One of the odder features of modern culture is the belief that, ideally, we should read as widely as possible. There are so many fields that we feel we should be informed about and so many books others have recommended. And so we are always vaguely haunted by the sense that we’re not reading enough. In Islamic culture, the Quran is THE book. The words were sent, sentence by sentence, from God to the Prophet Muhammed around 1500 years ago and, over a period of more than twenty years, he simply wrote down what God wanted the whole word to know. The Quran, therefore, suggests a radical view of reading. There is only one book we truly have to read and that we should spend our whole lives absorbing and reflecting on its message. To deeply know and understand one book is more important than to skim our way through hundreds. We may, ideally, end up committing large parts of this book to memory and feel no shame that we have scarcely opened another volume. Though currently unfashionable, the underlying point is crucial. A great book brings us face to face with the considered thinking of a wonderfully intelligent and deeply serious writer. It's an encounter that can (and perhaps should) last a lifetime. If we find in it assertions we want to disagree with, we are stimulated to frame our objections in terms that would make sense to the writer; and we then might imagine what their replies to our comments would be. We enter into a deep dialogue. We ponder anything that doesn’t quite seem to make sense, we consider what it might mean; we apply the ideas we find in it to our daily lives; we test our experience against it; we find its phrasing and vocabulary slowly influencing our own; our minds end up being shaped by it. We go back to the same book again and again, we find that as we age we see new things in it, or it becomes poignant because it keeps alive aspects of our younger selves that we are otherwise losing sight of. This means of course that across our lives we can properly read only a very few books — so finding them becomes important. They may not be initially the most exciting, they may not be page-turners — but a page-turner is designed only to be read once, the cleverest cliff-hanger means nothing once we know the denouement. The books that really touch us may be ones we slowly grow to love; they reveal their depths gradually; they are a little shy, we need to be gentle, at first, in what we ask of them, but once we are friends they will become our dear friends. The Quran is exceptionally beautiful and profound; but even if it isn’t the one book we are devoted to, it sets the properly high standard for engagement. If a book is genuinely worth reading, it’s worth reading many times. It might almost be the only thing we look at.
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