Educational Objectives in Qur’anic Stories: Taqwā and Justice in al-Nisāʾ

Occasion: Transcript of a lecture delivered at Woodbridge on September 17, 2026.Source: transcription of a recorded lecture by Dr. Ahmed Abouseif — watch the original video on YouTube

One of the Companions was walking through Madinah one day, and he began asking the people: are you sitting here while the inheritance of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ is being handed out in the masjid? Everyone said, "What inheritance of the Prophet in the masjid?" — and they ran to take a share of it. When they arrived they found somebody sitting there, speaking to the people and teaching them. They looked around: where is the money, where is the cash, where are the credit cards? They found nothing but a man talking. So they asked him, "What have you been saying?" He answered that the Prophet ﷺ said that the prophets leave an inheritance that is not dollars, and that their inheritance is knowledge.^[1]

When we sit in the masjid and keep ourselves patient with what we are hearing, whether we stay a long time or a short time depending on the topic and the lecture, we are taking from the inheritance of the Prophet ﷺ. Tonight I want to speak to you about Sūrat al-Nisāʾ. We have already spent time with al-Baqarah and Āl ʿImrān, each from a different angle, and tonight we turn to al-Nisāʾ.

Where al-Nisāʾ sits among the sūrahs

As usual, let us first connect the sūrahs. In al-Baqarah, if you remember, Allah gave us the structure, the frame of the Muslim community: how it is built. Once the community is built, the building has to be maintained. In Āl ʿImrān the maintenance begins, taking care of that community in depth. And the most important part of the community is the family, the usrah. And the most important person in the family is — he paused, "nobody wants to put him in trouble. Oops." Then, in reaction to someone in the room: "Mashallah, we have a brave person here. Yes, he said it." The one who matters most is the person through whom the rest of the people come, the offspring, the next generation.^[2]

That is exactly the place the sūrah takes up, clearly and directly, and that is why you find it in the opening of the sūrah. Allah is telling us:^[3]

My humble translation of the verse is this: O people, fear Allah, who created you and all the rest of humanity from one soul, and from that one soul Allah brought forth the rest of the people. Allah speaks to us directly here, and we will be questioned. The Creator is Allah, and the channel of that creation is the wombs, the bellies of women.^[3]

When we speak of this we are speaking of the great theme of our Islam: justice. Be fair, and do not be unjust with anybody. Oppression, injustice, attacking other people, eating their money, giving somebody a hard time: this position, this situation, is not in our dictionary.

The nine calls

When I taught at AIA the calls to the believers throughout the Qur’an, we passed through al-Baqarah and then reached al-Nisāʾ, and in al-Nisāʾ there are nine calls of "O you who believe." How many? Nine. Now let us look at them together.^[4]

The first: do not be unjust when you eat up the inheritance of women. Be fair with them. A woman may be in a strong position or a weak position, and it is in her weakness that someone may eat what is hers. The second call, on the other hand, concerns partnership. When you have a partnership, do not eat each other's money, for each of you has a share in it. So do not be unjust with women, and do not be unjust with your partners, and be careful of your own desires, because your desires are what cause all these problems.

The third call: Allah said not to approach the prayer while you are drunk. Avoid all of that before you come to the prayer, because in the prayer you are recharging your soul, and then you go back to the community to establish the idea of justice in every transaction you perform and every dealing you have with other people.

The fourth: once we avoid our desires, we find ourselves following the direction of Allah, and this is the fourth call. We follow the constitution, the rules of building the community, on the order of Allah and of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ.

And once we are moving together, we need to be conscious and cautious as we move, because something may go wrong. Be aware of the obstacles you may meet on your journey towards Allah. Sometimes we do something wrong with a good (the transcript breaks off here). When you go out for the sake of Allah, in jihad or whatever it may be, be careful about the people you are going to meet. Do not deal with them unjustly, saying, "They are disbelievers, we will kill them," while they are perfectly fine.

Then comes what I call the core of the sūrah. Imagine: when Allah says (the Arabic is missing from the transcript) to be those who stand firm for justice, what does it mean? Justice.^[4] What is the verse telling us? Take this glass in my hand. I can hold it while sitting. But imagine it is worth a million dollars, or more. Something like that, something precious, is meant to be held while you are standing, because you are going to be careful with it, more than you would be sitting. I would not treat it casually; I am going to take care of it. It is a million dollars in my hand! So when Allah says to be qawwāmīn with justice, imagine if we understood it that way. What does qawwām mean? Standing over something. Picture a person standing there all the time, waiting for your order: if we need something, we ask him. He is standing, not taking a break. So it is with justice: when we take care of it, we do not sleep and leave it alone, because somebody may then deal with it in the wrong way.

