Most of us study the Quran a little here, a little there. Some people think they will go through the whole thing in translation first. Some begin with the last juz, just because it is familiar and it is what they have memorized. 

It is an ocean and it is almost intimidating. Where do you even begin? 

That is how it went for me, for a long time. 

He Would Not Teach You the Whole Map 

I was really fortunate that I met a teacher who used to teach a particular course on the Quran and the whole purpose of it was to give you an overview. 

Think of the Quran as a giant map. He would not teach you the whole map, he would teach you the major milestones. 

Here is why I teach it this way: you are a student of the Quran for life. So while you are young, if you get this base, everything you learn afterwards has somewhere to sit. 

Three Ayat, One Sentence, Four Things 

According to a number of great scholars of the past, Surah Al-‘Asr is the summary of the entire Quran. All hundred and fourteen surahs, inside that one. It is super short, which is awesome, because it means I can hand you the summary of the whole Quran right now. Three ayat and many of you know it by heart.¹ 

Before we go anywhere, notice this. Those three ayat are one sentence. Not three. One. Which gives you a clue that an ayah is not the same thing as a sentence. If it were, there would be three sentences here. There is one. 

The surah opens with an oath, then says every single human being is in loss. Not doing badly. Drowning in it. Then comes the exception. Except these people. 

In that third ayah it is not four kinds of people. It is one group and they accomplish four things. 

1. They believe. 

2. They do good deeds. 

3. They counsel each other truthfully. 

4. They counsel each other to patience. 

Everyone else is going to fail. They are already in failure. 

So how is this a summary of the entire Quran? Go anywhere. Any surah, any passage, any ayah and it comes back to one of these four. Either it tells you what to believe, or strengthens your belief, or teaches you something about the unseen you could never have known unless it told you. That is the first. 

Or it tells you about some kind of good deed. Prayer, charity, the rights of your parents. That is the second. 

Or you find people counseling each other and giving honest advice and the biggest example is the prophets themselves. That is the third. 

Or you find people who did not just give counsel and run out of steam. Forget it, I gave advice, they did not want to hear it. No. They stuck with it. That is the fourth. 

Even where the Quran talks about war, that is a kind of patience, because it takes perseverance to withstand a battlefield and the soldiers are counseling each other, stand your ground. 

Why Anybody Swears at All and Why Allah Does 

The surah opens with an oath. By time. Look at your translations. By time. By the ages. 

We do not really do this in English anymore. If you watch ancient adventure flicks, some guy being overly dramatic says by the king. Nobody talks like that now. 

So why does anybody swear at all? 

1. You are angry. You are with your friends, one guy keeps getting made fun of and finally he says, I swear, if you do not stop. 

2. You are not being believed. You come to work forty-five minutes late. Your boss asks why. Traffic. No, no, I swear there was traffic. Saying I swear admits he is having trouble believing you. 

3. You are testifying. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. 

Those three exist in any language. English, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic. In old Arabic there were a couple more. 

4. You are grabbing attention. This one is particular to Arabic. Picture the marketplace, people shopping, noise everywhere. A guy goes up on the mountain and swears by the morning and everybody stops. Not because they think he is crazy, but because it means something really serious is about to go down. Is an enemy tribe attacking at dawn? I better listen. 

5. Evidence and witness. This one is not even something the Arabs did. It is specific to the Quran. Allah swears by something in order to give you evidence and to bring it forward as a witness. 

Now run all five over one sentence. I swear by time, human beings are in loss. 

First: Allah is possibly angry. Second: He is saying it because people are not taking it seriously. Third: Allah Himself is testifying that human beings are in loss. Fourth: He is grabbing your attention and the thing He grabs it with is time itself. Somebody says the word time and you look at your watch. Urgency is built into the word. 

Then the fifth, the most powerful one. He takes what He swore by and makes it a witness. 

Think of an old man who watched his friends make bad decisions and saw the consequences, then watched a younger generation make the same decisions and meet the same consequences. He says, I have seen this a hundred times. That is why we go to people with experience. 

Now imagine time itself, an old guy on the sidelines watching human beings play out the same drama over and over. Were there young men and women before you who wanted money and security, who had trials like you and me? Surethere were. 

