Surahs in Quran have a unique unit designed by Allah Almighty himself, so when Allah revealed 114 surahs, it’s as if he revealed 114 books. One way of looking at it is 114 books. Yes, each of those surahs can have relationships with each other. You can read an ayah in a surah, and it reminds you of an ayah from another surah that can happen.
It can also be that you’re reading an ayah in a surah and it connects to a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad. ﷺ it can happen that you’re reading an Ayah in the Surah and it connects to something that you may think about from the Bible or from Jewish scripture.
Surahs in Quran and its Beauty
It might be something that connects to world history; it might be something that connects to a phenomenon in nature, something in the skies, something on earth. So the Quran has lots and lots of connections, but one of its fundamental requirements to be understood properly is the fact that Allah put these surahs and these ayat together in one particular surah for a reason; he didn’t just take all of the ayat that are similar and put them all in one place.
He didn’t just take one subject and address it one time, and nowhere else now. This is a pretty amazing thing. First of all, as believers, we take the word of Allah. As he says, it’s Ayat that are stitched together. You know, when stitching happens and you put a cloth together, it’s the same imagery that Allah uses for how the Ayat of a Surah come together.
This convention and its legacy are that there’s a focus on one Surah at a time. Instead of generically saying it’s a convention about the Quran or about a variety of messages from the Quran, this principle is that we must respect where in the Quran this Ayah came from. What is the Surah? What is the message of that Surah? How are all of the Ayat of the Surah that Allah Almighty himself stitched together? How are they making sense together? Before we go outside, we must go inside.
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Because Allah put this inside first and so just that principle becoming so important that an entire year of world Quran, hour session after session, groups dedicated to studying the Surah and contemplating the Surah, and at the end of that entire year, an entire conference one of its main objectives to celebrate the Surah is such a powerful concept, because and I’ll this is the last thing I’ll going to share four things with you. The first of them is that we Muslims forget about non-Muslims.
Muslims tend to underestimate the Surah, and what do I mean by that?
There could be a Surah that was revealed in Makkah; it talks about the there’s another Surah revealed in Makkah; it talks about the there’s another Surah; it talks about, take a guess: there are a few in the Quran they’re talking about; they’re talking about the oneness of Allah or Allah’s creative power; go to another Surah, same subject; another Surah, same subject; now if that happened in a TV show, you would say I’ve already seen this episode; if that happened in a movie, Oh, they’re all the same, and when he opens his mouth and says today, I’m going to talk to you about the Akhirah, you’re like, Here we go again.
I already know this, so there’s a tendency to underestimate what’s happening in the surah because it sounds familiar to other surahs. The problem with that is that what I want you to appreciate is that every Surahs in Quran is a unique castle built by Allah, a unique palace designed by Allah, and yes, when you walk into this palace, it has its own unique locations, its own unique beauty, its own unique walls, windows, arches, and chandeliers, and some of them remind you of another palace, and some of them connect with another.
Also Read: The Reflections of Aziz and Ghafoor in Surah Mulk
But this is it’s own beautiful design; it has it’s own significance. Another way you can think about this is: I will give you some examples. I think most of you are probably familiar with Legos. If you give a hundred pieces of Legos to a creative child and you give same to another child and another child, and you say,
Build Something
Would they build the same thing? “No,” because their creativity is different but they’re made of the same pieces. A painter can give five different world-class painters the same four colors. Here’s a blank canvas. Are they going to come up with the same painting? “No,” but at the end of it, it’s just the same colour, it’s the same canvas, it’s the same paintbrush, but the final product is so different.
The way the colors came together—the way certain things and certain shapes were emphasized over other things—isn’t it? The same way you could say this Surah has an Akhirah, this Surah has an Akhirah, this Surah has taufiq, but the way Allah Almighty paints them together, the way Allah takes those same elements and puts them together every time, is a unique divine painting; it is a unique divine power.
Everybody knows social media has become a new power in the world, just like oil and gas used to be a power, material resources used to be a power, banking and money used to be a power, and there’s still a new power that has emerged in the world, and that is social media. The way human beings communicate on the internet has become a power by itself.
So, social media is not a small thing that we are talking about; it’s impacted the entire world in many different ways. One way that it’s disrupted the world is that there used to be a time, when some of you were young, when you used to go to the store and rent a movie and then come back home and put it in the VCR and then play.
But now entertainment is accessible, and anybody can become an entertainer. There was a funny kid in the family who used to do a little dance in front of the cousins, and everybody used to laugh. Now that they have a TikTok page and millions of followers, everybody has become a content producer and an entertainer.
So, just like nations are obsessed with gathering oil and gas, funds, and gold, now the world are interested in gathering human attention; that’s the new resource human attention. In this age of creative media, we want the world to pay attention to the Quran. Which means the competition has gotten a lot tougher That’s what that means, because human attention is being taken by cats playing pianos, by funny videos, by essays and all kinds of creative stuff.
So, we need to have a serious conversation about how we represent Divine Wisdom, the revelation that Allah Almighty has given us. How do we use it as inspiration to produce creative media? How do we create media that looks like entertainment but actually has the message of the Quran?
On the flip side, there are lots of entertainment media, like cartoons, TV shows, movies, you name it, and skit comedy, that do a very good job of doing Dawa-Te-Islam. They do a very good job doing Dawa for different kinds of social agendas.
They do a very good job of promoting, for example, LGBT values, and they do an excellent job, and they do it very creatively. The amount of books that have been presented at the children’s level—that is, the number of books that have already been produced for the LGBT values of children—is available in the libraries, you know.
That means creative media is being pushed to be produced for a certain agenda. Well, the only way to fight that battle is to bring a sword to a gunfight if the war is happening in the world of creative media.
Conclusion
At last, Muslims need to understand creative media and fight back, so there’s going to be a discussion with some really esteemed panelists that have backgrounds in creative media and in the Islamic space about divine wisdom and creative media. So, what can Muslims do? What can Muslim creatives do? What is the scope of it?