Q546 :In a book I read that Umar, the netpanion of
the Prophet, used to read the Qur’an once every night and Imam Al
Shafie used to read it 60 times in the month of Ramadhan, making an
average of twice a day. As a general rule, in how many days should we
read the Qur’an?
A546 : Allah has ordered us in the Qur’an to recite
his revelations slowly and with deliberations. Scholars have understood
this to mean that we should try to emphasize the meaning of what we are
reading. Moreover, we have to pronounce each word and sound it out.
While scholars of the Qur’an make it permissible to use three different
speeds in reading the Qur’an, they insist that even the fastest must
take care of the pronunciation so that words are understood properly
and sounds are given their features. In order to do that, perhaps the
faster reader who knows the Qur’an by heart could read one part in
twenty minutes. Since the Qur’an is divided into thirty parts, this
means that such a very fast reading takes ten hours. A person who knows
the Qur’an well and reads it with average speed will probably need 15
to 16 hours to finish it; while a person who recites it properly will
need between 45 minutes and one hour to finish one part. This means
that he may need thirty hours to finish it. In the light of the above,
and knowing that neither Umar ibn Al Khattab nor Al Shafie read the
Qur’an like parrots, but were keen to understand it properly and to
contemplate its meaning, we can say without hesitation that the report
mentioned in that book is incorrect. To imagine that a person could
finish the Qur’an in one night is to think that a human being could sit
for eight or ten hours reading at high speed without getting tired or
stopping to take his breath or to have a drink or to relieve himself.
Such an approach to the Qur’an is alien to Islamic practices. Scholars
say that on average a person should read about one part of the Qur’an
everyday which means that he finishes it once over a whole month. Many
people do better than that and read two parts a day in order to finish
the Qur’an twice in the same period. A person who has learnt the Qur’an
by heart needs to read more every day to maintain his memorization with
reasonable accuracy. Such a person needs perhaps to read three parts
every day. Scholars of the Qur’an renetmend such a person to read five
parts a day and say, “He who reads five parts does not forget what he
has memorized.”
Our Dialogue ( Source : Arab News – Jeddah )