Forty Parables of The Holy Qur'an (Biingual Arabic-English)

Ahmed Saad al-Azhari
Translation by Khalid Williams

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.