We all want to feel that deep connection with the Quran.
But let's be honest, for a lot of us, the Quran sits on the
shelf more than it does in our hands this Ramadan.
Let's change that. Imagine this.
You understand every word you recite.
The first days come alive with meaning and your heart feels a
closeness to Allah you've never experienced before.
This episode will be your guide to unlocking the Quran and
making a daily source of inspiration and spiritualities
this Ramadan and beyond. Assalamu Aikum, this is your
host nosheen and welcome to Junja Jannah, a podcast curated
to help you become your own dream girl.
On the third episode of the Ramadan series, we are going to
talk about how to connect or reconnect with the Quran.
Ramadan is essentially the month of the Quran, so logically we
should be using this month as best as we can to get closer to
it. Let me ask a question.
How many of us have read the Quran front to back in our
native language? How many of us have gone through
and studied each Surah meticulously and watched the
fears on them to truly understand the words of Allah,
Subhan matala? The answer is not enough of us.
So many of us want to build a relationship with the Quran and
we decide to do that by reading it in Arabic in Alhamdulillah.
It's a beautiful thing to do, but to truly build a connection,
I believe that you also need to actually understand it.
And to understand it, we need to actually know what is being
said, how Allah means each verse that is just as important as
reciting in Arabic. And the difference it makes is
genuinely mind blowing because again, you actually are
understanding what Allah is trying to convey to us.
I'm going to share a hadith that I think really exemplifies how
important the Quran is to us. Or the actual hadith is a lot
longer, but I'm just going to pull out this specific sentence
from it because that's what I want to share.
The Prophet Sallam said. And I am leaving among you 2
weighty things, the one being the book of Allah IE the Quran
in which there is right guidance and light.
So hold fast to the book of Allah and adhere to it.
So this book, the Quran, it's our connection to Allah.
I think it's so easy to forget that the words we read in the
Quran are the words of our Lord. They're the words of Allah,
Subhanawatallah. No other book has that.
No other book is going to be more important than this.
And at this point you might be saying yes.
I know the importance. I'm here to ask how exactly do I
connect. So I will be sharing 5 tips that
inshallah will help you. Tip #1 is to listen and read to
the Quran regularly. I know this may sound like a
very, very basic piece of advice, but honestly a lot of
the time it's the simple things that help the most.
How many of us are guilty of at one point or another in our
lives letting the Quran lay on a bookshelf for months and then
when we finally go and get it to read it, we find that there's
dust on it from how unused it is.
You're not going to build a connection with the Quran if
you're not actively engaging with it every single day.
So make Quran something that is a part of your daily life and
this means something different for everyone.
What I recommend is picking a time and making it an
unconscious habit to read the Quran at that time every single
day. And this can be after one of the
five daily prayers right before you go to sleep whenever fits
best. What I like to do is recite
after Mahrab. I know I've talked about this on
previous episodes, but basically my mother, my own love, bless
her soul growing up, she sort of instilled that habit into me and
my sisters. So after Mahrobi would all sit
down on our parameds and recycled on.
And as I've gotten older, at times I found myself finding it
really hard to keep up with this.
You know, life can get busy, but I always find myself going back
to it because this habit that has been instilled into me, it's
just it makes it so much easier to go back and restart it even
when I've lost it. Routines are always so, so
important to implement into your life.
And this also applies when it comes to the mean.
So if you make your Ibadat and your worship into routines and
habits, it just makes it that much easier even when at times
you may fall off. Having that system just makes it
extremely easy to put yourself back on track.
And I also said listen to the Quran, which is the second part
of the step. It's not just reading yourself.
Listening to other people recite the Quran is such a beautiful
experience. Like once you find your favorite
Quran reciters, the difference you feel when you listen to the
Quran is just wow. Like there have been times when
I found reciter and them reciting A pseudo has literally
brought tears to my eyes because of the emotion that they're able
to convey. And also on top of that not
everyone knows how to read Arabic.
Some of you guys may be very recent reverts, or you were born
into Islam but only recently are trying to connect with the Quran
and it can be very hard. So in all these instances, just
having those reciters there really helps.
And this is something that you can really easily implement into
your life, like you're cleaning, play a Quran recitation in the
background, you're driving somewhere, play a Quran
recitation, you're getting ready in the morning, play a Quran
recitation. It's just like, again, a really
easy thing to implement into your life and it brings a lot of
peace as well. Tip #2 Read the Quran in your
native language and watch the series.
We recite Surah Al Fatiha in every single rakat that we pray.
But how many of us know what this Surah actually means?
