With senior militant leaders looking on, Palestinian officials opened an international competition on Sunday testing participants’ knowledge of the Qur’an.
About 700 people, including diplomats and leaders of Islamic Jihad and Hamas crowded into a cultural centre for the first day of the al-Aqsa international competition for the holy Qur’an.
For five days, a panel of clerics will question the 50 contestants and ask them to recite verses of the Qur’an from memory. The competitors were from 17 countries including Senegal, Nigeria and the Netherlands as well as the Palestinian territories. Most of the contestants do not speak Arabic, making memorising the holy book especially difficult.
Yousef Salameh, Palestinian minister of religious affairs, commended the non-Arabic speakers for learning to recite the Qur’an ”better than us, who have Arabic as a mother tongue”.
Muslims believe there is a place secured in heaven those who memorise the Qur’an and follow its dictates. Those who memorise its 30 sections are given the title of honorary sheikh.
”The aim of this is to show our respect to the holy book of the Qur’an and… to create a new generation of believers who are following the rules of the Qur’an,” Salameh said.
He said the competition, which comes during the holy month of Ramadan, is part of the Palestinian celebrations over the recent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians hope the pullout will be the first step toward an independent state that also includes the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as its capital. The al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, is located in east Jerusalem.
”We pray to God that next year, God willing, the competition will take place in the al-Aqsa mosque in holy Jerusalem,” Salameh said.
The competition will end on Thursday. Winners will split just over $70 000 in prize money.
The word Qur’an is usually translated as ”recital,” and within Islam there is a long traditional of declaiming the text from memory, even among Muslims who do not understand Arabic.
Quranic memorisation competitions are common throughout the Islamic world. The contestants are judged on the accuracy of their memory and the fluency of their recitation. – Guardian Unlimited Â