There Is No Doubt in This Book

There is a further story that illustrates the same point. Both this account and the one before it were narrated directly by the people who lived them. This is the account of an African American student at Berkeley, the University of California at Berkeley. He heard about Islam, but he didn't really know much about it. African Americans tend to know about Islam because they would have relatives who are Muslim, or they would have a mosque next to them — there's a very old tradition of Islam among African Americans in America, so it is usually the case that they have one member of their family, or one friend, who embraced Islam or is a Muslim. So in general, they are more familiar than anybody else in America about Islam. So he knew about Islam, but he didn't know the details about it — he wasn't very interested in it.

He said one day, in the beginning of the semester, he was walking through campus, and a member of the Muslim Student Association was handing out copies of the Qur'an, translations of the Qur'an. "So I picked up a copy, and on my way home, on the bus, had nothing to do, so I opened up this book that was given to me as a gift. I had no idea what it is. And I opened up the first page, which is al-Fātiḥah. I thought that this is an introduction to the book, and who reads introductions? So I flipped the page, and I went straight to the body of the book." Now, the first thing that he would see next is Sūrat al-Baqarah. He said, "I began reading: alif lām mīm. There's no doubt in this book."

No doubts in this book. He said he was shocked by that statement. Usually, when an author writes a book, they start by apologising for their mistakes, apologising for their shortcomings. Here, though, was an author so confident about himself that he stated there was no doubt in his book — and that was the first thing to appear before the reader's eyes. "So I was quite amazed, and I wanted to know: who is the author of this book? I flipped the front cover, didn't see any name. Looked at the back, didn't see any name. I didn't know who wrote this book, and I kept on reading." And then eventually he realised that this wasn't written by man — this comes straight from Allah (ʿazza wa jal).

The power and confidence that meet a reader as soon as the book is opened, he said, made his heart shake, and that, he said, was the reason he became Muslim — just that verse, there's no doubt in this book. Now again, that person who was giving out Qur'ans might be thinking, "Well, nobody's going to read this, I'm just wasting my time, I'll just do it because they asked me to" — because of that Qur'an, this brother became Muslim, and he's an imam, and he's very active in daʿwah, and many people became Muslim through him. And that was the product of a very small effort.