Recite, or Read

Back to Basics: Reading the Qur'an

A Prologue, in Song

Sing this with me, the way many of us first learned it:

Ah rice oh come pah troit.
Nah jiryas core low bay.
Tusa our farther land.
With love and strength and faith…

Now sing it as it was written:

Arise, O compatriots,
Nigeria’s call obey.
To serve our fatherland,
with love and strength and faith…

Both are the (former) national anthem in Nigeria. In a school assembly – and the first version is exactly how many young Nigerians sang it for years – you cannot tell the two apart. The sound is the same. The child mumbling the first is no traitor; they are doing something expected of them, something that marks them as Nigerians. In that moment, in a real sense, they are being patriotic.

But notice what kind of patriotism it is. It is mimicry or a ‘performance’ of patriotism. The child is still patriotic in the way anyone raised in any country is patriotic; by identity, by absorption, by being from the place. The anthem is doing nothing to them. The child is not being summoned. On the other hand, the adult who understands the words is being told something – arise, obey the call, serve – and the meaning can reach in and shape them. If the child understood what he/she was singing, that child’s patriotism can be formed by the anthem rather than merely sit alongside it.

And the anthem is in English. It is in a language most speak in schools. The meaning was always accessible; it sat in plain view, and we sang past it. We were content to only make the sound.

Now what we do with a Book in a language most of us do not speak.

Reading is not Reciting

Ask a devout Muslim about their relationship with the Qur’an and they will tell you, sincerely:

• We read the Qur’an.

• We try to read it, cover to cover, as often as we can.

• We try to emulate the Messenger in his relationship with it.

Every line is true. But watch what happens when I change a single word:

• We recite the Qur’an.

• We try to recite it, cover to cover, as often as we can.

• We try to emulate the Messenger in his relationship with it.

The third line did not change, only one word changed in the first and second lines; and that should serve our purpose. Reading is comprehension; reciting in contrast is making a sound. They are two different acts, pointed at two different ends; one toward understanding, the other toward the polishing of a skill. Both can reach mastery in the case of the Qur’an. But one is mastery of understanding God’s words, and the other is mastery of a performance.

When we truly read in the first two lines, the third (emulating the Messenger) becomes reachable, because the Messenger’s relationship with the Qur’an was a relationship with its meaning. When we only recite, the third stays out of reach, however many times we make the journey. And I fear we have quietly traded the verbs: we say read, and we do recite. And somewhere along the way we made the reciting matter more, whatever we claim to believe. The proof is in our relationship with the Qur’an as a culture: we celebrate recitation in a way that undermines reading as if the two are substitutes, making us comfortable when we abandon its meaning.

Is Recitation Enough?

I should be clear that I am not claiming the recitation of the Arabic Qur’an is without value. It is worship; it is rewarded. It has preserved the sound and the text across fourteen centuries in a way no translation could. And an amount of the Arabic recitation is required of every Muslim, since there is no Salah without it. Arabic recitation, on its own, is worship; in the same way that the child making the sound of the anthem is patriotic. But my claim is that it is a lesser engagement with the Qur’an than it appears to be, when the sound in front of the reciter – God’s word, in His voice – is not what informs the reciter of the very message they are reciting. Whatever they understand of that message they recite repeatedly has had to arrive by some other route: a lecture, or the example of those around them. The Book itself, the channel God actually chose to speak to all of us, remains hidden.

We are holding the message in our hands, and receiving it second-hand.

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Iqra

Someone will object to the points made so far with the first word of the revelation itself. Iqra, which is often translated as read or recite. Was the Messenger not commanded to recite? Indeed, Iqra. But which is Iqra; read or recite?

I have come to prefer proclaim to either read or recite as the rendering of Iqra, because proclaim combines both, and adds the thing they are each missing. To read is to comprehend. To recite is to make the sound. To proclaim is to make sound about what you have comprehended; to project your conviction outward until it leaves a mark on the world. Reading without voice stays locked in a single heart. Voice without reading is shallow performance. Proclamation is the union of the two, a voice charged with conviction and aimed at affecting beyond ourselves.

Seen this way, recitation as we practise it is the voice of proclamation, disconnected from its mind and its purpose. We have kept the sound and lost the understanding that was supposed to give the sound something to carry.

And look at what the first revelation says next, once the command is given: your Lord “taught by [means of] the pen, taught man what he did not know” (96:4–5). The opening scene of the Qur’an is a scene of teaching; of knowledge moving from God into a mind that lacked it. The founding command was never “make this sound.” It was “take this in, and carry it out.” It was to proclaim!

