The Clothes that Omar Sewed

An enduring classic work on the etiquette that a Muslim must or should have with regard to handling and reciting the Quran (the Muslim scripture). The topics this volume raises include: ritual cleanliness, opportune times for recitation, the etiquette that students have with their teachers (and that teachers must have with their students), and variety of other issues that every Muslim should know and frequently ask about.

He present works was designed and written to explain to men and women how best to benefit from the Book of Allah. The blessing of the Quran is that whoever recites it as it should be recited is changed by it, and brought by imperceptible degrees to see why everything is the way it is. The seed of this knowledge is a humble intention to draw nearer to the Divine, the soil in which it takes root are reverence, awe, and love, ant its fruit is this world and the next. It is well known to everyone conversant wuth the Islamic disciplines that the learning of many thins does not teach wisdom, and that traditional books do not reveal their secrets or bestow their benefits to those without the key to them.

This key is adab, the “the right way of doing things,” rendered in the title as “etiquette.”… Books, especially sacred ones, give their knowledge to those of adab, and Westerns who know something about the sciences of Islam have been waiting for a book like this in English for a long time.
-From the Foreword by
Nuh Ha Mim Keller

“Who is the author of the Qur’an?” On this subject scholars have flagrantly contradicted each other. This work attempts to make a critical review of the major ‘authorship’ theories by pressing into service logical arguments, historical evidence, textual analysis and scientific data. Probably, the only point of agreement about the Qur’an is that it was uttered for the first time by a man who was born in Makkah (Mecca), a city of Arabia, in the sixth century—a man by the name of Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him). As to the source of the Qur’an, scholars are divided into three main groups: those who believe that Muhammad (blessings and peace be upon him) himself was the author; those who believe that he was not the author himself but learned it from another human author or authors; and those who believe that the Qur’an has no human author but is rather a word-for-word revelation from God. Hamza Njozi examines the three theories and comes to a firm and logical conclusion.