Calls of Faith in the Qur'an 13: Introduction to Sūrat Āl ʿImrān and Its Link to Sūrat al-Baqara

Occasion: Transcription of an Isha khatira delivered on 10 May 2026 Source: A transcription of a video khatira by Dr. Ahmed Abouseif — Watch the original video on YouTube

O Allah, we ask You for the good of this night, the good of what is in it and the good of what comes after it, and we seek refuge in You from the evil of this night, the evil of what is in it and the evil of what comes after it. O Allah, set right for us our religion, which is the safeguard of our affairs; set right for us our worldly life, in which is our livelihood; and set right for us our Hereafter, to which is our return; make life an increase for us in every good, and make death a rest for us from every evil. O Allah, do not let us die except upon Islam: we bear witness to You of oneness, we affirm for Your Prophet the message, and we believe in Your Book, in Your decree and destiny, and in what You have prepared for Your servants in Paradise, and we ask You not to make us taste the Fire. Make us firm, be pleased with us, guide us, mend our hearts, ease our affairs, fulfil our needs, and keep us upon what You love for Your righteous servants. O Allah, amen.

And now: may Allah greet you and be pleased with you. This is a new journey with renewed calls: "O you who have believed." By the grace of Allah we have concluded Sūrat al-Baqarah, and today we begin to speak about Sūrat Āl ʿImrān.

What Gives a Sūrah Such a Standing?

Sūrat Āl ʿImrān has a great standing in our religion. The Prophet ﷺ related that it comes together with al-Baqarah like a cloud on the Day of Resurrection, shading the people of faith, and he used to enjoin the recitation of the two radiant sūrahs, because they come on the Day of Resurrection like two clouds shading the believer. And I ask: what is it that gives a sūrah such a position, such a special standing on the Day of Resurrection?

I understand that the sūrahs of the Noble Qur'an are like the reformative curriculum by which life is carried out. Here I return to the Prophet's ﷺ counsel to recite Sūrat al-Baqarah in the home, and to what he mentioned, that Satan does not come near a house in which it is recited.^[7] And why? We have Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ, which equals a third of the Qur'an, and we have sūrahs that equal a quarter of it, and we have what is said to be the greatest thing in the Qur'an, which suffices to be recited on its own. So if the matter were tied to the measure of reward alone, there is in the Qur'an what is shorter and what is greater in weight according to the Prophetic indication. So why does al-Baqarah come to be a fortress for the servant, his home, his wife and his dependents, against Satan?

Is the matter tied only to the reward earned by the recitation, or to psychological factors connected to the mood of the family members, their way of thinking and their pattern of dealing with one another before and after the recitation? We are speaking about the psychology of the self from within Sūrat al-Baqarah; it is not a dramatic scene that takes place during the recitation and chanting while people sway, but a stirring of the inner depths in the recesses of the self, until conduct and behavior issue from it after the recitation that differ from what they were before it.

What Is in Sūrat al-Baqarah?

In Sūrat al-Baqarah there is a reminder of the patterns and kinds of people, and a reminder of all the scenes that passed with the Children of Israel. In it Ibrāhīm, peace be upon him, is installed as an imam for humankind, with his good intention, sincere aspiration, complete resolve, concern for the generations after him, and perseverance in work. In it is the Messenger of Allah ﷺ looking right and left, watching to where he is heading and where his qibla is, toward which he will turn.

