A Word Before You Read

Bahaa Fathy Farahat, born in 1980. I am not a scholar, nor a trained student of religious learning; I am a man who sat in the hall as you sat, and heard the bell as you heard it, and put off his paper as you put yours off.

I began this book in 2021 and finished it in 2025. Four years, in most of which it was not being written but revised, redone, abandoned, then taken up again. There is not a line in it that I copied from a picture I had not lived. Every scene here I have been through: the bell that rings while half a paper is still in my hand, the night I slept after promising myself I would sit up, the day I learned that what has passed cannot be bought back at any price. And I think you have been through them too; for I did not choose this picture because it is a fine one, but because it is the one picture known to everyone who ever went to school.

And this book is a reminder. Not a ruling, not a sermon from a pulpit, not a piece of research to be argued over. A reminder that the time for revision has come, that what is asked of you is known and needs no uncovering, and that the date of the examination is the one thing that is not known. Had it been known, the matter would have been easy and everyone would have made ready on the last night; it was hidden so that the whole of life would be the preparation, and not one night before morning.

And you were not put into this life for nothing, nor were you put into it to wait. You are here for a reason, and the reason can be known and acted upon: so take the means, and ask, and strive, and do not make your certainty about the decree a door to sitting still; for the One who wrote the end wrote the road to it as well.

And Why I Wrote It

As for me, this book has been the dream of my life since I first knew the world. Not because I wanted it said of me, but because I wanted something of mine to remain on this earth — a trace that people can benefit from after my name is folded away; for nothing of a man remains except what was of use, and nothing was of use except what was true.

So if you find good in it, pray for my father and my mother; and if you find a mistake in it, it is from me alone. Perfection belongs to God.

And How It Was Built

Three things I say to you at the start of the road, so that you read knowing what you have in your hands:

Every verse in this book is taken letter by letter from a verified text, not written out by hand and not quoted from memory. Where a verse stands on its own, the Uthmani script is set down and a published English rendering beneath it; where a verse is quoted inside a sentence, the English rendering stands alone. And with each one its place: the sura and the number of the verse.
And every hadith in it is referenced: its collection, its number in that collection, its narrator, and the grading given to it. No report has been let in that has no grading traceable to a source anyone can open and check.
And the poems at the head of the Parts are my own, not taken from anyone. I put one at the head of every Part not as decoration, but because a line of verse is kept in mind when the page is forgotten.

And at the end of every Part there is a map that gathers its path into a single panel, then lessons that are to be carried out and not merely said, then a short summary that saves you from going back to the Part if you have forgotten it.