And whom is Allah asking: me alone, or the whole community? Allah is asking every single person to take care of justice, in its own right. Imagine what Allah is asking of me as a husband: to take care of my wife and my children with the idea of justice. Is He asking me alone? At the same time He is asking her to do the same, and He is asking the children, at the same time, to take care of the concept of justice in their own place. I say to my son: I am your father; please take care of this. My job is to go out and do one, two, three, and come back to you with the money, to take care of you. I am the householder where money is concerned. But you are the householder of all of us in your position as a student. This is your job, your work: you go out and come back with A's, with good numbers, whatever you come back with. If I come home without money, your mother is going to ask me about it. If you come home without your grades, I am going to ask you about it. You will be questioned, and maybe you will bear the consequences of your shortcoming.

And Allah, when He asks all these people, is the only one watching us. The one we should be looking at, as the one who watches over us, is Allah; we are not to look at people more than we look at Allah.

If we are going to pass through all these positions, then of course we need more faith, to be solid and strong enough. So Allah is calling them to have more faith, and more faith, and more faith, and not to take the disbelievers (the transcript's wording is unclear) for themselves. That is the ninth call. When I have passed through all of them, I understand that Allah is stopping me, restraining me, from any kind of unjust action I could commit.

What does taqwā mean?

Now, what is the main theme of the sūrah? From the very beginning you find taqwā. What does taqwā mean? It is a common word. Everybody says it, but how, when, and why? Nobody really asks. When we look at the Qur’an we find taqwā — it is "fear Allah." But fear Allah with which concept of fear? Let me ask it through an example. I am an employee in this place; say I am the janitor. I came to clean the place; that is my main job here. How do I fear Allah in it? If you asked me, "Ahmed, you are going to be the janitor of this place, and you must fear Allah," what would that mean? It means cleaning the place perfectly. If I find a wallet or something that fell from somebody, I do not eat it, because taqwā came with the cleaning job. Eating other people's money is outside of taqwā. And at the same time, when I see somebody doing something wrong in the place, then advising him, or telling the board what that person is doing, is part of fearing Allah.

Or take this: I am working part-time, counted hour by hour. I came at 7:05 and left at 8:10. But because I went over into the second hour, I tell them, "Ahmed worked two hours." That is a different feeling of Allah altogether. When I say taqwā, I am looking at all the aspects of life and asking what taqwā means in each of these positions.

Taqwā in the sūrah, point by point

Now let us look at taqwā itself within this sūrah. Each of these points needs a long time of its own, but we are trying to get as much as we can, as an idea of what the sūrah means.

First, the fear of Allah concerns the people around me, my relatives. I try to make everybody around me satisfied, because I fear Allah.

Second, Allah speaks of Ādam: we have the same source. What does that mean for me? I do not look at you as white or black or blue or yellow; how do you see me? You see me and I see you as a human being, and we come together from the same source, from the same person. We are siblings, brothers or sisters, partners in the same responsibility. And once we have the same origin, we have the same rights in this world. Think of America: for a time black people were not allowed to ride the bus with others, they had a specific place, and, as he put it, they might be killed — because of what? Because of discrimination. Allah, from the very beginning, told me where I come from and how He created me, so that I would take care of the rest of the people as the rest of the people take care of me.

Within the same point, the source of human beings goes on, and it comes through women. And once we are talking about women, somebody says Islam deals unjustly with women and does not give them their rights. When we hear that, remember that Allah has given me a specific order, a specific order to fear Him, concerning this kind of human being. We are men; the other partner, the other side of humanity, is the women. We take care of them, and not merely because they are human beings: they do something we cannot do. They carry the womb. They give the next generation, the offspring, to the world; without them we could not find our children. So Allah is telling me to listen to this.

Third, Allah mentions the weak, and we are fearing Allah when we look at the future. I have a child who will come after me. I am not sure whether I will stay around him or go somewhere else. Will he be alone? Will he have somebody to take care of him or not? That is why I need to fear Allah, in order to leave a good future for our children when they come into this life, in shā’ Allāh.^[5]

Fourth, when we leave our homes and go around to earn our living, we meet people and deal with them in transactions. How will it go? Allah tells me: if you fear Allah when you pay, when you sell, when you buy, when you deal... Let me tell you something, and I am quoting a humble number: hundreds of times somebody has come to me and asked, "Can we buy something, use it for a while, and return it, because the law gives us the chance to do that?" You know what I mean. How do you answer? If I go to Kroger or wherever right now and take something, use it for a long trip, and come back and say, "I am sorry, I want to return it," the cashier will certainly not ask me anything. But what we are doing is attacking the rights of the people around us. We are not just getting an advantage, we are taking advantage of the chances we already have. We are not dealing justly with the matter. It is the same with any kind of transaction among ourselves. I am the older brother among my siblings, and that gives me the right to get more than them because I am the older. Or the opposite: I am the younger one, and I act like the little boy.^[6]

Then Allah says that the hereafter will be better for each one who fears Him in everything. Fifth: Allah tells us that if you are doing this and that, He knows exactly what you are doing. But what is the subject here? Allah gave the verse on the relationship between spouses, especially when they disagree. In a disagreement there is a conflict of interest. Who takes what? Me and my wife have decided to separate; we are going to break the relationship now. Who is going to take what? And I use whatever advantage I have or am able to use against the other party.