In it is a dispute between spouses that reaches the point of divorce, then how the separation after divorce is to be, and how the raising of the children is to be after that; long verses that remind people of the states of agreement and the states of discord, and of the excellence of conduct that should be between them even in times of hardship, and of self-restraint in times of disagreement and conflict. In it is a pointing to how to deal with finances and what we should follow in our transactions, and in it is the prohibition of usury, whose root prohibition is from Sūrat al-Baqarah. In it our Lord, Glorified and Exalted, speaks to His servants, saying: ﴿وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ اللَّهُ وَاللَّهُ بِكُلِّ شَيْءٍ عَلِيمٌ﴾ (And fear Allah, and Allah teaches you, and Allah is Knowing of all things), and in it He teaches His nation to say: ﴿وَلَا تُحَمِّلْنَا مَا لَا طَاقَةَ لَنَا بِهِ﴾ (and do not burden us with what we have no ability to bear), ﴿وَاعْفُ عَنَّا وَاغْفِرْ لَنَا وَارْحَمْنَا﴾ (and pardon us, and forgive us, and have mercy upon us), ﴿فَانصُرْنَا عَلَى الْقَوْمِ الْكَافِرِينَ﴾ (and give us victory over the disbelieving people).^[1]

It is as though Sūrat al-Baqarah helps to form a mind that thinks in a pattern entirely different from the mentality of one who searches for the glass that broke, the cup that changed, the dish that was cooked, and for cleanliness, appearance and "prestige." This mind says: we have other issues, bigger, deeper, wider and graver than these trivialities that many people revolve around. So al-Baqarah, as it were, reshapes the mind and establishes in your self, heart and conscience another mind that truly searches for the reality of human existence.

Why Three Days?

And because human memory forgets after a while, in the period the speaker mentioned (three days) there is what keeps our memory working with Sūrat al-Baqarah, so that when the three days pass we reactivate the memory and remind ourselves of the principles a second time. Imagine a mind that repeats the whole of al-Baqarah every three days: do you think it will forget it after a year? If we divide the days of the year by three, what you recite of it in a year comes to more than a hundred times, repeating it to your memory with its landmarks, its details and the circumstances of the protagonists in it.^[2]

The recitation here is for a purpose, which is that the house in which al-Baqarah is recited is not approached by Satan. So if you recite it searching for solutions between you and your wife, you will see nothing in it but that. And I give an example: a few minutes ago I was looking at Sūrat Āl ʿImrān to trace the places of "O you who have believed." I took the muṣḥaf, put on my glasses, and began turning the pages, and I saw nothing but "O you who have believed," although the pages contain many other verses. And a clearer example: when you buy a car of a certain make, you begin to see on the road all the cars of that make that you never used to notice. I went to the dealer to buy the car I like, and the salesman said to me: look at this model, these strong options, this one runs on electricity, and this addition costs you such-and-such. Then when I took it and left the dealership with it, I saw on the road a car of its kind, as if I had never seen the like of it in my life. So too if you buy a new color or put on a new garment, you begin to see who wears it; you only look at what you are searching for.

So why did I give these examples? Because if you recite al-Baqarah searching for the attributes of the God-fearing, you will find the attributes of the God-fearing, and if you recite it searching for solutions to marital problems in your life, you will see nothing in it but that: you will see the Prophet ﷺ as a model of reconciliation between spouses, and you will see the Messenger of Allah ﷺ ruling in the affairs of women. So imagine the sūrah being recited a hundred times and more in the hearing of a reader who is searching for solutions between himself and his household and dependents, looking at the future of this home and this family: no problem will arise among them at all after a while, because as soon as the talk begins, the place that treats this particular matter jumps into his mind, so he steps back two steps and does not act in any random way. It is as though it were a resetting of the angles of thinking in the human mind.

Āl ʿImrān Completes the Building

All this is about al-Baqarah, so what of Āl ʿImrān? We agreed that the Prophet ﷺ enjoins two sūrahs that come together on the Day of Resurrection, like two clouds. In my simple thinking, Sūrat al-Baqarah was concerned with building the structure of the Muslim nation, so when we have finished the building, come with me to the engineer's question: which is harder, during the construction or the moments after you finish, receive your dues and go on your way? Then the owner of the establishment calls you, the first call after the handover: what do you expect in this call? It will not be greetings and praise; rather, within two seconds you are pulled into another world in which you examine every corner of the building: where did the disaster come from? Where did the crack strike? So harder than building is maintaining the building.

