My TijarahConnectingwith the Qur’anthrough Arabic
What the Arabic says that a translationcannot, and how to start hearing it.
What is inside
Contents
Before you begin
- You have felt this alreadyOne line, four translations, two readings
- Why this Book came in ArabicWhat Allah says about His own Book
- An assurance, before we go onRecitation, reward, and where translation stops
- A word about paceTen ayat, and the rule the salaf used
Part one: nine things Arabic does
- 01 The rootThree letters, and the family they carry
- 02 The patternWhy the heavier verb is used for sin
- 03 The orderHow tawheed is carried by word order alone
- 04 The sentenceOne vowel, an act or a permanent state
- 05 The numberDarknesses in the plural, light in the singular
- 06 The articleTwo letters that take in every praise there is
- 07 The turnThe exact line where you stop talking about Him
- 08 The silenceThe one question He answers without a messenger
- 09 The endingWhy the closing name is the verdict
- Al-Fatihah, line by lineFour of the nine, in the surah you know best
Part two: turning this into a practice
- Where we have been standingThe five rungs, and what holds them up
- Ten minutes a dayThe loop, and the mistake that reverses it
- Four things worth owningThe Mus’haf, the tafsir, the dictionary
- Three ways this goes wrongIncluding one the scholars themselves dispute
- Where a teacher makes the differenceThe part no book can do for you
- The nine questionsOne page. Tear it out and keep it in the Mus’haf
Before you begin
You have felt this already.
You have said this line seventeen times a day, at the very least, for as many years as you have been praying. Four translators, each of them a careful scholar of Arabic, rendered it in four different ways.
مَـٰلِكِ يَوْمِ ٱلدِّينِ
Al-Fatihah 1:4
None of them made a mistake. Each was trying to carry one Arabic word across into a language that has no word waiting to receive it, and each of them chose differently. Whichever copy sits on your shelf has been telling you something a little different from what the other three would have told you, in every prayer of your life.
Each of the four renderings is a published translation, named beside its own line, and Ibn Kathir discusses the word itself at al-Fatihah 1:4. Throughout this book ﷺ stands for the honorific: peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.
Before you begin
Why this Book came in Arabic.
You might reasonably assume Allah chose Arabic because the first people to hear the revelation spoke Arabic, and that the language itself is incidental, a box the meaning happened to arrive in. He tells us otherwise, and He tells us more than once. Wherever He mentions the language of this Book, He joins it to the reason it was sent.
إِنَّآ أَنزَلْنَـٰهُ قُرْءَٰنًا عَرَبِيًّا لَّعَلَّكُمْ تَعْقِلُونَ
Indeed, We sent it down as an Arabic Qur’an, so that you may understand. Yusuf 12:2
بِلِسَانٍ عَرَبِىٍّ مُّبِينٍ
In a clear Arabic tongue.
Ash-Shu’ara 26:195
قُرْءَانًا عَرَبِيًّا غَيْرَ ذِى عِوَجٍ لَّعَلَّهُمْ يَتَّقُونَ
An Arabic Qur’an, without any crookedness, so that they may be conscious of Allah.
Az-Zumar 39:28
What He asks of you afterwards is reflection, and twice He asks it in the form of a rebuke.
أَفَلَا يَتَدَبَّرُونَ ٱلْقُرْءَانَ أَمْ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبٍ أَقْفَالُهَآ
Will they not then reflect upon the Qur’an, or are there locks upon their hearts? Muhammad 47:24
The Arabic language itself is part of the religion, and knowing it is an obligation. For understanding the Book and the Sunnah is an obligation, and they are not understood except through understanding Arabic, and whatever an obligation cannot be fulfilled without is itself obligatory.
Ibn Taymiyyah, Iqtida as-Sirat al-Mustaqeem 2/207
‘Umar, may Allah be pleased with him, put it in a single line to the people of his time: learn Arabic, for it is part of your religion. Neither he nor Ibn Taymiyyah asked you to become a grammarian. The scholars have always distinguished the portion each Muslim personally needs, which is roughly what your prayer requires of you, from the mastery the ummah as a whole is answerable for. Most of us will spend our lives somewhere between the two, and there is a great deal of good to be had there.
