TilĀwah
TILĀWAH. Recitation of the sacred words of scripture in Islamic contexts of prayer, liturgy, and public performance is designated by the Arabic terms tilāwah and qirāʾah. The very name of Muslim scripture, Qurʾān, is a cognate of qirāʾah from the finite verb qaraʿa, which means "he read," in the sense of "recited." Tilāwah is the more general term for Qurʾān recitation, and its root carries the double sense of "to recite" and "to follow." Thus, the Muslim concept of scripture entails the notion of divine speech meant to be recited, as indeed is the case with several other scriptures, such as the Hindu Vedas and the Jewish Torah. The sacred archetype of Muslim scripture is the Preserved Tablet (lawḥ maḥfūẓ, surah 85:22) or Mother of the Book (umm al-kitāb, 13:39, 43:4), the heavenly inscription of God's word from which it is believed that scriptures had been sent down to other prophets (e.g., the torah to Moses and the gospel to Jesus) and ultimately from which the angel Gabriel recited the Arabic Qurʾān to Muḥammad. This notion of divine speech, preserved and transmitted in heaven and on earth in both written and oral forms, can be traced among Semites to ancient Near Eastern cosmologies.
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