I cannot tell you how many hours we spend with people just to make them fear Allah in the decision they will make against each other. A couple comes. I still remember — maybe I told you this before — that I spent more than sixty hours between two spouses, just two spouses, at different times. We would finish five or six hours sitting and talking, going around the same point. At the end of the day I told the woman, "Sister, are you serious? You are talking about ten thousand dollars. All of these issues, only because of ten thousand dollars?" She said, "You know what? Just give me a second," and she took out her checkbook and wrote a check, and I still remember it: fifty thousand dollars. She said, "This is for the masjid. I am not looking for the money. I am just trying to give him a hard time. That is the only reason for all of this." And I told her, "All right. You want to give him a hard time. What about me?"^[7]

Look at the point Allah makes in the same passage. First, at the beginning, He asks for generosity from each of the two. If we cannot give that generosity, then at least we must have fear of Allah and justice between us, to fix the problems.

And then Allah tells us that He gave the same advice to the people before you, and to you, to fear Allah. What kind of taqwā is this? It relates to the dīn itself, to īmān, to Islam. We must take care of our religion as much as we take care of our homes, our children, our spouses, our business, our time, even our leisure time, whatever Allah is asking of me in each position. And when I look at the concept of taqwā itself, Allah asks us to fear Him as He should be feared.^[8] Even when we deal with our parents, our spouses, our siblings, our children, it makes no difference whom you are dealing with. What matters is whether you are fearing Allah or not.

Why we have the Qur’an

I have given you a hard time tonight with a long lecture. But look at what the sūrah gives us: we should observe its results, the reasons for having this Qur’an at all. Allah gave us the Qur’an as guidance. As long as we try to benefit from it, we will be on the straight path. Otherwise, once we leave the Qur’an behind us, we will be lost, and we will lose our direction towards Him. With that —

--- ^[1]: توثيق المحرر: the lecturer did not name the Companion or give a source, and the transcript is unclear about who answered inside the masjid. The saying in view is the well-known one: «إِنَّ الْأَنْبِيَاءَ لَمْ يُوَرِّثُوا دِينَارًا وَلَا دِرْهَمًا، إِنَّمَا وَرَّثُوا الْعِلْمَ» (reported by Abū Dāwūd, al-Tirmidhī and Ibn Mājah); the lecturer gave only its sense, and the market story is reported in al-Ṭabarānī with a chain whose grading the editor has not verified. ^[2]: توثيق المحرر: the transcript is garbled here and the person named by the lecturer (and by the audience member) cannot be recovered; the sentence is kept as spoken and nothing is supplied. ^[3]: توثيق المحرر: the transcript does not record the recitation (the Arabic words are missing), so the verse is kept out of the body. It is identified by the editor as the opening of al-Nisāʾ from the lecturer's translation: ﴿يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ اتَّقُوا رَبَّكُمُ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُم مِّن نَّفْسٍ وَاحِدَةٍ وَخَلَقَ مِنْهَا زَوْجَهَا وَبَثَّ مِنْهُمَا رِجَالًا كَثِيرًا وَنِسَاءً ۚ وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ الَّذِي تَسَاءَلُونَ بِهِ وَالْأَرْحَامَ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ عَلَيْكُمْ رَقِيبًا﴾ [al-Nisāʾ: 1]. Translation: "O people, fear your Lord, who created you from one soul, and created from it its mate, and spread from the two of them many men and women. And fear Allah, in whose name you ask one another, and the wombs. Indeed Allah is ever watchful over you." ^[4]: توثيق المحرر: the lecturer gave no verse numbers for the nine calls. In al-Nisāʾ the phrase "O you who believe" occurs at verses 19, 29, 43, 59, 71, 94, 135, 136 and 144; his descriptions match these in order. At the second reference in the body (the "core of the sūrah"), the transcript lacks the Arabic; from his explanation of standing and justice the editor reads it as ﴿كُونُوا قَوَّامِينَ بِالْقِسْطِ﴾ [al-Nisāʾ: 135], which is not certain. ^[5]: توثيق المحرر: the transcript has a gap where the lecturer cited the verse for this point ("Allah said ..."), perhaps al-Nisāʾ 9, on those who would fear for the weak offspring they leave behind. The lecturer's words are kept and the verse is not asserted. ^[6]: توثيق المحرر: this passage is muddled in the transcript (the return-after-use example and the sibling example run together); the sense given is the closest that the text allows. ^[7]: Editor’s documentation: The story is told anonymously, as in the lecture. The woman's profession, which the lecturer mentioned, is left out to protect the privacy of a counselling case. ^[8]: توثيق المحرر: the lecturer's wording echoes ﴿اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ حَقَّ تُقَاتِهِ﴾ [Āl ʿImrān: 102]; he did not recite it here.