The Four Great Suras of Salat (Prayer)

(Note: New Improved Post, removed the excess for a different post.) The four suras (like chapters/sections) of the Quran most frequently recited in the canonical Islamic prayer called salat are the first sura, Al-Fatiha “The Opening” (1), the quintessential prayer of salat, and the final 3 suras, Al-Ikhlas “Sincerity” (112), Al-Falaq “Daybreak/ Breaking-open” (113), and An-Nass “The People” (114). They are all short suras, making them easy to recite. Allah the All-Merciful wants this prayer to be easy for us, and at the same time a powerful and effective “connection” to Him, to His all-encompassing power and mercy. These four suras form a {2,3,4} set, with three (3) together at the end, and the fourth (4) in the very beginning, and two of these suras form a pair (2) in the “middle.” Thus the end of the Quran re-connects us to the beginning, analogous to how Resurrection and Judgment Day reconnect us to Allah in paradise where Adam was created at the beginning of humanity – if we had faith in Allah, and made a genuine effort in Allah’s path of justice and compassion.

Interpretation of Quranic Numbers 9.5 and 19

The number 19 is, for a number, relatively famous (or perhaps infamous) as a Quranic number, but is mentioned in the Quran (74:30) and is a factor of the number of suras in the Quran, 114 = 6 x 19. The number 9.5 is not known to be significant, but revealed a significance while studying the metaphor of the chambered nautilus and its significance in the Quran. That is explained elsewhere on this blog, but I will flesh it out separately here. The numbers 9.5 and 19 are formative elements in the design of Quranic Architecture as discussed on this blog. In its calendric architecture, the Quran is divided into 12 months for each “year,” or each complete turn of the spiral. For 114 suras, there are 9.5 years, expressed by an equation: 114 ➗ 12 = 9.5. Then when we multiply 9.5 x 2 = 19, we can ask the question “is there any significance to this equation in terms of the meaning of the Quran?” And the answer is a resounding YES! Explained below:

Rabb Al-‘Alameen in Quran

As the 7th and 8th words in the Quran, and arguably the 4th name of Allah in Al-Fatiha, the name Rabb Al-‘Alameen is significant and appears in the Quran 42 times in 42 verses in 21 suras. Thus it is not repeated in any verse, but is frequently repeated among the suras. Of these 42 ayat/verses, 7 are ayat of praise like the second verse of Al-Fatiha 1:2.  As both 42 (6×7) and 21 (3×7) are multiples of 7, this is an interesting correlation. Much interpretation has been given by scholars to this name over time, most interpreting the word al-alameen to refer to all that exists except Allah, or in the words of Ibn Abbas, “all the heavens and what they contain, all the earths and what they contain, and all that is between them, be it known or unknown.” Or, as Ibn ‘Arabi put it, “all through which God can be known.” He also thought of the term rabb as referring to the level where existence and the Divine are related. But for me, I think of Rabb in itself as simply the relationship name for Allah, because unlike other names of Allah, it easily and unequivocally accepts possessive usage, such as “my Lord” (using “lord” as the English expression for rabb), “their Lord,” “your Lord,” etc. Adding the expression al’alameen signifies that this name only can possibly refer to Allah the Exalted.

Al-Fatiha as a Conquest of Denial

This sounds counterintuitive, but while discussing the nature of “conquest” in the Quran in my previous post, it occurred to me the root-word connection between fat’h meaning “conquest” and “Al-Fatiha” — the name of the Quran’s first sura — meaning “the opening,” has implications for the first sura itself. In that post I noted how the fact that both words share a root affects the understanding of of the word “conquest” to have a different nuance to it than the English definition and sense of “conquest” as being more of an “opening” in the conflict than merely a subjugation or advantage that often lends to the winner oppressing the loser. But could that same sort of victory or opening in a conflict also deepen our understanding of Al-Fatiha?

Quranic Architecture as a Calendar

Quranic Architecture as a Calendar with one surah in each chamber.

the-calendar-q-nautilusDownload

Above is an image of the spiral Quranic architecture discussed on this site, where each surah is shown by number in its chamber. Due to size consideration, there’s insufficient room for the surah names; however the first 12 surahs are named, and on the outer edge of the circle are the Hijri calendar names as well as the names of the zodiac constellations.

A full explanation of the calendar design and meaning is above in a downloadable PDF. It shows the exact match between the Quran’s size of 114 Surahs and arrangement here as 9.5 “years” (12-month/ chamber “cycles”) with Noah’s time as prophet of “a thousand years minus fifty years” or 950 years, making this symbolic “calendar” architecture of the Quran an “ark” protecting those who “embark” the Quran’s ark by reading it from the cataclysm of the Day when time as we know it, and therefore the universe as we know it, ceases to exist, that is, the Day of Resurrection or Judgment Day.