Ibn Taymiyyah, Iqtida as-Sirat al-Mustaqeem 2/207. The narration of ‘Umar is recorded by Ibn Abi Shaybah in his Musannaf. On the split between what each individual must know and what the community as a whole owes, the scholars are agreed, and note that no authentic hadith makes the formal study of Arabic obligatory on everyone.
Before you begin
Before we go on, an assurance.
A book like this one can leave a sincere person feeling that the years already given to recitation somehow did not count. They counted. Look at how the Prophet ﷺ described what you have been doing all this time.
You are already being rewarded
“Whoever recites a letter from the Book of Allah has a good deed for it, and each good deed is multiplied tenfold.” The reward attaches to the recitation itself, and none of it waits on your understanding.
At-Tirmidhi 2910
Struggling counts twice
“The one skilled in the Qur’an is with the noble, obedient scribes. And the one who recites it stammering, and it is hard on him, has two rewards.” The difficulty you feel over it is itself rewarded, twice over.
Muslim 798
The other half of the matter is stated just as plainly by the scholars. A translation is not the Qur’an, and this is a settled ruling rather than a point of taste. Once the meanings have been carried into another language, what you hold in your hands is a tafsir, an explanation of what scholars understood the words to mean. This is why it can be handled without wudu, why a non-Muslim may pick it up, and why your prayer would not be valid if you recited from it.
That a translation is tafsir and not Qur’an is the ruling of the Standing Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta. That recitation in the prayer is valid only in Arabic is the position of the majority of the jurists. Both hadith above are given with their collections.
Before you begin
A word about pace.
Nine short chapters follow. Each one takes a single thing the Arabic language does, sets it working inside a real ayah, and names the tafsir it came from at the foot of the same page, so that nothing here has to be taken on trust. You will need no Arabic to follow them.
There is nothing hidden or coded about any of it. This is ordinary grammar, the sort a child in a maktab meets in his first year, discussed openly in every major work of tafsir for the last thousand years. If it arrives like a discovery, that is because the language you were reading in had no way of showing it to you.
When one of us learned ten ayat, he would not move past them until he knew their meanings and had acted on them.
Reported from Abu ‘Abd ar-Rahman as-Sulami, describing the Companions
Ten ayat at a time, held onto until they were understoodand until they had changed something. That was the method of the people who took this Book from the Prophet ﷺ himself, and nobody has improved on it since. Take these chapters at something close to that pace. Nine days would suit them better than one evening.
Part one
Nine things Arabic does that English cannot.
Each of these is a decision the Qur’an makes that your translation has no way of showing you. English is not a poor language; it stores its meaning in other places. A great deal of what Arabic carries sits inside the shape of a word and the order of a sentence, and those are the two places an English sentence has nothing to put.
The root
Three letters, one family of meaning
The pattern
The shape a root is poured into
The order
What a word gains by standing first
The sentence
An event, or a settled state
The number
One, two, or many, and why
The article
Two letters that take in everything
The turn
When speech about Him becomes speech to Him
The silence
The word that is not there
The ending
The name that closes the verdict
The root
al-jadhr
Almost every Arabic word grows out of three letters.
English words mostly stand on their own. Mercy, womb and compassionate have no letters in common and no shared history that a reader would ever feel. Arabic is built differently. Three consonants hold a meaning between them, and every word raised on those three letters inherits that meaning and keeps it, audibly, for as long as the word exists.
ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
The Most Merciful, the Bestower of mercy.
Al-Fatihah 1:3
Two of Allah’s names stand side by side here, and both grew out of those three letters. Ibn Kathir relates that ٱلرَّحْمَـٰن is the more intense of the two in its mercy, since it takes in the whole of creation in both worlds, while ٱلرَّحِيم speaks of that mercy as it reaches the believers. Ibn al-Qayyim expressed the difference as the mercy belonging to Him and the mercy as it arrives with you. ٱلرَّحْمَـٰن He has kept for Himself, and no one else has ever been named by it.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
Ibn Kathir on al-Fatihah 1:3 for the two names, and Ibn al-Qayyimin Bada’i al-Fawa’id for the distinction between them. The hadith of the womb: Abu Dawud and at-Tirmidhi 1907, graded hasan sahih by at-Tirmidhi. Affirm these names as Allah affirmed them, without distortion, denial, asking how, or likening Him to His creation.
