up in the American public school system. While education was foremost in our house, my siblings and I never attended Sunday school. At that time, Islamic schools, immersion programs, and podcasts were not widely available. My parents raised us with a solid foundation in Quran and Islamic history. However, as we grew older, most of the books in our house were limited to English transla-
Companion — the most dedicated to help, and the most eager to learn. By the time I began residency, weekend intensive programs and audio lectures by Muslim American scholars were just starting to blossom. Hamza Yusuf, a young American convert who had studied in Mauritania, was gaining popularity in the West as an American voice of classical Islamic scholarship. I
THE DRAMATIC CULTURAL GAP AND HECTIC PACE OF THE 21ST CENTURY HAS LEFT MANY MUSLIMS DEPRIVED OF AN INTIMATE AND INSPIRING RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PROPHET.
The dramatic cultural gap and hectic pace of the 21st century has left many deprived of an intimate and inspiring relationship with the Prophet. For many, including myself, this has left us feeling disconnected from the Quran. I have seen others moved to tears by its verses, and yet somehow I have always felt a certain distance, separated by the Quran’s language and historical context. As a non-Arabic speaking Muslim, I felt that the English translations had kept the Book’s true meaning and majesty out of my reach. My understanding of the story of revelation (also known as the Seerah) was no different. Growing up in suburban America, I encountered a huge gap between my world and seventh century Arabia. Neither an Islamic scholar, nor an amateur historian, I am the son of immigrants, born and raised in New Jersey and who grew
tions of traditional Urdu and Arabic texts … not the kind of material most teenagers wanted to read. I was frustrated because my pursuit of the Quran and Seerah had stalled while I continued to excel at advanced coursework in high school and college. Unable to attend a language immersion program in college, I felt as though the prospect of learning Arabic was out of my immediate reach. Meanwhile, I struggled to learn the historical context of the Quran. The Islamic books I read at home were completely different than the textbooks I studied in school. Having learned to use diagrams, tables and glossaries, I was struggling to remember Islamic history from page after page of translated English text. The books felt devotional rather than scholastic. Books on Islam written by Western authors were limited — many lacked academic authority and others were mired in orientalism. What I lacked during those formative years was an efficient study guide of classical texts; something that could present the historical context of the Quran in a format I could study, analyze, memorize, and master. Life in America doesn’t leave much in the way of free time, and medical school took that to the extreme. Four years later, I was feeling lopsided and restless. How does a busy professional make the Quran an integral part of his life? After struggling with this question for years, I imagined what it would be like to be a Companion of the Prophet. After all, his first followers did not read the Quran, but experienced it — rich in context — as it unfolded in front of them. Perhaps, my best chance at understanding the Quran lay in re-living the story of its revelation as the Prophet’s closest
ISLAMIC HORIZONS JULY/AUGUST 2015
purchased a copy of his 24-CD audio collection, “The Life of the Prophet,” and began listening to his lectures while I commuted to work. Rich with authentic narrations and Quranic references, Yusuf provides a classical exposition of Martin Lings’ renowned biography, “Muhammad: His Life based on the Earliest Sources” (2006). As I was listening to the fifth CD, I heard him pause in the middle of his lecture and expose the very problem we Americans having been facing: “This book … a lot of people find it difficult because of the names … it is a problem … and you know what would be really nice? If somebody actually went through the book, wrote down all the names, and then had a glossary of names. You could kind of keep that with you as you read the book. That would be really useful…” I had been reading Lings’ book at the time and, as Yusuf suggested, started writing down all of the names I encountered: names of people, their ancestors, their parents and their offspring, and various tribes, clans, battles, treaties, and towns. At first, the sheer volume of names, places, and dates left me feeling hopelessly resigned that I would never truly master the material. After all, how does one keep track of 20 men who are all named “‘Abd Allah?” But as the list of names grew, my old habits from medical school reemerged. As a student, I knew how to consolidate multiple sources of information, reduce it to succinct notes and diagrams, organize it into an efficient study guide, and use it to master the original texts. As I started to get a handle on the basic storyline, a number of questions occurred to me that I simply couldn’t ignore. For example: 27