QURAN READING DRILLS (DIY)

Bismillahi rahmani rahim

Assalam alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu

I pray this finds you in the best of health and imaan.

When beginning learning how to read the Quran we usually start with the alphabet letters in madrasas or right from our homes, recognizing the shapes and learning their proper sounds. Then we learn to join the letters to form words, and then to read different words and short sentences. All this can be learned with the help of a teacher or through a course.

After learning the basics, however, we often expect ourselves to be able to read the Quran with some fluency, forgetting all about the crucial second step of learning – practice. 

We must keep reminding ourselves that learning to read texts in a completely new language isn’t easy – it takes much hard work and plenty of practice. The Quran especially deserves our attention and hard work, because it’s not just any book but the Book of Allah. And when you’re your own trainer, maintaining regularity becomes more important. Here’s a process which I myself found very useful when I started reading the Quran (with the help of my teachers at IOU).

QURAN READING DRILLS

01. PREPARING, YOU'LL NEED

◾ One mus’haf (copy of the Quran).

◾ Recordings of recitations of the Quran - whomever you prefer

◾ A quiet room / corner

◾ Two or three highlighters of different colours

◾ A notebook / sticky notes

◾ Set a particular day of the week as your milestone or testing day, and a particular time each day for the drills.

◾ A reliable audio from known Shaykh.

02. FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

What we’re going to do is, starting from the back of the Quran, work our way through the shortest surahs, especially the ones we often recite in prayer. Open the mus’haf at the last page. Assuming that you’ve already learned the letters and how to join them into words, read Surat an-Nas, the last surah. 

The first reading may take a lot of time and concentration, and may seem uphill work, but after reading it several times, you’ll keep gaining confidence, in sha Allah. Start the recording of the recitation of the surah and put it in loop so that it keeps repeating. Match the Shaykh’s recitation with what you’ve read, and highlight the mistakes. Now try and recite along with the Shaykh, taking special note of the highlighted words. Repeat several times, until you somewhat master the surah.

The next day, recite the surah on your own. Then listen to the Shaykh’s recitation and highlight the places where you went wrong. Repeat with the Shaykh until you’ve corrected the mistakes. Now look closely at the words you highlighted on the second day. Try to see if there is a pattern. Then revise those chapters of your book or notes, or ask a teacher, or a friend who is fluent at reading the Quran, to explain it to you. Keep doing this until the following testing day. Can you now read without any help from a Shaykh? If everything goes right, in sha Allah you can. For the next week, repeat the same drill and so on until you can read the whole Juz Amma completely without help. Depending on your level of mastery, you may choose to drill on more than one surah per week.

03. ACHIEVE INFLUENCE IN READING

Now that you can read Juz Amma with fluency, you might start thinking about achieving enough fluency to read through almost the entire Quran without help. For that we arrive at Juz Tabarak (the 29 Juz). Start with Surat al-Mulk and repeat all the steps of (2). Keep slowly increasing the chunks you drill on every week. Continue doing the same for the preceding Juz. By the time you reach about Juz 25 or 24, you will, in sha Allah, gain enough fluency to be able to read entire sections from anywhere in the Quran without any prior reading.

I pray to Allah this will help biidnillahi. And Allah knows best.

| By Tabassum Mosleh |