Timekeeping is all about changing quite literally “what is between our hands,” the Quran’s expression for the “present”, by increasing its size from a “moment” to “the present day” as it were, and beyond. And the Quran uses this meaning of time in its text and message, so it makes sense that its very architecture would also be a calendar, showing us how to spend our lifetime’s limited term wisely, leading to success outside that lifetime, when this world of time ceases to be.

The Quran’s Architecture as a Calendar, by S. Karami

The Chambered Nautilus and Its Connection to the Quran

X-Ray of a chambered nautilus shell

What is the connection between the Quran and the chambered nautilus shell? The shape fits the gradually descending size of the Quranic surahs, which, unlike chapters in most human-authored books, are each separate self-contained “enclosures” of text — the word “surah” means “enclosure”—, each containing words found only in that surah and nowhere else, yet adjacent surahs are connected by small shared references, all of this being similar to the chambers of the nautilus shell.

For the living nautilus, a cephalopod or “head-foot”, it provides both protection and a system of propulsion capable of “neutral buoyancy,” the same property that keeps the human brain, our “head-foot,” safe from gravity which would otherwise have pulled the brain’s delicate tissue against the skull, damaging our uvery-much-essential neurons. Herein lies a metaphor on many levels.

The downloadable PDF below gives more details of the amazing connections between the Quran and this ancient creature’s shell, long noted for its beauty and inspiring sacred geometry. Beyond that are Quranic and scientific connections which ultimately make this shape the perfect way to present the Quran as a whole, giving us a way to envision and interpret its multiple depths of meaning.

chambered-nautilus-sectionDownload

Also, this link gives a discussion among mathematics and science professors/ scholars on whether or not the chambered nautilus shell is an example of a golden spiral. To which the answer is not precise, but then, life is more complicated than it is precise.

https://114chambers.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/chambered-nautilus-section.docx

A Summary of Quranic Architecture

Unlike most studies of the Quran including studies of its form and structure, this is a vision for the whole Quran in one image, developed using the Quran as a guide, fitting the 114 Surahs in a spiral shell shape like that of the chambered nautilus, in which each surah (the word surah meaning “enclosure”) is envisioned as a separate “chamber,” with 12 surahs per completed “turn” or circle of the spiral, making 9 complete circles and one half-circle. This spiral shape forms a symbolic calendar where each chamber/ surah is one “month”, for a total of 9.5 years. This corresponds to the symbolism of Noah’s ark as his message or Divine revelation whose construction was guided by Allah’s revelations in the same way sacred books were sent. The ark’s being a vessel that protected those who boarded it from the cataclysmic flood symbolically correlates to the Quran as our “ark” protecting those who “board” it—that is, read and be guided by it—from the greatest cataclysm of them all, Judgment Day. The Quran describes Noah as having lived among his people “a thousand years minus fifty years,” or 950 years. Move the decimal point 2 spaces to the left, and you have a match between the time period Noah spent with his people, a kind of “testing” period, and the time period embodied in the Quran’s Architecture as envisioned here, a nautilus-shaped “ark” carrying within it a complete guidance system to safely bring those it “carries” through this life and the coming cataclysm to gardens of unimaginable delight.

Quranic Architecture in Islam, Nature, and Ourselves

One need only to see an aerial view of the Ka’aba in Makkah with Muslim pilgrims circling the central shrine in tawaf to recall how central the circle is in Islam. This is in effect the center of the Islamic world, and in a form of worship, the pilgrims or Hojjaj must circle it, thus also participating in the making of a circle. Now we recall that the architecture of the Quran is also circle-based, one could even say in three dimensions as in the shell of a chambered nautilus. But the scope of this discussion is so far reaching, the symbolism contained in Quranic architecture so profound, it may be more enlightening to include more graphics to do justice to the idea of dynamic symmetry in relationship to cycles, returning (to our Creator Allah), the creation, the divine Message itself, and last but not least (as you shall see in the Quran), us.  

The Circle of Time

One of the most important and yet illusory elements of human life is time. It begins for us when we are born and when time as we know it ends, this is signified by our death. So our concept of time is completely tied up, for us, with birth and death. But for Allah, who is neither born nor dies, time cannot be as we know it. For Allah, time has no boundaries. Many thinkers have thought of this as a circle.

Structure as Metaphor in the Qur’an

The Qur’an is usually interpreted and studied based directly on the meanings of the ayat, just as one interprets any other book. Style, appearance, frequency of occurrence of specific phrases and words, the appearance of individual letters at the beginning of some Suras (“Quranic Initials”), and even the more symbolic meaning of certain narratives, such as the lives of prophets, and “graphic” elements such as the physical appearance of letters or size of Suras, are rarely studied with an eye to discover their importance or meaning in the Qur’an.

A Picture of Time, a Calendar, a Guide

After looking at Al-Fatiha, the first Sura of the Qur’an, it’s time to go back to the overall structure, to see if we can find meaning and purpose in it.