So you may imagine that Sūrat al-Baqarah has taken us up to the mountaintop, and the difficulty is not in the climb but in remaining steady on the mountain after the climb. And the challenges that faced the nation of Islam at the time of its building, in the era of the Prophet ﷺ and the Rightly-Guided Caliphs after him, were not prolonged problems but momentary problems relative to the lifespan of the nation, which Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq (may Allah be pleased with him) put an end to, and what of them recurred in the era of ʿUmar was of the pattern of the old problems that the Prophet ﷺ had faced in the stage of building, and they got through them. The stage of building was very hard, but harder is maintaining the building so that it continues. That is why the full official entity of the nation collapsed after a while; because maintaining a building is harder than building it, and preserving it for a long time is more difficult. Even when you lay the foundation, it changes according to the period the building will last: the foundations of three floors differ from five, and both differ entirely from a single floor. And according to the purpose of the building: clinics? Then stronger insulation. A dentist? And a psychiatrist here? And a lecture hall with loud voices? The foundation differs according to differing aims and purposes.

And then the Lord of the worlds, Glorified and Exalted, completes the building for me in Sūrat Āl ʿImrān. And with what did it begin? With the same opening as al-Baqarah: ﴿الم﴾ in al-Baqarah, and ﴿الم﴾ in Āl ʿImrān. Then we take a step forward and read in al-Baqarah: ﴿ذَٰلِكَ الْكِتَابُ لَا رَيْبَ فِيهِ هُدًى لِّلْمُتَّقِينَ﴾ (That is the Book about which there is no doubt, a guidance for the God-fearing), and here the mention of the Book is delayed a little. Why? Because we are completing the structure, and the first thing taken from this Book is what you believe about Allah, Mighty and Majestic. Did we not say that we are adjusting the angles? We call it in construction "alignment." So the first item and the first subject we need to speak about: ﴿الم * اللَّهُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ الْحَيُّ الْقَيُّومُ﴾ (Alif, Lām, Mīm. Allah, there is no god but Him, the Ever-Living, the Sustainer of all existence). Then after it comes: ﴿نَزَّلَ عَلَيْكَ الْكِتَابَ بِالْحَقِّ مُصَدِّقًا لِّمَا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ وَأَنزَلَ التَّوْرَاةَ وَالْإِنجِيلَ﴾ (He has sent down upon you the Book in truth, confirming what was before it, and He sent down the Torah and the Gospel) … ﴿وَأَنزَلَ الْفُرْقَانَ﴾ (and He sent down the Criterion). Oh, this is more talk about the Qur'an.^[3]

And had the matter stopped at speaking about oneness, we would have said: this is the goal. But when He spoke about the Book, He went into it in more detail than He spoke of in al-Baqarah. And why? Because in al-Baqarah we built the walls and laid the foundation, and here we furnish, placing in every corner what it needs: here the sofa, here the chair, here the table. So the Lord of the worlds, Glorified is He, explains to me in detail what should be. So the sūrah opened with speaking about oneness, and the detailing and grounding of the speech about oneness will be only in the Book. And to confirm that Book, it is necessary to make clear to people that there were books that came before it: ﴿نَزَّلَ عَلَيْكَ الْكِتَابَ بِالْحَقِّ مُصَدِّقًا لِّمَا بَيْنَ يَدَيْهِ﴾ (He has sent down upon you the Book in truth, confirming what was before it), so do not be heedless of what came before, ﴿وَأَنزَلَ التَّوْرَاةَ وَالْإِنجِيلَ﴾ (and He sent down the Torah and the Gospel). Was "what was before it" not enough? No, it was not enough, so more detail came so that the landmarks of the road would be clear in indication, clear in direction, clear in guidance: where you are going and from where you set out, so that the Muslim does not remain for a moment of his life living randomly in any way whatsoever. The line is straight, so go on.

