Quran Gallery Blog
Essays written from the printed page
Long-form writing on the Quran, prayer, the pilgrimage and the inner life. Every claim is traced to a named edition, volume and page, and the page opens beside the text.
278 essays28 collections7 languagesevery citation opens the printed page
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Read in order
The essays are filed in series: a pilgrimage walked step by step, the prayer from the first takbir to the salam, a month of fasting from its eve to its end. Start at part one.
- Part 1 → 18 A Journey Through Hajj 18 essays
- Part 1 → 9 A Journey Through Umrah 9 essays
- Part 1 → 8 Prepare for Hajj 8 essays
- Part 1 → 7 Delve Deep: The Goals of Hajj 7 essays
- Part 1 → 7 The Virtues & Etiquettes of Dua 7 essays
- Part 1 → 5 Strengthening Iman Through Dua 5 essays
- Part 1 → 5 Umrah 5 essays
- Part 1 → 4 Fasting 4 essays
- Part 1 → 3 Taste the Sweetness of Dua 3 essays
- Part 1 → 2 Madinah 2 essays
- 17 essays Journey Through Salah
- 11 essays Ruqyah
- 10 essays Before Salah
- 9 essays Pre Ramadan
- 9 essays During Salah
- 8 essays Iman in Ramadan
- 8 essays Palestine: A Quranic Lens
- 5 essays The Hereafter
- 5 essays Morning & Evening
- 5 essays Tasbih
- 4 essays Names of Allah
- 4 essays Istighfar
- 4 essays Etiquettes
- 4 essays Reflecting on the Ayat of Hajj
- 3 essays Virtues of Al-Aqsa
- 2 essays Muharram
- 2 essays Post-Ramadan
- 2 essays Post Hajj
Jumada al-Ula
From the shelves
A Journey Through Hajj· Part 18 of 18 Ḥajj mabrūr: what an accepted pilgrimage leaves behind Al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī was asked how a pilgrim can tell that a Hajj was accepted, and did not answer with a feeling. What the sources actually promise for a ḥajj mabrūr, and why the earliest scholars measured it months after the rites were over. Post Hajj A Ḥajj That Counts: What the Prophet Named as the Sign of Acceptance Was your Ḥajj accepted? Two hadiths answer with a test rather than a feeling: one graded on what you kept out of your iḥrām, the other on what you now do for the people around you on any ordinary day since. Post Hajj Take Account of Yourself Before You Are Taken to Account A caliph once reduced an entire discipline to two verbs: count yourself, and weigh yourself, before someone else does both to you on a day you cannot postpone. A hadith names exactly what gets counted — age, knowledge, wealth, and body — before a single foot is allowed to move. What doing that counting now, voluntarily, has to do with being handed your own record later and told to read it yourself. Muharram Twelve Months, One Called by Allah's Own Name The Qur'an sets four months apart from the other eight and calls that division itself "the correct religion." One of the four goes further still — a hadith gives it a name no other month in the calendar carries: the month of Allah. What that second distinction rests on, and why the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, answered a direct question about it by naming a fast. Muharram The Fast He Never Finished: What ʿĀshūrāʾ Still Asks ʿĀshūrāʾ was already sacred before Islam, became obligatory in Madinah, and then lost that obligation the moment Ramadan was legislated — yet the Prophet kept treating it as if almost nothing outranked it. What the hadith actually preserve about that day, and the ninth-day plan death cut short. Articles Sending Blessings on the Prophet: What Comes Back to You A popular list claims forty benefits for sending salawat upon the Prophet, but it circulates with no chain behind it. Here is what actually traces back to a graded hadith — and an honest account of what does not. Articles Loving the Messenger, Loving Allah's Beloved The Qur'an does not accept a claim of love for Allah at face value — it appends a test, and that test runs straight through love for His Messenger. What that test actually asks of a believer, and what it promises in return, is not the same thing as feeling moved by his name. Articles Recorded, Not Imagined: How Precisely the Companions Described the Prophet No painting, no icon, no agreed portrait exists of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) — and none was ever meant to. What the Companions left instead is something rarer: a description precise enough to be checked, sentence by sentence, against the page it came from. Articles After the Adhān, in Tashahhud, on Friday: When the Prophet Asked for Ṣalawāt Ṣalawāt upon the Prophet is welcome at any hour, but the Sunnah singles out particular moments and attaches particular wording to them. Five of those occasions, traced back to the printed pages that record them. Reflections No Harsh Word in Ten Years: The Character His Household Witnessed Anas ibn Malik served him for ten years and never once heard a reprimand. Asked to describe him, ʿĀʾishah pointed to the Qur'an itself. This is what the people closest to the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) — with the most access and the most reason to notice a fault — actually said. Articles The Meaning of Ṣalāh Upon the Prophet: What Allah, the Angels, and We Actually Say "Ṣalāh upon the Prophet" gets translated as "blessings" so often that the word's actual content disappears. Here is what the tafsīr tradition says the verb means when Allah is its subject, when the angels are, and when we are — three different things carried by one verb. Reflections Timing, Purity, and Patience: The Practical Conditions of an Answered Du'a The words of a du'a are not the whole of it. When you ask, what state you ask in, and whether you can wait for the answer shape a supplication as much as the sentence itself — three practical conditions the Qur'an and the Sunnah both describe in concrete terms. Articles He Loved Us First: The Direction of the Prophet's Affection Salawat is usually framed as a debt we owe him. The hadith record runs the other way — he wept for people who did not exist yet, called them his brothers before they were born, and spent his one guaranteed prayer entirely on us. Articles Where Salawat Stands: The One Act of Worship Allah Performs Himself Salawat is not one more item on a list of good deeds — it is structured differently from everything else a believer is asked to do. Here is why the classical scholars kept ranking it near the top: what it is, why the du'a built from it cannot be refused, and where it stands in law.
