terms of the the subjects covered I mean we this could be useful just for the page yeah um no it's not because it just says chapter one chapter two oh my God but I mean off the top of your head I mean what thinking about so so we we're talking about um how the Quran was revealed okay we're talking about how it was collected and preserved we're talking about the readings of the Quran and the recitation of the Quran that is roughly the things that are covered in in volume one in volume one here okay and the one you translated what kinds of things did it deal with so then from chapters 36 to 42 which is what I did is mostly to do with uh issues of language so Quran is like uncommon vocabulary vocabulary so so clarifying those and then words that are from outside the hiji dialect or outside or they come from outside the Arabic language so we call those lone words in linguistics right so things that were assimilated into the Arabic language but came from other languages uh such as Greek such as abian such as um Parian and so on right so there are these things are covered and then um lots of aspects of the intricacy of how quranic language Works chapter 4 in particular is called so it goes through every B the L all these different things right you know and it's it's the largest chapter of of the law in this section and and it goes into how they're used in in multiple ways and that's all extracted from another book we'll see called sorry and the chapter that comes after is about which is also from that book Byam and then there's some more rules pertaining to plurals and relating to pronouns and related to gender and all sorts of things not not in these modern subjects but from a linguis listic point listic point of view yeah so so it's kind of a primer here are the important subject matters that revolve around the study of the Quran before you engage Quran itself here are some key things that an academic student should know in fact it's not even an introduction it is the Source book that has gathered uh like up until the time of he he he died in 911 I don't mean on September 11th I mean 911 of the Hijra he died um so that is is is a good 500 uh years ago so obviously things have happened since then but so book Al remains and this is a one volume Edition uh Remains the one that is is is still most important so there's lot probably works that are coming out after that are probably building upon built on yeah so you something about this book right yeah so I used to have a hard cover copy of this book uh it was the first Arabic book I ever bought um because it was on sale and it was $7 and it was used and I was like o an Arabic book it says Quran on it I couldn't even read the calligraphy that at the time and then when my Arabic got to a certain intermediate not even beginner upper Beginner level I used to bother our Imam at the Masjid in Long Island in Bayshore to uh help me read it because I you know this was the first book I tried to read without harat so we got through four pages and he gave up on me but yeah we did we get through four pages though and I read those four pages like 50 times over and over again just to get the flow and yeah that's good actually to do that that's that's it's important to actually go over things that was myran book I was like yeah I read four pages of an Arabic book well so so this is this is a 20th century work I mean before him we so this is a this is the best you know people ask what's the best edition of that best edition of this there isn't always a clear answer to that question but in some cases there is for this Edition this is not the original this is a kind of ble copy from Egypt but it's theik Edition from Medina and you know the editors have done a tremendous job of getting the text accurate and adding useful footnotes um and some less useful footnotes as well like honestly I don't need someone to tell me that the author's AA is suspect or something I I know that there's points where the different religious schools will differ um so but sometimes they do this as a way of kind of uh sanitizing the work and making acceptable to to their public so that's UMR and then in the 20th century we have in the early 20th century this is by an scholar and uh it is also an important work but so it's the next work that probably is seen as important after ATI how does it differ from AI it's just written in a different style but again it draws heavily upon and other works so it's not it's not like coming from nothing um so there are various others um you know modern Works and's work is is one of those and in fact when we were studying yeah uh we were given a book that was sort of mysterious uh in terms of its sources but I managed to figure out that some of it was lifted directly from this one and some was lifted directly from the zuran I see and it was s patched together so last question for you on this um how is different from and are they is a subset ofum Quran or is it a separate science Al together so I mean in in what if what I've gathered here as Quran yeah I have a few things that are that are subsets and I don't mind that for example there's a section here about oration okay which is one of the Quran yeah and it's also part of so right so like there's libring is not an exact science for me um you just need to be able to find you have to catalog in a way that Mak sense to you exactly at the end of the day so yeah in in the subject of n this book by Mustafa is fantastic you know a lot of people they just they talk they make very quick judgments about issue like oh there is in the Quran there is in the Quran well until you've read mustfa Z's book I don't think I should comment on is there or in the Quran right because some of these people they've gone into detail and they've gathered the data which then allows you to make I've got various books that are denying agregation several books denying agregation um in English and Arabic it's not uncommon for people to say it for example there's no abreg in the Quran but you know you can come at that from a purely theoretical angle or you can wrestle with you know the actual case studies the data as such yeah and the case studies um so one of the subsets of course and within you know right at the end of's book we have got some chapters about what is and then some of the history of right categories of them uh yeah and sort of their their history and the progression of them over time as well um but I you know and I would call the principles of interpretation as a subset of Quran right um and really a science on its own and a science on its own um but of course all the quranic Sciences are Sciences on their own right but the thing is that um I would say not everything in Quran is pertinent to in a direct way a lot of it is and some specifics like for example the portion ofan that you translated that mostly dealt with linguistic issues is heavily related yeah hugely relevant to the Ser studies yeah and it's the kind of thing that you know a lot of these things as well like you might think why translate them is it doesn't make sense to translate I I agree with that critique but having translated that what sort of emerged is has become a kind of Quran translation manual in right because because specifically by translating the parts about quranic Linguistics and showing what has to happen in English to correspond to the points being now a Quran translator can use that to understand you know how to handle these types of materials uh when they see men in the Quran what are the different possibilities they're not just you know they should read it in Arabic but in addition they can see well ah there's a Min that means from there's a Min that means made of a Min that means because among Min that means because of yeah there's all sorts of means yeah that means IE that means IE yeah B so yeah so these are things which um typically doesn't come out in in Translation right right and actually sometimes translators butcher things like me oh yeah or they just write from everywhere yeah and English Creeks under that pressure of trying to use from in all these meanings right yeah so yeah after that I guess I do come on to and from here it becomes I see there's a kind of a transitional period here in the in the Shelf where um I I have some things to do with um well this section here is is what you could call actually I want to have a separate discussion with you about them yeah I think we should wrap this one up here I'll pull them out let's discuss them yeah Salam everyone it's Dr suib here you've had the chance to look inside my library now I'd love to take you inside some of what I've learned from there especially in the flagship project of the Aban as Center which is distilling the insights of a great muf Muhammad we have a special course for you on Surah Yasin I'd love you to get involved I'd love you to benefit from our new translation and commentary on the Quran head over to i.com Academy to find out more