The pattern
al-wazn
The shape a root is poured into carries meaning of its own.
Take one root through the standard verb patterns. Nothing has been added but a doubled letter in one place and a prefix in another, and yet the meaning turns each time in a direction you could learn to anticipate.
| Form | Verb | Reading | Meaning | What the shape does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | عَلِمَ | ‘alima | he knew | the bare root |
| II | عَلَّمَ | ‘allama | he taught | made another know |
| IV | أَعْلَمَ | a‘lama | he informed | caused knowing, once |
| V | تَعَلَّمَ | ta‘allama | he learned | took the teaching on himself |
| X | ٱسْتَعْلَمَ | ista‘lama | he sought to know | asked for it |
The principle the grammarians drew from this is that added structure carries added meaning. Watch what the Qur’an does with it in a line about you and me.
لَهَا مَا كَسَبَتْ وَعَلَيْهَا مَا ٱكْتَسَبَتْ
It has whatever good it has earned, and against it is whatever evil it has acquired. Al-Baqarah 2:286
kasabat
The plain form, used of good a soul comes by.
iktasabat
The heavier form, which carries deliberate effort in getting a thing.
More letters in the form, more weight in the meaning
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
At-Tabari and al-Qurtubi on al-Baqarah 2:286, on the difference between كسب and اكتسب. The principle that added structure carries added meaning is a standard rule of the language, applied throughout the tafsir literature.
The order
at-taqdeem
A word moved to the front of a sentence shuts out everything else.
Arabic normally puts the verb first and the object after it. Where the Qur’an lifts the object in front of its verb, the grammarians read restriction into the change: this one thing and nothing besides it. No word has been added to say so. The position of the word carries it.
The ordinary order, which the Qur’an did not use
we worship You
We worship You. True, and complete as a sentence. It says nothing about whether we worship anything else too.
The order the Qur’an used
You
we worship
You, and only You, do we worship. The whole of tawheed, carried by the position of one word.
إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help. Al-Fatihah 1:5
A declaration of pure tawheed, and the word onlyappears nowhere in it. To say in English what the Arabic has already said, a translator has to introduce a word that was never there. Every translation giving you “You alone” is doing precisely this, and doing it correctly.
Once you know to look you will find it all over the Book. On the previous page, لَهَا and عَلَيْهَاboth stand ahead of their verbs: to this soul and to no other, against this soul and against no other. Nobody carries another’s account, and the word order says so before the words do.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
On fronting إياك for restriction and specification: Ibn Kathir, al-Qurtubi and as-Sa’di on al-Fatihah 1:5. On the same fronting in 2:286, at-Tabari and al-Qurtubi on the ayah.
The sentence
naw’ al-jumlah
One vowel decides whether you described an act or a settled state.
Arabic builds its sentences two ways. One kind rests on a verb and describes something that happens, which means it begins and it ends and it sits inside time. The other kind has no verb in it at all, and describes a thing as being so, with no beginning or end implied. The grammarians call that second quality thubut, settledness.
The angels come to Ibrahim, peace be upon him, and greet him. Look carefully at the two words below, because they are spelled with the same letters and differ only in the final vowel.
قَالُوا۟ سَلَـٰمًا ۖ قَالَ سَلَـٰمٌ
They said: peace. He said: peace. Hud 11:69
سَلَـٰمًا, carrying the fathah, is the object of an understood verb: they greeted with a greeting, an act performed and completed. سَلَـٰمٌ, carrying the dammah, has no verb behind it at all, so the peace Ibrahim returns stands on its own with nothing to end it. He answered with better than he was given, which is what we were later commanded to do.
وَإِذَا حُيِّيتُم بِتَحِيَّةٍ فَحَيُّوا۟ بِأَحْسَنَ مِنْهَآ أَوْ رُدُّوهَآ
When you are greeted with a greeting, greet with something better than it, or return it. An-Nisa 4:86
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
On سلامًا as a verbal sentence and سلامٌ as a nominal one indicating permanence, and on the reply being better than the greeting: Ibn Kathir, al-Qurtubi and as-Sa’di on Hud 11:69.
