The Circle Of The Qur'an #1[The Arkaan Series] ✓

Crescent 40: The Marabout's 1000 Profound Steps.(1)[Us Five!]

...فَنَادَىٰ فِي ٱلظُّلُمَٰتِ أَن لَّآ إِلَٰهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبۡحَٰنَكَ إِنِّي كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّٰلِمِينَ

...And he called out within the darknesses,"There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers."

(Surah Al-Anbiya' 21:87)

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Recitations thrummed the lower floors of the great masjid as the boys from Sky Legacy Haven engaged one another in Tahfiz wa Murajah of the Holy Qur'an. One boy in a white thobe sat alone at the very middle of the crowd, his head bowed low, his eyes, absorbed in the pages of a Mushaf spread opened before him upon a rehal.

It was the time after the Jumu'ah Salah that day, and a great number of the scholars from the esteemed Madaaris had retreated right after the Friday prayer, to their usual weekly summit at the topmost floors of the masjid.

The masjid itself was a five storey edifice, shaped like a towering pagoda with a transparent dome that glittered like crushed ivory, and opened through an oculus at its apex. It stood in full magnificence at the centermost of the school's labyrinth of student rooms and arcades surrounding flowering courtyards. The top floors of the building were of smaller girth than the lower ones, although overall the whole building occupied a wide area, and they opened inside as balconies overlooking the floors below. As such, the lower floors had brilliant sunlight flickering in.

A gentle wind billowed in through the many opened windows, bearing with it the fragrance of a thousand flowers from the courtyards, and the song of caged birds - which were suspended from the upper floors, intercepted with the thousand hymning voices of students down below.

The boy in the immaculate white was quiet, unlike the other students in the gathering. His most immediate perimeter held a staggering silent soulfulness, as though secluded from the world itself and all its chaos. Deafening silence encompassed him from within and without.

It was not that the students around him were not reciting the Qur'an like the rest; in fact, they were probably the loudest of the groups. But it so happened that the immediate air space around the boy was dominated by a dense aura of profundity. It was the type which seemed to carry something akin to an enchanted air - like the enlightened sages of old, silencing the world and calming the hearts as they meditated on the pages of the sublime scripture of Allah - Al Qur'an.

So also was Abdul Bâqi Al Aswadi engaged wholly in this endeavour and form of worship.

He was so engrossed in the depths of the sacred words that he had unintentionally induced an ambience of Tafakkur and Tadabbur about him, so that if one were to enter that very gathering at the moment, and observe all around, one would be inexplicably drawn to him by the strange mystical silence.

Abdul Bâqi Al Aswâdi was enthranced by a particular verse of Qur'an from the pages before him. His heart bathed in spiritual nourishment, transcending from euphoria to euphoria with each new enlightenment he encroached upon whilst contemplating that one single ayah.

He was a boy who would pick an ayah a day and contemplate upon it, immersing himself wholeheartedly into studying the commentary of the salaf and reviews of contemporary scholars concerning it. And till his heart had relished fully in its sublimity, he would not move on from it.