Like what is Allah subhan what that are trying to tell us
through it and most of us would be like I don't actually know
because I haven't done that amount of research into the
Quran to try and grasp onto that.
You can't truly connect with the Quran if you don't know what
Allah is trying to convey to us through it.
A really great way to do this and to truly understand the
meaning of the Quran is to watch the seers.
If you don't know what a the seer is, it's basically an
explanation of the Quran. So scholars will sit down and go
through each verse of a Surah explaining everything.
And on top of that, oftentimes they'll break down the verses
into the specific words that are being said.
Because Arabic is such an intricate language, one word can
literally have 30 different meanings.
So going through it like piece by piece and putting it all
together so that you can truly understand inside and out what
the Sudah is saying. And I remember the first time I
watched a theft seer video, I was actually, it was on Sudah
Alf Adahab because I saw a video and someone said the same exact
thing. Like how many of us know what
Sudah Alf adahab actually means when we recite it so many times?
And I was like, OK, so I'm going to give this a try.
I remember how genuinely surprised I was by how in depth
of an analysis the scholar was given.
He was going into how each word had all these different
meanings. Like this story is 7 verses 25
words and the video was almost an hour long.
That's how in depth he was going.
And honestly that experience really changed how I viewed the
Quran, like my perception of the Quran really changed and how I
interacted with it as well. I was able to see the Quran not
just as a collection of verses, not just as a book, but as
something deeper that is really intricate.
And I feel like after this point I was able to fully appreciate
the Quran for what it is. And that's because I saw the
true beauty in it. And it's so easy for the Quran
to just like become something that we recite during our
prayers. But going into the actual
meaning helps with creating a deeper bond with it and with
Allah, because you know the meaning of the amount of, the
amount of wisdom and the amount of guidance that each verse
holds. It's something that has really
helped me again in shaping my perception of the Quran and in
Islam in general, and it's elevated me on my spiritual
journey. A great thing to do to keep
track of all the fifth series that you watch is to keep a
Quran journal where you basically just take notes on the
fifth series for each Surah. Writing down all the things that
you learn just makes it easier to actually sit in the brain.
And what I like to do is write the verse out fully in Arabic
and then write it in English and then notes on how the scholar is
explaining everything so that I just have like a brief nice
summary overview if I want to ever go back and just relook at
my notes. Next we're going on to tip #3,
which is start acting upon what Allah says in the Quran.
Implementation of the Quran is just as important as engaging
with it. You can recite the Quran, listen
to it, learn its meaning. But if you're not then taking
what you've learned and then applying it to your life, then
you're not fully connecting it. Essentially, the Quran is a
guide to us as Muslims on how to live our lives.
Does it make sense to read the guide and take the time to
understand what the guide is saying and then not follow what
the guide is telling you to do? No, it doesn't.
We're supposed to take what we've learned and connect it to
our daily lives. The Quran says to, for example,
be patient. You can read the verse in Arabic
and in English and watch the seer, but with that deep
knowledge that we now have, we are sort of kind of obligated to
act upon that knowledge. One thing that I did to help
with this is I bought a book called The Practicing Muslim
which summarizes the code of conduct that is prescribed in
the Quran and it breaks it down by each Surah.
So you can go through by each Surah and see what Allah
prescribed in each Surah. So for example, under Sudafir
Khan, it says remain steadfast, don't be arrogant, exercise self
restraint, be humble. And it goes on with more points
from the Surah. This has really helped me
because it really easily translates the Quran's message
into do's and don'ts that I can take and directly implement into
my life. I hope you guys see that
connection between the three steps that I've given so far
because they do interconnect, they all build off of one
another and they're all very important parts of the journey
of connecting with the Quran. Let me give another example.
So in pseudo 49 verse 12 Allah subhanahu with Allah tells us
not to backbite and backbiting is basically talking bad about
somebody else. If you read this verse you
understand it on hamdullah but then you go ahead and talk bad
about someone else while you're hanging out with a friend.
That's not first of all isn't just not a nice thing to do,
it's immoral. And secondly, Allah subhanahu
with Allah has explicitly told you not to do it.
Knowing this, having that knowledge and then going ahead
and doing it anyway, it doesn't make sense to do it.
It honestly makes it worse. So you can see how important it
is to not only understand the Quran intellectually, but to
also internalize its teachings and to allow it to shape your
behavior. The reflection of how strong
your connection is with the Quran lies and how you act upon
it. It lies in your actions, your
personality, your character. Next, on to tip #4, which is
make it interactive. Our brains tend to remember
things better when they're interactive because we are
actively engaging in whatever it is that we're learning.
