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    Key to al-Fatiha: Understanding the Basic Concepts
    Key to al-Fatiha: Understanding the Basic Concepts
    Key to al-Fatiha: Understanding the Basic Concepts
    Ebook75 pages56 minutes

    Key to al-Fatiha: Understanding the Basic Concepts

    By Abdur Rashid Siddiqui

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    About this ebook

    Based on valuable material from authentic tafasir in Arabic and Urdu, the book provides a thematic study of Surah al-Fatihah. A commendable work, meeting the mindset and intellectual needs of the English-speaking young generation of Muslims in the West.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Islamic Foundation
    Release dateFeb 15, 2014
    ISBN9780860375272
    Key to al-Fatiha: Understanding the Basic Concepts
    Author

    Abdur Rashid Siddiqui

    Abdur Rashid Siddiqui is the author of numerous popular books on Islam, including: Treasures of the Qur'an; Tazkiyah: The Islamic Path of Self-Development; and Qur'anic Keywords: A Reference Guide. He gained an honours degree in Economics and Politics from the University of Bombay and has a law degree from the same university. He completed his postgraduate study in Librarianship in London and was elected an Associate of the Library Association. He worked as an Information Librarian at the University of Leicester from 1966 until his retirement in 1997.

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      Book preview

      Key to al-Fatiha - Abdur Rashid Siddiqui

      Preface

      Thankful praise be to Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful for sending down His Blessed Book for the guidance of human beings. Peace and Blessings be on our beloved Prophet who conveyed the Message of Allah to humanity. I feel very humble that one who is so deficient in knowledge and good deeds should undertake this immense task of explaining the vocabulary of the Glorious Qur’ān. Yet I feel that there is a need for such work. Furthermore, I hope that those who are more knowledgeable and competent will provide their valuable comments and suggestions to help improve this effort.

      Every science and discipline has its own vocabulary and terminology. A person lacking familiarity with the technical words used to expound that science will fail to grasp the essence of the message conveyed. The Holy Qur’ān revealed by Allah, Subḥānahū wa Ta‘alā,¹ is the guidance for mankind until eternity. It was revealed in the Arabic language at a particular time during mankind’s history. Those living in the West today, in different cultural and linguistic traditions, who try to understand it and reflect upon it without an adequate knowledge of Arabic, are really handicapped in reaching the essence of its message.

      Translations help in overcoming language barriers, but no matter how faithfully accomplished translations can never capture the true meaning and import of the ideas of the original. Encountering this very difficulty, one of the eminent translators of the Holy Qur’ān into English, Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall, frankly admitted in his Foreword to the Meaning of the Glorious Koran that The Koran cannot be translated. That is the belief of old-fashioned Shaykhs and the view of the present writer. What Pickthall is trying to convey is that a mere literal rendering, a word for word, will not help the reader understand the true meaning of the Holy Qur’ān. Commentaries (Tafāsīr), to some extent, provide some means of overcoming this problem but unfortunately there are as yet not many good ones available in English.

      To alleviate this problem, I think, explanatory notes on some of the basic keywords employed in the Glorious Qur’ān will be helpful. What do we mean by keywords? How can they help towards a better understanding of the Holy Qur’ān? To answer these questions we need to look at the process by which a language is changed to give ‘new’ meanings to ‘old’ words. The study of any language reveals that words gradually acquire quite different meanings from their original use. For example, words like culture, industry or family used to convey different concepts in earlier centuries than what we mean by them today. This is discussed extensively by a distinguished sociologist, Raymond Williams in his book, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. After the Second World War, when the author was released from the army and returned to Cambridge to resume his studies, he and his old friend noticed the changes in language so much so that it was as if younger students did not speak the same language. He observed: "Yet it had been, we both said, only four or five years. Could it really have changed that much? Searching for examples we found that some general attitudes in politics and religion had altered, and agreed that these were important changes. But I found myself preoccupied by a single word, culture, which I was hearing very much more often…" (p. 12). This led him to the development of Keywords in which he wrote notes on about 125 such

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