Learning the Pillars of Islam with Jibril (Revised)

The Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam, is revered as the spoken word of God by approximately one-fifth of the world’s population. Since its inception, the power of the Quran has derived not only from its message, but also from the inimitable literary style and rhetorical impact that the Arabic scripture has on its audiences. Divine Speech: Exploring the Quran as Literature attempts to make some of the most recent Arabic and European-language scholarship on its literary features accessible to a wider, English-speaking audience. These features include its language and word choice, its use of figures of speech and other rhetorical devices, its manner of narrating parables and stories, and the structure, coherence, and the order of its “chapters”-aspects that typically remain mysterious to readers of English translations of the text. Divine Speech furnishes its readers with a better appreciation of the Quran from a literary perspective, and in the process stimulates interest in, and provides tools and resources for, further study of the scripture.

An authoritative and accessible study guide that covers what the Book means to the believers and sets out the essential prerequisites of body, mind, and heart that serve to light up the inner life with the Qur’anic worldview; the etiquette of reciting, reading, and understanding the Qur’an; how to study the Qur’an collectively; and how to live by its teachings.