One really easy way to do this, and I already mentioned this
briefly earlier, but keep a Quran journal.
While you are reading the Quran, jot down verses that jump out to
maybe a particular phrase that resonates with you or with
something that you're going through right now or a question
that comes to your head. Write it all down.
Don't worry about being needs. It's honestly just for you.
This is your personal space to explore your own thoughts and
your own feelings. In addition to writing down the
verses, you can also take the time to reflect on what it
actually means to you. What lessons can you learn from
this? How can you apply the teachings
to your daily life? Maybe you even want to write
down a dua based on the verse, asking Allah for the strength to
live by its message. Another great thing you can do
is build a mind map. Let's say you're reflecting on
the theme of patience in the Quran.
You can create a mind map with the word patience in the center
and then as you brainstorm verses or stories relating to
patients, you can branch them out from the center.
So for example, you might add a branch for Sudas about dealing
with difficult people controlling your anger or
entrusting in a lost plan. You can also then sub branch to
add specific verses. And after reflecting, you can
also add personal stories like think about your own life,
brainstorm situations where being patient was a challenge
for you. Maybe you had a long commute to
work or to school one day and that sort of kind of tested your
nerves or you had a disagreement with somebody.
Write down these experiences and then see how the Quran's
teachings on patients could have helped you in those moments.
Through this method you can really visualize and see the
connections between different ideas and how they all relate
back to the central theme and they allow you to connect the
topics within the Quran and see the bigger picture.
This also relates back to my third step of acting upon the
Quran, because you're also able to see exactly where in your
life you can apply specific verses of the Quran.
Another interactive study method is to create or to join a study
group, either in real life or online.
You can learn together and you can learn from each other.
Discussion is also very important in the process of
learning, so you can discuss with each other what you've
learned. And all this just helps keep
what you've learned in your brain for a longer amount of
time. This can also count as a great
way to hold yourself accountable, to actually connect
with the Quran every single day. Because let's face it, studying
and staying consistent can be tough.
It's really easy to become demotivated, but when you've got
a study group, you're not going at it alone, which makes it a
lot easier to stay on top of your goal.
And this goes both ways. You can be the one giving your
friends that extra boost that they need to stay motivated too.
Tip #5 Also, the final tip is reflect.
This is the most impactful thing that you can do to get closer to
the Quran. Think about it like this.
Reflection is the bridge that takes you from simply reading
the words on a page to truly feeling them in your heart.
I'm going to go back to the example that I was using before
about patience. It's one thing to understand the
meaning of the words, but it's something else entirely to
consider how this verse applies to a recent fight you have had
with a friend. Or maybe the verse reminds you
of the importance of forgiveness or the need to control your
anger. Reflection allows you to make
these connections, to take the wisdom of the Quran and to use
it as a mirror to examine your own actions and the motivations
that you have. It's about asking yourself the
tough questions like am I living up to the teachings of the
Quran? And how can I better myself as a
person? How can I better myself as a
Muslim? This process of self reflection
isn't easy. It forces you to face your
flaws, but it's ultimately what allows the Quran's message to
take root and grow within you and change you for the better.
The Quran has so many beautiful, powerful verses, and it's up to
you to figure out what they mean for you in terms of applying
them into your life, on how you think and on how you act.
There have been moments where I'm reading a verse and I have
to stop because I'm thinking, wow, reading this is really
making me regret something I did or saying in this situation.
I should have thought about it in this way.
For you, maybe it could be adverse about generosity and you
have that nagging feeling that you could be doing more right
now to help those in need. But here's the thing.
Once you see those flaws, once you recognize them, you can't
just Unsee them, right? That's the beauty of self
reflection. It forces you to confront your
shortcomings, but it also gives you the power to do something
about them. And to do that through the Quran
by using it as your guidance is the best way.
Let's go back to the patient's example before we end this
episode. So let's say you're reading the
code on and you come across a verse about patience, and you
reflect on that verse and you're able to realize that that's
something you need to work on. So you may choose to recoup your
thoughts before you respond to something that annoys you.
These are the kind of positive habits that can result from
reflection and over time, as you keep reflecting and making
changes, you'll start to notice a difference in yourself.
You'll be more patient, more generous, more kind because you
will took that extra time to look inward and confront your
own flaws from the perspective of the Quran.
That brings us to the end of this episode.
I hope your first day of fasting went amazing and that the start
of this Ramadan has been good for you.
Make sure to follow my Instagram for dating motivation and to
just see my life. I have the link to that in the
description Ramadan Kareem and I'll see you guys in my next
episode as Salaam Alaikum.