Mahmud Ali Al-Banna, A Qari Who Spent His Life Serving Quran
He was born in December 1926 in a village named Shibra in Egypt’s Menofia Governorate. His father was a farmer.
Mahmoud started learning the Quran by heart at the age of six in the village’s Ahmadi School.
Every night he would review what he had already committed to memory as well as the verses his teacher would ask him to recite the next day.
His teacher and the likes of him in villages all over Egypt made incredible contributions to the development of Quran memorization and recitation in the country and training such figures as al-Banna.
Mahmoud says once his teacher punished him although he had performed well in memorization.
“I went back home crying, telling my mom what had happened. My mother said she had asked the teacher to punish me because she felt I had lacked the needed concentration when learning the Quran.”
Mahmoud was a very religious person and spent all his life in serving the Holy Quran. His son Ahmed has followed in his father’s footsteps and is now a good Quran reciter.
He says that after his father’s death, his mother told him to learn Quran recitation.
“I was a businessman and did not think to be able to become a qari. That night I had a dream in which I fell into a well and started crying. My father came and grabbed my hand, getting me out of the well. My mother had a dream on the same night in which my father gave her two shirts and told her to give one of them to me. That inspired me to start learning Quran recitation.”
