Somebody Underlined This Before Me: Notes From a Second-Hand Quran

Fifty Pence and a Bit of Rain

Saturday. The kind of rain that isn't dramatic enough to justify staying in but is stubborn enough to ruin your shoes. I was in a charity shop on a side street in Sheffield, killing twenty minutes before meeting a friend for coffee, pretending to look at the jigsaw section.

The window display was the usual chaos: paperbacks with cracked spines, a chipped jug, a puzzle with no picture on the box. Tucked beneath a James Patterson thriller was a dark green book with gold lettering worn down to the metal. The Holy Qur'an, with a translation alongside the Arabic. Fifty pence.

I'd taken my shahada the year before. I owned a Quran, obviously — a nice new one, still stiff, the spine barely cracked. But I'd never held one that looked used. Not used like neglected. Used like read.

So I bought it. Obviously.

The Handwriting

On the bus home I opened the cover and discovered the book had a previous life. An inscription in blue biro, slightly faded: "For Aisha — graduation, 1998. Whatever you do, keep asking questions. Love, Uncle Rafiq."

A graduation present. Nearly thirty years old.

Then the margins started talking. Someone had underlined phrases in pencil first, then gone over them later in biro, as if they'd come back years down the line and decided the thought was still worth keeping. Beside one passage about patience: "this is the one — read again after the hospital." Beside another: "ask the imam what 'hands' means here." On the back page, a shopping list in a different hand. Milk. Nappies. Something I couldn't decipher.

And pressed flat between two pages near the middle, a bus ticket. First South Yorkshire, dated 14 March 2004. A single.

Becoming a Very Amateur Detective

I want to be clear that I am not a detective. I'm a person with a phone and an overdeveloped sense of curiosity.

Still, I did the obvious things. There was a stamp inside the front cover from a mosque library in Bradford — "Please return" in small letters under the logo. I rang them on the Monday. A woman called Sister Hana answered, and when I explained, she laughed in a way that suggested this was not her first phone call of this kind.

"We don't track them," she said. "People donate, people borrow, people move house. We had one returned last year with a curry stain and a note saying sorry. That was a good day."

I asked whether they'd ever throw out a Quran with writing in it.

"No," she said, quite firmly. "Never. Some sisters and brothers won't write in a mushaf at all — that's their respect, and it's fair enough. Others do. Both are fine. We're not the police."

I tried the charity shop volunteers too, who were kind but unhelpful in the way that charity shop volunteers usually are. "Books come in bags, love," one of them told me. "We don't ask where from."

Fair enough. Case closed, sort of.

The Shelves Where Faith Waits

Here's the thing that stayed with me. That Quran had almost certainly passed through several pairs of hands. Mosque library, then a donation bag, then a shelf in Sheffield, then me.

I'd spent my first year as a Muslim quietly panicking that I was behind. Everyone else seemed to know the songs; I was mouthing the words. But the margins in that book were evidence of something much less intimidating: that even the people who seem settled are still asking questions, still coming back to the same verses, still writing ask the imam next to a line they've read forty times.

Uncle Rafiq told Aisha to keep asking questions in 1998. That instruction was still doing its work in a charity shop in 2026, in the hands of a stranger she'll never meet.

We talk about faith as a personal thing, and of course it is. But it's also a relay. Somebody hands you something — a book, a phrase, a habit of asking — and you carry it a bit further. You don't have to have started the race to be in it.

The Note I Left

I kept the book. I did pay for it, in my defence.

But I added something. On a Post-it stuck to the inside back cover, in pencil, I wrote: "Found in a Sheffield charity shop, November 2026. Fifty pence. The bus ticket stays where it was. — a later reader."

I dated it and felt slightly ridiculous. Then I did it anyway, because the book had already taught me that the small traces are the point.

If Aisha ever wants it back, I hope she finds me. In the meantime, her uncle's underlinings are still there, the 2004 bus ticket is still between the pages, and I've added a few pencil marks of my own.

The Quran doesn't need me to be the first reader. It just needs me to be one.