The Muḥkam and the Mutashābih

Then we find in the sūrah after that a sentence of the utmost importance. You read at the beginning of the sūrah: ﴿إِنَّ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا بِآيَاتِ اللَّهِ لَهُمْ عَذَابٌ شَدِيدٌ وَاللَّهُ عَزِيزٌ ذُو انتِقَامٍ﴾ (Indeed, those who disbelieve in the verses of Allah will have a severe punishment, and Allah is Exalted in Might, the Owner of retribution), ﴿لَا يَخْفَىٰ عَلَيْهِ شَيْءٌ فِي الْأَرْضِ وَلَا فِي السَّمَاءِ * هُوَ الَّذِي يُصَوِّرُكُمْ فِي الْأَرْحَامِ كَيْفَ يَشَاءُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ الْعَزِيزُ الْحَكِيمُ﴾ (Nothing is hidden from Him on the earth or in the heaven. It is He who forms you in the wombs however He wills. There is no god but Him, the Exalted in Might, the Wise). So what comes after that? The Lord of the worlds, Glorified is He, says: ﴿هُوَ الَّذِي أَنزَلَ عَلَيْكَ الْكِتَابَ مِنْهُ آيَاتٌ مُّحْكَمَاتٌ﴾ (It is He who has sent down upon you the Book; in it are verses that are precise) ... ﴿وَأُخَرُ﴾ (and others). Why this? Were we not proceeding along the line of faith, affirming and submitting, with no objection on our part? I believed in Allah, and what You tell me I will proceed upon. So why did He bring up the matter of the muḥkam and the mutashābih? Because He is not addressing the One who sent it down from Himself, but addressing your mind. My mind comprehends some things and does not grasp others. So the Lord of the worlds, Glorified is He, values for me what I attain in my hands, in that part of it is muḥkam, easy to reach in grasping its meanings, indications and understandings, in deriving rulings from it, acting upon them and applying them in their places of time and space, and part of it is what I do not grasp.

And why do I not grasp it? Because the time of understanding has not yet come. And this is a very important point: there are things in the Noble Qur'an that are not obscure, but the time of grasping them has not yet come. And I give a simple personal example: I did not grasp the meaning of the term "motherhood" until I saw my daughter begin the stage of pregnancy. She is tired and writhes at night: oh, my stomach! And you do not sleep and want to go to work in the morning. And you never expect to hear the word "uff" from your mother at all, and it does not seem natural to you to hear her complain; she is always present, and anticipates events and meets what you will need tomorrow. As though she reads what is in your head, and the night weather report says the weather will turn cold, and she has already prepared the heavy clothes for you. And so the world goes on with this smoothness as far as you are concerned, so you do not grasp the terms of motherhood, nor its dimensions nor its pains, and you do not grasp them with your wife, because for you it is another wing of dealings. But when your daughter comes to you, while you are raising her, and then you see what you see, you say: ah, what is all this hardship, why are you women so tired like this? So there are things that are understood only in their time.

And I give another example: a twelve-year-old boy stands in prayer and disturbs the one beside him and hits this one, then looks right and left, and you say to him: my son, fear Allah, and be in awe of the station of divinity before which you stand. He says: what are you saying, Hajj? Yes, I am standing before our Lord, and what do you want? Is it prayer and humility? Fine, Hajj, may Allah make it easy for you. He does not grasp the dimensions of what you say, but after a while, and the Noble Qur'an dives into the depths of the self and runs with the blood, a person senses the station of "Allahu akbar," and you begin to feel the meaning of "Our Lord, to You is the praise." And a third example: the doctor who treats patients and has never suffered pain one day, deals with pains as ongoing events he hears about, but when he lies in bed with a doctor treating him, he senses the weight of the task for its holder, and the pain of lying down for the patients who passed through his hands before.

