WHY?

For a long time, I wondered whether I should start a blog. I always thought it a bit ridiculous that nowadays, every person felt entitled enough to have a blog. I believed that by starting one, I would be adding to the madness that already exists. My decision was made for me, approximately 10 minutes ago. I was listening to a podcast about the Quran. In the introduction, the person claimed that they were going to go through the Quran verse by verse, sura by sura, and provide their thoughts. I had high hopes for this podcast but two minutes into the substantive content, the person made a blatant mistake.

While I was born and raised as a Muslim, I have never actually read the Quran. Now, as an ex-Muslim, I have been grappling with actually reading the Quran. I believe, maybe not rationally, that if I read the Quran from start to finish and still disbelieve it, I can finally get rid of some residual guilt that creeps up once in a while.

So. I am going to read the Quran, verse by verse and sura by sura. To help me along the way, I will use this blog to discuss my thoughts. As disclaimer, I am not a religious scholar by any means and my knowledge of religion is from personal reading. I may make mistakes because I am a human. I am going to use two sources: the English translation of the Quran by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (given to me by my mother in the hopes that I would become more religious) and the Sahih International translation on The Noble Quran, a website dedicated to a verse by verse translation of the Quran (http://quran.com/).

The format of when I go through verses and suras will be the following. I will copy and paste the English translation of the verses from The Noble Quran. If I have a question or a remark, whether good or bad, I will write it directly underneath the verse. After I have done this with every verse in the sura, I will write a summary of my thoughts at the end. Given that some suras are very long, I will most likely have numerous blog posts for those suras. The summary will be at the end of the sura.

For certain verses, I am going to write separate blog posts, in which I will discuss the actual impact that the verses have. They might be focused around personal anecdotes, statistics, current events, history, etc. The list is never ending.

So welcome and let’s get started.