So you ask time. How are we doing overall? Time says, man, they are just in loss. Nations think they are doing amazing and get destroyed. People come into a little money and lose all sense of right and wrong. A boy hits puberty and thinks he owns the world. Then they crash and burn. 

In your personal life, time is a witness too. The mistakes, the moments you regret, the things you did in secret. 

The One Thing You Are Losing and Can Never Get Back 

Loss means you lose something and you cannot get it back. Lose money and you can earn it back. Lose a game and you win the next one. Lose points with a teacher and you earn them back on an extra credit assignment. 

There is one thing you and I are losing that we will never get back and it does not matter if you are old or young, rich or poor. 

Ten in the morning is gone and it is never coming back. Today is gone once I lose it and every day the amount I have lost increases. Time is the ultimate proof of loss. 

People say this delusional thing to young people. You have your whole life ahead of you. Who said you have your whole life ahead of you? Who knows how long they are going to live? 

If you ever get the chance, go visit a graveyard and walk past the stones. Born two thousand and eleven, died two thousand and eleven. Born two thousand and one, died two thousand and fourteen. Are they all old people in there? No. Did any of them know how much time they had? Nope. None of us do. 

So all of us should have some urgency about the time we have already wasted. If I only had one day left I would look back and say, man, I could have done so much more. I sat there for hours playing stupid video games. I look at how I have spent my time and I regret it. 

You Are Drowning. Watch What Drowning People Do. 

Why these four and not some other four? 

You are drowning and you are also unconscious. There is no way you survive like that. So what is the first thing you need? To wake up. If you wake up and say, this is just a nightmare, I am going back to sleep, you are dead. 

You have to accept the reality. You have to truly believe you are in loss. That is why belief is the first condition. If you do not believe you are drowning, you will not do anything. 

Once you believe it, whether you can swim or not, you do something. Flap your arms. That is the second condition. 

While you are trying to save yourself, you notice people you love down there, still asleep, tied to you. Do you save yourself and think, well, I never liked my cousin that much anyway? No. You try to wake them up and let them know they are drowning too. That is counseling each other truthfully. 

Now the two of you are working at it and you start giving up. Who is right there? Come on, just a little more. That is counseling each other to patience. 

If you are drowning, these are the four things you need. 

The Last Two Are Not About You 

This religion is not just about taking care of yourself. It calls on you to care about other people, starting with family. Allah did not put the weight of the world on your shoulders. He put the people around you there. 

Notice what has happened. The last part is not about you at all. Allah is telling us that we are not going to survive Judgment Day unless we learn to work with each other. Look at the grammar. The beginning is singular, every individual human being is in loss and then the exception switches to plural. Not the one who believed. Those who believed. Our communities suffer because people give up on each other. We had an argument, that was it. Where did the counseling to patience go? 

One more thing. What is the difference between and and or? One teacher says do A and B and C and D. Another says A or B or C or D. Four tasks, or one. These are ands. Miss any one and you fail and go right back to the rule. 

So it is not enough for me to believe and do good deeds. I have to learn to work with other people.

Every Word of It Is in the Past Tense 

One last secret before I let you go. 

The final ayah is entirely past tense. They believed. They did the deeds. They counseled each other to the truth, they counseled each other to patience. Past, past, past. Even when I translate it I say those who believe and do good deeds, present tense, to help you follow. Technically the language is past. 

Why? Because no human being should think they have already survived this. The only ones who have survived it are the ones who are already gone. You can look back at them and say, they believed, they did the deeds, they counseled each other to the truth and to patience. Until I die, I had better be working on it, so that after I am gone it can be said of me that my life amounted to those four things. 

Here is the last thought. We could save all of humanity if we just started worrying about the people around us. If everybody took care of the few people near them, we would cover the whole planet. You do not have to fix the world. Work on yourself and the people around you. 

This is the first of the sessions and the four things are worked through one at a time across the rest. Study Quran Passages with Ustadh Nouman Ali Khan on Bayyinah TV: Bayyinah TV 

Notes

This post is adapted from the opening session of Quran Passages on Bayyinah TV and is written in the voice of that session. Every teaching claim, example and aside in it is taken from the session itself.

[1] Al-Quran, Surah Al-‘Asr, 103:1-3, https://quran.com/103