The number
al-‘adad
The Qur’an keeps falsehood in the plural and truth in the singular.
English marks its plurals as well, of course. What it does not do is turn the choice into an argument. Read this ayah slowly and count the darknesses.
يُخْرِجُهُم مِّنَ ٱلظُّلُمَـٰتِ إِلَى ٱلنُّورِ
He brings them out of the darknesses into the light.
Al-Baqarah 2:257
ٱلظُّلُمَـٰت is plural and ٱلنُّور is singular, and the pairing is never reversed. The mufassirun give a plain reason for it. The truth is one thing, while disbelief arrives in a great many forms, all of them false. There is one way out of the dark and any number of ways to remain in it.
The same shape appears again with paths. He names His own path in the singular and commands that it be followed, then names the alternatives in the plural and forbids them, all inside one ayah.
وَأَنَّ هَـٰذَا صِرَٰطِى مُسْتَقِيمًا فَٱتَّبِعُوهُ ۖ وَلَا تَتَّبِعُوا۟ ٱلسُّبُلَ
And this is My path, straight, so follow it. And do not follow the other ways. Al-An’am 6:153
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
On the light being kept singular and the darknesses plural because the truth is one and disbelief is of many kinds: At-Tabari, al-Baghawi and Ibn Kathir on al-Baqarah 2:257.
The article
at-ta’reef
Two letters at the front of a word can gather up every instance of it.
English has the, and it does a single job, which is to point at something already known to you. The Arabic ٱلْ will do that job too, though it has a second one, and the mufassirun stop to ask which is meant. In its second sense it gathers, taking in every member of a category at once.
No article
Praise. A praise. Some praise, from someone, of an unstated size.
With ٱلْ
The praise. Every kind of praise there is, all of it, already His.
ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ
All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds.
Al-Fatihah 1:2
Ibn Kathir states it directly: the alif and lam on ٱلْحَمْد take in every kind and category of praise belonging to Allah. Strip those two letters away and the line would report only the praise of whoever happened to be saying it. As it stands, you are not presenting Him with your praise. You are reporting where praise already belongs, and your own share in it is not what the ayah is about.
The same reading governs ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلْمُسْتَقِيمَ two lines further down, which is both definite and singular. You are not asking to be shown a straight path among several. You are asking for the one already known.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
Ibn Kathir on al-Fatihah 1:2, that the alif and lam are for taking in all the categories of praise. The same reading is in al-Qurtubiand in ash-Shawkani’s Fath al-Qadir.
The turn
al-iltifat
At one exact line, al-Fatihah turns from speech about Allah to speech addressed to Him.
The surah opens by speaking about Allah in the third person. All praise belongs to Him. He is the Most Merciful. He is Master of the Day of Recompense. Then, without warning and without any word to join the two halves, it turns.
إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.
Al-Fatihah 1:5
You. The scholars call this al-iltifat, the turning of the face, and they take it as deliberate wherever it occurs in the Book. The explanation offered for this particular turn is that the servant, having praised his Lord, has drawn near, and one who has drawn near speaks to a person rather than about him.
There is a hadith qudsi in Muslim in which Allah says: I have divided the prayer between Myself and My servant in two halves. The hadith then goes through al-Fatihah line by line, and the line at which Allah says this is between Me and My servant is the ayah above. The grammar turns at the place where the hadith tells us the surah folds in two.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
On al-iltifat and this ayah as its most famous instance, the standard works on the sciences of the Qur’an, and Ibn Kathir on 1:5. The hadith qudsi dividing the prayer in two halves: Muslim 395, from Abu Hurayrah, may Allah be pleased with him.
The silence
al-hadhf
A word held back can carry the meaning.
Al-Baqarah carries a run of questions brought to the Prophet ﷺ, and each is answered in the same manner. The pattern is steady enough that a reader stops noticing it.
قُلْ, meaning say. A question reaches the Prophet ﷺ, and Allah instructs him to pass the answer along, six times over in a single surah. Then a seventh question arrives in the middle of the verses on fasting, and the pattern gives way.
وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِى عَنِّى فَإِنِّى قَرِيبٌ
And when My servants ask you about Me, then indeed I am near. Al-Baqarah 2:186
Every other question in the surah
They ask you
the people, through the Prophet
Say, O Muhammad
The answer
reaches them relayed
Al-Baqarah 2:186
My servants ask
not the people. Mine.
is not there
I am near
He answers them Himself
The قُلْ is gone, and with it the messenger has stepped out of the sentence. They asked about Allah, and Allah answered them directly. The missing word is itself the answer: they asked how near He is, and the shape of the reply is the nearness.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
On the omission of قل in 2:186 and what it conveys: al-Qurtubi and Ibn ‘Ashur on the ayah. The six other questions are printed above so the claim can be checked rather than taken.
The ending
al-fasilah
The name that closes an ayah is the verdict on everything before it.
Ayat often close on a pair of Allah’s names, and it is easy to hear them as a refrain. The pair is chosen for the passage it closes, so when two passages resemble one another and end on different names, that difference is worth stopping over.
Below are two prophets, each speaking to Allah about people who went astray after them. The situations resemble one another closely, and the endings do not.
Ibrahim, peace be upon him
He is interceding, and hoping.
فَإِنَّكَ غَفُورٌ رَّحِيمٌ
Most Forgiving, Most Merciful · 14:36
The context is appeal. He has just said that whoever follows him is of him, and he leaves the rest to mercy. So the ayah closes on mercy.
‘Isa, peace be upon him
He is disowning, and submitting.
فَإِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلْعَزِيزُ ٱلْحَكِيمُ
The Almighty, the All Wise · 5:118
He is asked on the Day of Judgement whether he told people to worship him. This is not the moment to plead. He hands the matter over entirely, so the ayah closes on might and wisdom.
Read at speed, ‘Isa’s ending looks like the wrong one, since he mentions forgiveness and then names the Almighty and the All Wise rather than the Forgiving and the Merciful. The mufassirun answer that his words are an act of surrender rather than a request, and that naming mercy at that moment would have turned a disavowal into a plea. A second answer is offered alongside it. If You forgive them, You forgive from complete power and complete wisdom, and not from any weakness or from any failure to know what they had done.
What the translation carries
What the Arabic carries
Al-Qurtubi and Ibn Kathir on al-Ma’idah 5:118, on why ‘Isa said al-‘Azeez al-Hakeem, and on the difference between his words and Ibrahim’s in 14:36.
Putting it together
Al-Fatihah, with four of the nine inside it.
You have said this surah more often than any other words in your life. It is set out again below, with each of the nine marked where it occurs, and the two halves marked as the hadith qudsi divides them.
بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Bestower of mercy.
Two names from one root, ر ح م. One names the attribute, one names its reaching you.
ٱلْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ رَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ
All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all the worlds.
ٱلْ on حَمْد takes in every kind of praise there is, not the speaker’s share of it.
ٱلرَّحْمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ
The Most Merciful, the Bestower of mercy.
Repeated straight after رَبِّ ٱلْعَـٰلَمِينَ, so lordship is read through mercy.
مَـٰلِكِ يَوْمِ ٱلدِّينِ
Master of the Day of Recompense.
The last line spoken about Him. Everything after this is spoken to Him.
إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.
The turn, and the fronting. Tawheed carried by word order, at the exact hinge of the surah.
ٱهْدِنَا ٱلصِّرَٰطَ ٱلْمُسْتَقِيمَ
Guide us to the straight path.
ٱلصِّرَٰط, singular and definite. One path, already known, not one of many.
صِرَٰطَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَنْعَمْتَ عَلَيْهِمْ غَيْرِ ٱلْمَغْضُوبِ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا ٱلضَّآلِّينَ
The path of those You have favoured, not of those who earned anger, nor of those who went astray.
أَنْعَمْتَ names the Giver. The anger and the straying do not name who caused them.
Nine short pages ago none of this was visible to you, and it has been sitting in your prayer every day for years. Take that as encouragement rather than as loss. It opened as soon as somebody pointed at it, and it will keep opening.
Those before you saw the Qur’an as letters from their Lord. They would ponder them by night and carry them out by day.
Al-Hasan al-Basri
Letters from their Lord, read at night and carried out by day. The rest of this book is about how somebody with work in the morning and children in the house arrives at something like that.
