On Monday, September 16, 2024, the Grand Imām of Al-Azhar, Dr. Aḥmed al-Ṭayyib, delivered remarks on the occasion of the Prophet Muḥammad’s birthday (mawlid) at the Manara International Center in Cairo. He spoke primarily about the Prophet’s merciful character and the laws of war in Islam, but also made some intriguing and somewhat provocative remarks about the relationship between the Islamic revelation and previous revelations (e.g. Christianity and Judaism). At the end of his speech, the Grand Imām gifted a new English translation of the Qurʾān produced by the al-Azhar Translation Center to President ʿAbd el Fattāḥ al-Sīsī who was in attendance.
This translation was prepared by Noha Heraiba, the database editor for Dialogue Across Borders, and Rajāʾ Maḥmūd Ismāʿīl.
Publication Date: October 22, 2024
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In the name of the most merciful, praise be to God, Lord of the worlds, and prayers of peace and blessings upon our Prophet Muḥammad and his Family and Companions. Dear President ʿAbd el Fattāḥ al-Sīsī, President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, may God protect it, and esteemed guests, peace be upon you, with God’s mercy and blessings.
It pleases me, at the beginning of my speech to present to you, the President, and to the loyal, dear people of Egypt, and to the Arab and Islamic nations, and their kings, presidents, leaders, and sultans, the best congratulations and truest wishes on this dignified and blessed occasion, the occasion of the birth of the Prophet Muḥammad, peace be upon him, the prophet of Islam and the messenger of humankind. May God’s mercy be upon the world. I wish this gathering more success, glory, and strength and generosity and stability.
Dear people, one who looks at the qualities of the Prophet, peace be upon him, does not know which one to start with nor which one to end with, nor what to take from this torrential downpour of beautiful and majestic qualities, nor what to leave out.
And how could it not be, when God described the expanse of his noble character with the description of the most sublime, and He said in his Holy Book, “Truly, you have a strong character.” (Q 68:4)
As described by those people around him, and his wife Sayyida ʿĀʾisha, mother of the believers, may God be pleased with her, when she was asked about his morals, she said, “Verily, the character of the Prophet of Allāh was the Qurʾān” and in the narration, “His morals were those of the Qurʾān, and he abided by what the Qurʾān allowed, and abstained from what the Qurʾān prohibited.”
Sayyida ʿĀʾisha, God be pleased with her, was aware of the width of the horizon of this prophetic creation and the difficulty of making people fathom this width, which cannot be quantified or abbreviated or sourced, so she conveyed this width through a comparison between his morals and the morals of the noble Qurʾān, and what they revealed of the morals of the Prophet, peace be upon him, in application and likeness.