The Great Issues of Āl ʿImrān

I have gone on at length with you, so I apologize; and we have not yet reached "O you who have believed." The point is that Āl ʿImrān came to complete the building that took place in al-Baqarah, to complete this conceptual and intellectual system, and to complete the building of the full conception of what is called Islam. That is why you see in the sūrah roughly three fundamental issues. The first issue: oneness, and we deal with it through faith in the muḥkam and the mutashābih. The second: the Battle of Uḥud. And what is the connection of Uḥud to Sūrat Āl ʿImrān? I wanted to find the link between the Battle of Uḥud in particular, about which Allah teaches us much in this sūrah, and the sūrah. And the third dimension in the sūrah is patience and being trained in it.

Badr, for us, was a moment of faith-driven excitement that stirred through the body and filled people's hearts, so they set out in its wake, and Allah, Mighty and Majestic, gave them victory, and they returned rejoicing, a joy that reached the point of rebuke from Allah. Can you imagine people so joyful that He rebukes them? No, not to this degree. Slow down a little: ﴿يَسْأَلُونَكَ عَنِ الْأَنفَالِ قُلِ الْأَنفَالُ…﴾ (They ask you about the spoils of war. Say, "The spoils are…") ﴿فَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَأَصْلِحُوا ذَاتَ بَيْنِكُمْ وَأَطِيعُوا اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ إِن كُنتُم مُّؤْمِنِينَ﴾ (So fear Allah and set right that which is between you, and obey Allah and His Messenger, if you are believers), then He describes them: ﴿إِنَّمَا الْمُؤْمِنُونَ الَّذِينَ…﴾ (The believers are only those who…). So we are reshaping the situation. And you may imagine that this event passed through the memory of history like a dream come true on the morning of a day full of injustice and darkness.^[4]

But at Uḥud a kind of hypocrisy appeared that had not existed before, beginning from the start of the movements, as though the sūrah were a formulation of the kinds of cracking that might appear in the building. As though an engineer had finished a building a little while ago, and its owner spoke and said: Lord have mercy, cracks have appeared in these places. So imagine the beginning of the possibilities of cracks in the wall of society, the wall of the Muslim nation, and Āl ʿImrān comes and tells you: beware, these possibilities exist, and there is a new hypocrisy on the scene that people had not seen before.

As for the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews at the beginning of the Prophet's ﷺ entry into the illuminated city of Madinah, in the early times it was a silent relationship; each one testing the other and learning how deep he went. And when what happened at Badr happened and then Uḥud came, it became apparent to these Jews that the Prophet ﷺ was not mere words, but action, effect, movement and progress, and so he was not to be taken lightly, so they had to begin a new stage of the covert work as usual. So there began to appear in the Muslim society these hypocrites who stand behind the Prophet ﷺ, and their logic: ﴿لَئِن رَّجَعْنَا إِلَى الْمَدِينَةِ لَيُخْرِجَنَّ الْأَعَزُّ مِنْهَا الْأَذَلَّ﴾ (If we return to Madinah, the more honored will surely expel from it the more humble). Whom do you mean, you there? What is he saying? He says "the more honored will expel from it" while speaking about Muḥammad ﷺ! So our Lord, Glorified and Exalted, replies: ﴿وَلِلَّهِ الْعِزَّةُ وَلِرَسُولِهِ﴾ (But honor belongs to Allah and to His Messenger), Glorified, Exalted in His highness.^[5]

The Two Wings of the Call: The Reference of Tawḥīd and the Unity of the Nation

The point is that the sūrah came to complete two very important matters. The first matter, which is the first wing of the launched call of Islam: the reference of tawḥīd. And this is the first thing we hold on to in order to move. And if anyone errs in something, the first and only sentence I say does not change: "Fear Allah" — O Allah, grant us Your taqwā. So we stepped back, the rows were set straight, and we completed our journey of da'wah and moved with what this movement allows us in the progress of society. We went along with the matter with one word only: fear Allah. This is the reference of tawḥīd.