The statement of al-Hasan al-Basri, and the report from Abu ‘Abd ar-Rahman as-Sulamiabout the Companions and their ten ayat, are both well known in the books on reciting and pondering the Qur’an.
Part two
Turning this into a daily practice.
Part one was concerned with what is there. This part deals with the smaller and more immediate question of what to do tomorrow morning. It is no Arabic course and does not need to be. Ten unhurried minutes a day with three ayat will carry you further into this Book over a year than a shelf of textbooks bought in one evening of enthusiasm.
Where part one sits
The five rungs, and what holds them up
What each rung buys
Measured in what you can read
Ten minutes a day
The loop, and how to run it forwards
Your toolkit
Four things, and nothing else
Three ways it goes wrong
One of them looks like success
Where a teacher fits
The part a book cannot do
The practice
Where we have been standing, and what holds it up.
Everything in part one belongs to the topmost rung of the ladder below, which is worth stating plainly. The common mistake after reading a book like this one is to fall in love with the rhetoric and try to begin there. Each rung rests on the one beneath it, and there is no reaching the fifth without the four underneath.
The heights are not decorative. Each rung takes longer than the one before it, and the third, morphology, is where most people stop without meaning to. It is the least exciting of the five and by some distance the most useful, since it turns a vocabulary list into the ability to meet a word you have never seen before and understand it anyway.
The last rung carries no end date, and that should hearten you. It is the reason scholars were still finding new things in this Book after fifty years of daily company with it.
The practice
What each rung gives you.
Read the script
ٱلْقَاعِدَة4 to 12 weeksThe letters, their shapes inside a word, the vowels, and the tajweed that keeps one letter from turning into another.
You can then: Open any page of the Mus’haf and say it correctly while understanding none of it. Most people reading this have it already.
Own the core vocabulary
ٱلْمُفْرَدَات3 to 6 monthsThe few hundred words the Qur’an reaches for again and again, learned as roots rather than as flashcards, so each brings its family along.
You can then: Recognise most of a page of juz Amma before you have translated anything, which is the point at which recitation begins to feel like reading.
See the shape of a word
ٱلصَّرْف4 to 8 monthsMorphology. The patterns from chapter 02, the prefixes and the endings, who did what to whom and when.
You can then: Meet a word you have never seen, take it back to its root, and understand it without reaching for a dictionary. This rung is what ends the plateau.
See the shape of a sentence
ٱلنَّحْو8 to 18 monthsGrammar. Case endings, what governs what, and why one fathah turns a passing greeting into a permanent one.
You can then: Read an ayah and know what it is doing as well as what it says, and follow a tafsir in Arabic with a dictionary beside you.
Hear what is chosen
ٱلْبَلَاغَةThe rest of your lifeRhetoric. Why this word and not its synonym, why this order, why this ending. Everything in part one lives here.
You can then: Notice for yourself the things this book had to point out to you. There is no ceiling on this rung, which is the best of it.
The second and third rungs repay you far beyond what they cost. A few hundred words will cover most of the Book, and the patterns multiply what those words are worth, so that ten shapes learned once turn each root you own into ten words rather than one.
The practice
Ten minutes a day, in this order.
The order of these matters rather more than the length of time. Most people run the loop backwards, reading the translation first and then glancing across at the Arabic to confirm what they have already been told. Very little is learned that way, since nothing was ever worked out. Run it forwards and even a wrong guess will leave something behind in you.
Three or four ayat, rather than a page. Take a whole page and you will find yourself skipping the third step, which is where the work happens. One word a day taken back to its root comes to three hundred and sixty five roots in a year, and each of those arrives with its family.
Where to start
Al-Fatihah, and then juz ‘Amma. You have them by heart already, so the memory work is behind you and each minute can go on meaning. After that, take the surahs you pray with most often, since understanding those will change something you do daily.
How you will know it is working
One day in the prayer a word will reach you before you have translated it. You will not have decided to understand it; it will have arrived on its own. That is what all of this is for, and it tends to happen sooner than expected.
The practice
Four things worth owning.
The temptation with a subject like this one is to collect resources rather than use any of them. These four will carry you a long way, and a fifth will mostly slow you down.
