There is no path to guidance, soundness, and the rectification of every matter except by following the ways to which the Qur’an directs and which it urges the servants to pursue.

Once you know that the entire, magnificent Qur’an is endowed with these attributes—the loftiest, most complete, most perfect, and most beneficial to humankind—and that those noble meanings are repeated throughout it and woven together in a wondrous, unparalleled harmony of perfection and beauty, you will understand that when a student of knowledge studies the explanation of some verses, he is thereby trained and enabled to comprehend the rest of the verses as well.

For these and other reasons, we have deemed it advantageous to confine ourselves to an abridged summary of that commentary, hoping that the Lord will perfect His favor and that the intended objective will thereby be attained.

We have also judged it preferable to present each subject separately, for this brings the material closer to the reader, makes it easier, and gathers the concepts that belong to a single discipline in one place—even though, as noted earlier, many subsidiary rulings inevitably appear within verses dealing with fundamentals, many fundamentals within verses dealing with subsidiary rulings, and a great deal of exhortation, warning, and narrative is interwoven throughout. This remarkable interweaving is part of the Qur’an’s perfection and the magnitude of its influence: it is a book of instruction that removes manifold forms of ignorance, and a book of cultivation that rectifies morals and deeds. It teaches, corrects, refines, and disciplines by the highest methods—methods that neither sages nor thinkers could devise, nor anything even approaching them.