The Honour Owed to the Book of Allah

To listen when the Qur'an is being recited is farḍ kifāyah: if it is being read, speaking over it is not permitted. There is no comparison at all between the words of Allah and any other speech, exactly as there is no comparison between Allah and His creation. Yet Muslims today have the Qur'an as a ringtone, ringing even in the toilet — a disgusting state of affairs; the plot has been lost, and no respect for the Qur'an remains. A favourite reciter may sound beautiful — al-Ḥudhayfī, say — but not in the toilet, and not as a ringtone on a telephone, and many of the current scholars hold this use to be absolutely unlawful. Great care is needed here. The Qur'an is the Book of Allah, not an mp3 song, not a tune to be used and abused at will; and anyone who wishes to know the state of their relationship with Allah should first examine their relationship with the Book of Allah, for where respect for His Book is present, Allah gives everything.

There is a legendary account, told as such, of ʿUthmān Ghāzī (may Allah have mercy on him), the founder of the Ottoman state, a simple shepherd from a nomadic tribe, who came once to his shaykh's house and was given a room for the night in which a copy of the Qur'an hung upon the wall. He did not sleep at all; in the morning the bed was found untouched. Asked what had happened, he explained that he could not bring himself to stretch his legs out before the Qur'an, out of respect for it, and had instead spent the night reading it through. Such regard for the Qur'an stands in sharp contrast to its treatment today, when it is tossed aside wherever convenient — from which refuge is sought with Allah. The Qur'an deserves the greatest respect that can be given it, being the Book of Allah and the words of Allah, and one's relationship with it is worth establishing and examining closely.