A Mus’haf you write in
Paper rather than a screen, because you will be marking roots, circling prefixes and writing meanings into the margin. A year of your own handwriting in one Mus’haf is worth a great deal more than any application. Keep the nine questions from the back of this book inside the cover.
A word by word text
For the vocabulary stage, and with an end date on it. A scaffold of this kind turns into a crutch the moment you could stand without it, and the day you catch yourself reading the English line first is the day to put it away.
One tafsir, read in order
Begin with as-Sa’di, which is short, clear and written to be read straight through. Ibn Kathir afterwards, when you want the narrations, and at-Tabari when you are ready to watch the scholars disagree with one another and to understand why. One at a time.
A dictionary arranged by root
A dictionary arranged by root will teach you a word’s whole family every time you look one up, which a phone translator cannot do. Lane’s Lexicon in English, or Mu’jam al-Wasit once you can read an Arabic definition.
The practice
Three ways this goes wrong.
You now have tools for looking closely at the Book of Allah, and tools of this kind get misused in three fairly predictable ways. Two of them feel like progress while they are happening.
Failure one
Deciding what an ayah means because you noticed something.
This is the serious one. Interpreting the Qur’an by personal opinion is forbidden, and the warning attached to it is severe: whoever speaks about the Book of Allah from his own view and turns out to be correct has erred all the same. The order of interpretation is fixed. The Qur’an is explained first by the Qur’an, then by the Sunnah, then by the statements of the salaf, and then by the rules of the Arabic language. Whatever you notice in an ayah is a sign that you are reading well, and it remains a long way from a tafsir.
Failure two
Treating every nuance you read online as settled.
A good deal of what circulates as Qur’anic linguistic wonder is contested by the scholars, overstated, or invented outright. The example below gets repeated almost everywhere as though it were a settled law of the language.
nazzala
sent down in stages, over time
anzala
sent down all at once
Az-Zamakhshari held that تَنْزِيل is specific to a descent by degrees and إِنْزَال to one that arrives in a single act, and many later works repeat it as settled. Abu al-Hasan saw no difference between نَزَّلْتُ and أَنْزَلْتُ beyond the intensive form, and the Qur’an uses both words of its own revelation. Half the shelf treats this as decisive and the other half denies it, which makes it a poor thing to preach from a dictionary entry found on a phone.
Failure three
Learning the language and leaving the recitation behind.
Understanding does not stand in for reciting, memorising or correct tajweed. The Companions gave themselves to both, and this Book was described as one to be recited and pondered together. Guard your daily portion against a new enthusiasm.
On the order of the principles of tafsir and the warning against interpreting by personal opinion, Ibn Taymiyyah, Muqaddimah fi Usul at-Tafsir. On the disagreement over نزَّل and أنزل, az-Zamakhshari against Abu al-Hasan, both positions reported in the lexical works.
The practice
Where a teacher makes the difference.
A good deal of this you can do on your own. Vocabulary is a memory problem, and a list and a habit will settle it. Reading tafsir in English requires nobody’s help. Keeping to ten minutes a day is a matter between you and your own resolve.
Alone is fine for
- Building vocabulary from a list
- Reading a tafsir in translation
- Keeping the daily ten minutes
- Memorisation review you already know how to do
A teacher is the difference for
- Pronunciation, which you cannot hear yourself getting wrong
- Grammar, which fails silently and compounds
- Reading aloud and being corrected in the moment
- Knowing which nuance is established and which is folklore
- Being asked a question you cannot look up
Look again at the second list. Every item on it fails invisibly, which is no coincidence and is the honest reason to sit with somebody. A teacher is there not because you are incapable of learning, but because the mistakes this subject produces are the kind you cannot see from where you are standing.
It is also the way this knowledge has always travelled. The Qur’an came to the Prophet ﷺ through an angel who recited it to him and listened while he said it back. Every reciter in every chain since has read to somebody and been corrected by them. There has never been a version of this in which a person taught himself out of a book.
My Tijarah
Read one ayah out loud to someone who knows.
Vetted, qualified Qur'an and Arabic teachers, one to one, matched to your level and your schedule. Bring this book to your first lesson and start on page one together.
Find your teacher→mytijarah.co.uk
The back page
The nine questions.
The whole of part one sits on this page. Put these questions to any ayah you spend time with. You will not manage all nine at the start, and you are not expected to. One answered is a good day’s work.