And the second wing: the unity of the nation. That is why you see a wondrous sentence, and I always repeat this: ﴿يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ حَقَّ تُقَاتِهِ﴾ (O you who have believed, fear Allah as He should be feared) — "as He should be feared" did not come in the Qur'an in another place — then what? ﴿وَلَا تَمُوتُنَّ إِلَّا وَأَنتُم مُّسْلِمُونَ﴾ (and do not die except as Muslims). Can you imagine the gravity and strictness of this sentence? It means: do not allow anything to creep into your Islam so that you die upon other than Islam. So what follows after that is an exposition of what nullifies Islam in us.

And the norm in the context is that it should be said: "O you who have believed, fear Allah as He should be feared, and do not die except as believers," but the word came differently from the way the verse was headed. So what is the reason for this difference? Its reason is that among the people of faith there is room for disagreement, and that disagreement may reach even ﴿وَإِن طَائِفَتَانِ…﴾ (And if two groups…), but neither party should abandon its Islam, so that enmity is not exaggerated until it exceeds the limit of Islam.^[6] Have you not heard this sentence before from the voice of the navigation device in the car? It says to you: stay in the left three lanes and continue, then: stay in the right two lanes to turn right. You ask: why two lanes? Why does it not tell me one lane? And it says: no, your movement allows you within three lanes. So this is the limit of Islam and this is the limit of Islam, and between them is faith, so it is permissible for us to differ in viewpoints and disagreements, and to become intense and quarrel, but each of us remains within the two limits.

So the other wing is the wing of the unity of the nation, for which any disagreement within it is feared for Islam. And it is the first concern in view for all parties dealing with any new events on the scene of the nation, otherwise we lose an Islam. And we will continue, if Allah, Blessed and Exalted, wills.

--- ^[1]: Editor's documentation: The verses are from Sūrat al-Baqarah (282, then 286). The speaker cited them in excerpts, so they are recorded only to the extent he uttered them, without completion. ^[2]: Editor's documentation: The numbers in the transcript are inconsistent (the speaker mentioned about 122 and 123 times a year after dividing the days of the year by three), so the meaning is recorded without the number. The ḥadīth of the two radiant sūrahs was transmitted by meaning as the speaker mentioned it, and its origin is in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim from the ḥadīth of Abū Umāmah (may Allah be pleased with him). Linking the period to "three days" is the speaker's own interpretive judgment, not an established Prophetic text transmitted here. ^[3]: Editor's documentation: Sūrat Āl ʿImrān, verses 2–7 (and the opening verse from Sūrat al-Baqarah 2); only the parts the speaker uttered are quoted. ^[4]: Editor's documentation: Sūrat al-Anfāl, verses 1–2. The transcript is inconsistent at this point, so the text was not completed beyond what was heard. ^[5]: Editor's documentation: Sūrat al-Munāfiqūn, verse 8. The link to Uḥud is conveyed as the speaker gave it; the verse was revealed on the expedition of Banū al-Muṣṭaliq (al-Muraysīʿ), as in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī from the ḥadīth of Zayd ibn Arqam (may Allah be pleased with him), so its connection to Uḥud is not asserted. ^[6]: Editor's documentation: Verse 102 of Sūrat Āl ʿImrān; the phrase "two groups" is possibly from al-Ḥujurāt (verse 9), but the transcript is inconsistent there, so it was not completed. ^[7]: Editor's documentation: What is established in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim from the ḥadīth of Abū Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) is that Satan flees from the house in which Sūrat al-Baqarah is recited; as for specifying "three days," it was not verified, and "three nights" occurs in another ḥadīth specific to the last two verses of al-Baqarah (narrated by al-Tirmidhī, Aḥmad and al-Ḥākim from the ḥadīth of al-Nuʿmān ibn Bashīr), so the specification is not attributed to the first ḥadīth.