Understanding First

I understand the Qur’an as placing reading above recitation. When God speaks about the Qur’an, most of it has to do with understanding and acting on that understanding. God describes the Qur’an as something to be understood, weighed, and pondered. Even where the God mentions the sound of the Qur’an (73:4), He immediately mentions the weight of the word (73:5) and the expected action (73:6); the sound is a vessel for the weighty meaning and expectations of the reader.

God asks: “Will they not contemplate the Quran? Do they have locks on their hearts?” (47:24). The Qur’an was sent down blessed, “for people to think about its messages, and for those with understanding to take heed” (38:29). How can we “contemplate”, or “think” or even “take heed” if we don’t readily access the meaning? God says: “We have made it a Quran in Arabic so that you [people] may understand” (43:3); Arabic so that its first hearers could grasp it, not Arabic as a wall built to keep the meaning in from non-Arabic speakers.

The Medium is Still The Message

For the first community of Muslims, the Qur’an came through two media at once. The first was the Arabic language, and it was their language. They understood the words – what God said – and the words moved them, enraged them, broke and converted them. The second medium was the Messenger himself, living amongst them, embodying the very thing he proclaimed. They had the message and the messenger, and both carried meaning.

For most of us, neither media is accessible to us in the way it was for the first community. The Messenger reaches us through records, from a distant time. And the Arabic is not a language the vast majority of the Muslims understand. It is opaque. It is sound. Therefore, the medium has not changed in absolute terms but our relation to each medium has changed significantly due to time and language barrier.

There is a saying “the medium is the message”: change how a thing is delivered and you change what is in fact received. When the medium is a sound you cannot understand, the message you receive is no longer “here is guidance, understand it and live by it.” It quietly shrinks into “here is a holy sound, perform it well.” The medium has obscured the message.

Finishing without Reading

You can watch this happen every Ramadan. The race to complete one cycle, two, three. Pages turned at speed, the tongue moving without a stumble, the heart set on the reward of finishing. We ask: how many times did I complete the Qur’an this month, but not what did it say? What did God tell me this month? What did I learn from His Book?

For many of us, very little. We completed the Qur’an in Arabic without reading it. We performed it faultlessly and barely met it at all.

You should read a translation instead. But, you may say, the translation is not the Qur’an. It is inferior to the original revelation. It loses the Arabic.

All true. A translation is a window with smudges on the glass. But consider your choices: a spotless window into a dark room via a sound you do not understand; or a smudged window into a bright room, where you can still see the contents, i.e. the meaning. The smudged window still shows you the room. The clear one shows you nothing but your own reflection. The centuries-old tradition of tafsir exists precisely because the meaning is the point; traditionally tafsir is considered superior to tajweed (the art of recitation). To guard the Arabic while ignoring the meaning is to polish the glass and ignore the room behind it.

The Ask

So let me be plain about what I am and am not asking.

I am not asking you to stop reciting. I am not asking you to abandon the Arabic. Keep the Arabic you need for Salah; that is the floor. To elevate from that floor, I am asking for one thing: a reordering. Understanding first. Comprehension before the perfection of pronunciation; the meaning before the melody. For the non-Arab especially, the time to deepen your recitation is after you have met the message, not in place of it.

If your worry is reward – that recitation is rewarded regardless – then the question is what is the aim of the recitation. If the aim is reward through devotion to God to produce the sound of the Qur’an, you are good. If the aim is to also understand what God is saying, ponder it, and embody it, then let’s continue. If your worry is that I am exalting the head over the heart, it is the reverse: comprehension lets the heart be moved by the actual words, instead of running on the shallow religious feeling it would have had anyway; like the mimicked patriotism of the child in a school assembly. Meaning cracks open the heart; it is what gives the heart something specific to break on.

Toward a Walking Qur’an

Return to the two media the first community had: an understood message, and a messenger who had embodied the message. We can recover both in the order they were first given. Comprehension restores the message. And the second loss – a life so shaped by the Qur’an that the character itself proclaims it – only becomes possible after the meaning is in you. The Messenger was called a walking Qur’an by his wife Aisha when asked to describe his character. This is proclamation in its fullest form: not sound alone, but a life that carries what it has understood out into the world and changes the world through it.

There is a path here. An early, intuitive acquaintance with the Book; then a deeper, internalised familiarity; and finally a life that embodies it. But it all begins with comprehension.

So, I will leave you where we began. You can make the sound of the anthem and be carried along by a patriotism you absorbed from the air around you. Or you can hear what it is telling you to do – arise, obey the call, serve – and let it form you.

The Qur’an asks more of us. We were not commanded merely to recite it, nor only to read it in private, but to proclaim it; to understand it, and to make that understanding leave a mark on the world. It is a message, not just a sound.

It is time we read it.

If you are ready to take the first step, I have written about where to begin: a way of reading the Qur’an wide and on the surface that builds what I call Qur’an Intuition. Start here