What is the root?
Three letters. What else in the Qur’an is built on them?
What is the pattern?
The bare form, or a heavier one? And why heavier?
Is anything out of order?
A word standing ahead of its verb is being singled out.
Verb sentence or noun sentence?
An event that passes, or a state that holds.
Singular, dual or plural?
And does its opposite in the ayah take the other number?
Definite or indefinite?
ٱلْ can gather every instance. Its absence can single one out.
Who is being spoken to?
If it changes partway, ask what moved to bring that about.
What is missing?
A word the pattern led you to expect, and its absence.
How does it end?
The closing name or phrase is the verdict on the ayah.
And then, always, the tenth
What did the scholars say about this ayah? Check whatever you arrive at against a tafsir, or against your teacher. The nine questions above will make you a careful reader, and this last one will keep you a safe one.
Tear this page out, or print it on its own, and keep it inside the cover of the Mus’haf you write in.
A closing word
The du’a of a man with a knot in his tongue.
رَبِّ ٱشْرَحْ لِى صَدْرِى • وَيَسِّرْ لِىٓ أَمْرِى • وَٱحْلُلْ عُقْدَةً مِّن لِّسَانِى • يَفْقَهُوا۟ قَوْلِى
“My Lord, expand my chest for me, and make my task easy for me, and untie the knot from my tongue, so that they may understand my speech.”
Ta-Ha 20:25 to 28
Musa, peace be upon him, was sent to the greatest tyrant on the earth, and what he asked his Lord for was language. He asked that the knot in his tongue be untied so that his words would be understood. A prophet asked for this, which should tell you something about asking for it yourself.
A year from now this Book will be what it has always been, and you will have changed. Begin with three ayat tomorrow, keep at it on the days you would rather not, and ask Allah to open it for you. He is the One who taught the Qur’an. May He make it easy for you, and may He make you of its people.
My TijarahSources and method
Where everything here came from.
Nothing in these pages is an original reading of the Qur’an. Every point was made by the mufassirun first, and the reference sits at the foot of whichever page it appears on, so any single claim can be checked without reading the rest.
The Qur’an text
- Arabic follows the Uthmani script of the Tanzil Project (tanzil.net), retrieved programmatically rather than typed.
- English renderings are given for meaning only. They are not the Qur’an, and they are not for use in the prayer. Where several published translations are compared, each is named.
Tafsir relied on
- At-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan. Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-‘Azeem. Al-Qurtubi, al-Jami’ li Ahkam al-Qur’an. As-Sa’di, Taysir al-Kareem ar-Rahman.
- Ibn ‘Ashur, at-Tahrir wa at-Tanwir, and ash-Shawkani, Fath al-Qadir, for the points of rhetoric.
On the rulings
- That a translation is tafsir and not Qur’an: the Standing Committee for Scholarly Research and Ifta. That recitation in the prayer is valid only in Arabic: the majority of the jurists.
- On the standing of the Arabic language: Ibn Taymiyyah, Iqtida as-Sirat al-Mustaqeem. On the principles of interpretation: his Muqaddimah fi Usul at-Tafsir.
Hadith
- Muslim 395 (the prayer divided in two halves) and 798 (the one who recites stammering).
- At-Tirmidhi 1907 (the womb named from ar-Rahman), graded hasan sahih by at-Tirmidhi, also in Abu Dawud. At-Tirmidhi 2910 (a good deed for every letter).
- Al-Bukhari 5027, that the best of you is the one who learns the Qur’an and teaches it.
On the aqeedah
- Allah’s names and attributes are affirmed as He and His Messenger affirmed them, without distortion, denial, asking how, or likening Him to creation. Nothing in the discussion of ar-Rahman and ar-Raheem departs from that.
- No claim of numerical or statistical miracle appears anywhere in this book, and none should be built on it.
What this book is not
- This is neither a tafsir nor a grammar course. It is a case for learning the language, made out of nine examples.
- Where the scholars differ, that is said plainly rather than the more striking opinion being chosen.
Keep this guide
Print it, write on it, and give it to someone who has been meaning to start. When you are ready for the part a book cannot do, your teacher is waiting at mytijarah.co.uk.