Ramadan and
the Qur’an
by Asim Ahmad
Sometimes, having too many choices and options can
lead to indecisiveness. This is precisely what happened to
Ayesha j. “If I knew which night Laylat al-Qadr was, what
du‘a would I make to maximize the blessings of this night?”
she would ponder. From hundreds of du‘a to choose from,
it should not have been a complicated task. But, that was
precisely the problem. Because she knew so many du‘a,
it was difficult for her to decide which du‘a to make on
the night that was equal to a thousand months (97:3). She
finally turned the matter over to the blessed Prophet a and
asked, What du‘a should I recite if I knew which night was
Laylat al-Qadr?”
He replied, “Oh Allah, You are ‘Afw and love ‘Afw. Please
forgive me” (Tirmidhi).
We face a similar situation when Ramadan is upon us. We
have many devotions, different types of worship, and ways
to please Allah, but when the time comes, we never set
upon any form of devotion and tend to vacillate between
one type of worship or another. This is not necessarily
a bad thing, however, because we don’t have a default
devotion to turn to that creates the impetus for us to utilize
our time wisely, we end up wasting the opportunities of
free time between our work hours and salat times doing
little or absolutely nothing. In addition, our focus remains
scattered and we cannot create realistic goals of what we
want and expect to achieve in the month of Ramadan.
When goals are not created, there is no motivation to do
any particular thing and a worshipper becomes a prisoner
of his/her whim and does what he/she likes. If a person
does not have a set goal at any given moment, that time is
wasted. As a result, the spiritual needs of a believer are not
met, the batteries of iman are not charged, the benefits and
blessings of the blessed month are not maximized, and
most importantly, we hardly ever set a routine of worship
in Ramadan.
Looking back on the lives of our pious predecessors, the
scholars, and the Auliya of our time, we find that they
engrossed themselves in a variety of devotions throughout
Ramadan, but the central worship that defined their
Ramadan, provided impetus for them to maximize their
time, and which almost invariably formed the nucleus of
all other devotions, was the recitation of Qur’an.
I will briefly write about the rigorous routines and diligence
of our predecessors in completing the Qur’an, but it is
16 March - April 2020 | AL-MADINAH