When the Qur'an describes the hypocrites, it says their fire radiated — aḍāʾat. It does not say it illuminated — anārat. One word means the fire lit everything around the man and nothing inside him. The other would have meant he was changed by it. God chose the first.

That distinction disappears entirely in English translation. There are forty like it in this book.

About the Book

Forty Parables of The Holy Qur'ān is Shaykh Dr. Ahmed Saad al-Azharī's study of the amthāl, the similitudes God sets forth throughout His Book: the fire that goes out, the smooth rock beneath a layer of soil, the garden on a hill, the spider's house, the mirage in the desert, the panting dog, the Lamp that gives light.

Most books on the parables explain what they mean. This one goes further and asks why they are worded as they are. Why ẓulumāt, darknesses in the plural, rather than a single darkness? Why does God say the devourers of an orphan's wealth are consuming fire, rather than saying it is as though they were? Why the word ṣarṣar for the wind that ruins the disbeliever's charity, when that single word carries both howling and freezing at once?

These are the questions of balāgha, the classical science of Qur'anic eloquence, and they are almost never asked in English. Shaykh Ahmed Saad asks them forty times, and answers them in language any reader can follow.

A Complete Bilingual Edition

Every English page in this volume faces the author's original Arabic, fully vowelled, set in classical Qur'anic type. Nothing is abridged and nothing is summarised. Read the English alone, read the Arabic alone, or read them together and watch the argument move between the two languages.

For students of Arabic, this is a rare thing: a contemporary scholarly text of real substance, presented in parallel, on a subject that rewards close reading of the original.

Inside Each Parable

• The verse, in Arabic and English
• Its context within the sūra and what it depicts
• A numbered breakdown of its rhetorical features, word by word
• Supporting testimony from the classical exegetes, among them al-Qushayrī, Ibn ʿAjība, Ibn ʿĀshūr and al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī
• Ḥadīth, and verse from the great Muslim poets, drawn in where they illuminate the image

Each parable runs four to six pages. You can read one after Fajr, or one a night through Ramadan, and finish the book without ever feeling hurried.

Origins

These reflections began as talks delivered before the Tarāwīḥ prayer in Ramadan 1437, thirty of them, one for each night of the month. Shaykh Ahmed Saad later extended the collection to forty and spent the following years deepening it from works of tafsīr, language and taṣawwuf. The number is deliberate: forty carries its own weight in the Islamic tradition, and the author draws the parallel with the forty nights appointed to Mūsā, peace be upon him.

Contents

Author's Introduction

1. The State of the Hypocrites
2. How Showing Off Annuls Good Deeds
3. The Charity of the Sincere
4. The Biting Wind
5. The Orphan's Property Brings Terrible Torment
6. The Muḥammadan Light
7. The Victims of Delusion
8. Between Life and Death
9. The Expansion of Faith
10. The Narrowness of Unbelief
11. Good Land and Bad Land
12. The Panting Dog
13. The Weight of Pleasures
14. The Reality of Life in This World
15. An Apt Comparison
16. Holding On to Water
17. The Likeness of Truth and Falsehood
18. The Good Word and the Bad Word
19. The Powerless Idols
20. Breaking Promises
21. The Eternal Value of Deeds
22. Mercy to Parents
23. Between Miserliness and Extravagance
24. The Rolled-Up Pages
25. Worshiping Upon the Brink
26. The Light of the Heavens and the Earth
27. A Mirage in the Desert
28. The Waves of Darkness
29. Too Late for Regret
30. A Spider's House
31. The Slave Partners
32. The Illuminating Lamp
33. In the Service of Partners
34. The Lifestyle of Livestock
35. Like a Sapling that Grows Stout
36. The Backbiter
37. The Goodly Loan
38. The Effects of Neglecting the Revealed Law
39. Remembrance is the Life of the Heart
40. Form Without Substance

Conclusion · Bibliography

Who This Book Is For

• Readers who have long suspected that something is lost in translation, and want to see exactly what
• Students of Arabic working toward reading the Qur'an in the original
• Anyone looking for a structured Ramadan companion: forty parables, one a night
• Study circles and halaqāt, where each parable stands alone as a session
• Teachers and students of tafsīr, Qur'anic studies and Arabic rhetoric

The Author

Shaykh Dr. Ahmed Saad al-Azharī is a British-Egyptian scholar, imam, and founder of the Ihsan Institute for Arabic & Islamic Studies in the United Kingdom. A descendant of the Prophet ﷺ, he memorised the Qur'an by the age of ten and took his BA (Hons) in Islamic Studies from al-Azhar University in 2001, followed by a PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2024 on traditional Muslim engagement with modernity.

He holds one of the shortest chains of transmission in the narration of Ḥafṣ, at twenty-nine links, and carries ijāzāt in Qur'anic recitation, ḥadīth, fiqh, theology, Arabic grammar and taṣawwuf from more than eighty-five scholars across the Muslim world. A former imam in Canada and the United Kingdom, he teaches and lectures internationally, and is the author of Contemplating the Qur'an along with several collections of poetry.

Translation and Editing

Translated by Khalid Williams, whose renderings of the classical Islamic tradition are widely read in English. Edited by Muhammad Isa Waley, formerly Lead Curator of Persian and Turkish manuscripts at the British Library.

Specifications

• Author: Shaykh Dr. Ahmed Saad al-Azharī
• Translator: Khalid Williams
• Editor: Muhammad Isa Waley
• Publisher: Ihya Publishing, 2025 / 1447
• Format: Paperback, bilingual Arabic–English on facing pages
• Pages: 236
• Dimensions: 6 × 9 in (152 × 229 mm)
• ISBN: 978-1-939256-24-9

Ihya Publishing is a non-profit 501(c)(3) publishing house.