When Allah speaks, His words reveal the secrets of everything.

Not information to be stored and repeated. Light, by which a thing is finally seen for what it is.

And Jibrīl carried it as an amāna.

Through the whole heaven, down to the earth. Entrusted, and delivered. Nothing lost on the way, and nothing changed.

Until it was placed in our hands.

Every one of us receives it. Which means the responsibility is not small, and it is not somebody else's to carry.

This is the tie between the Creator and His creation.

This is the way, and this is the road that brings us back to Him. We come to know Him through His own words, or we do not come to know Him at all.

So it is given all our time and all our attention.

The table cleared. The rest of the evening set aside. A child learns what a thing is worth by watching what his family puts down for it.

One teacher. One child.

Not a row of thirty, where the quiet child is the one who is never heard. A teacher whose whole attention is your child, for the whole of the hour.

He asks everything he is tempted to ask.

No question too small, too strange, or too late to go back to. And what comes back is the exact explanation, not a kind way of moving on.

And the parents are in the room.

Watching, overseeing, part of it. Nothing in your child's lesson happens somewhere you cannot see it, and nobody meets your child alone.

He knows his own weakness, word by word.

Every word is graded, in colour and as a number. Red is not a mark of failure. It is simply where the next gain is, and he can see exactly which word it sits on.

And he knows what to do next.

What today asks of him. What this week asks, and this month, and this year. A child who can see the next step does not need to be pushed toward it.