Review.
Revision. Recall. It’s the maintenance of your Hifz.
It’s the oxygen of your journey. It’s memory management. You have got to
engage with it. As I always say, doing Hifz gymnastics every day will keep the memory in stay!
You will have seen from my
revision posts that there are many ways to go about it. The following method is another one of them.
This method is great for those who:
- might not get much time due to a busy schedule
- can’t maintain consistency with doing large amounts of revision every day
- struggle with stacking revision every week
- wants to strengthen their Qur’ān memorisation
- has memorised the entire Qur’ān
How does it work?
Normally, we would expect someone to review a juz’/para or more on a daily basis, but this system is focused on doing a quarter with spaced repetition. This is a method that was shared with me and is prescribed by Mawlana Yunus Patel as an approach for ease for those who find less time.
- Before and after every salāh/namāz, recite 3 rukū’ repeating it 1, 3, or 5 times. The default number is 3 but it can be reduced or increased per your needs. A rukū’ is a paragraph marked with an ‘ayn in the non-‘uthmānī script which is the equivalent of ½ quarters of a hizb. You should do this off memory, but if need be, do once looking, twice without (if repeating 3 times which is preferred).
- You will have used spaced repetition of the same 3 rukū’ at least 10 times in the day.
- The next day, take the next set of 3 rukū’ (or the equivalent) and repeat in the same way.
- You can even recite the 3 rukū’ instead in every prayer throughout the day.
- In 6 days on average, you will complete a Juz’. On the 7th day, you can recite the entire Juz’ with a the rukū’ sets per salāh in the same way.
- So in a month, you can do 4-5 ajzā’ with repetition, and in 7 months revise the complete Qur’ān in this way. There are 558 rukū’ (240 quarters in the ‘uthmānī script), which means you can do at least two complete readings each year.
This is a unique Qur’an memorization method and is widely used in Bosnia and Turkey. You can even find it being used in schools as far as Malaysia.
The Stacking System
It uses what I call the stacking system. When you’re building something, you start from the bottom. Say, you’re building a lego block, you’d create the foundational blocks and then begin to build on top of it. When it comes to memorizing the Qur’an, this method uses something similar. You start from the bottom but it uses an unconventional approach.
How do you begin?
The Qur’an of choice is the 15-lined mus’haf. Day one will look different depending on what system is being used by the teacher. There are some differences.
One system will have you begin to memorize from the 30th Juz’ first. A total focus on that. It’s a great way to start. It has more pages than any other Juz’, covers every Tajweed rule you’d need to know, and has a great range of āyāt (small to medium). After this, some will go on to the 29th or memorize specific sūrah, such as Yāsīn, al-Wāq’iah, ar-Rahmān, and al-Mulk. After this, they will go on to start rounds of stacking. I’ll explain this shortly.
Another system will have you memorize the 30th and then start a round of stacking. Others will not start with the 30th at all – but will begin with the stacking system itself.
In this post, I want to share some reflections upon Hadīth and a Hifz/review method.
So many of you will ask, “How can I memorize the Qur’ān and never forget it?”
The answer is to never leave it.
When you’re memorising the Qur’ān see yourself as an owner of a camel
‘Abdullāh ibn ‘Umar reported that the Messenger of Allāh (ﷺ), said, “Verily, the example of the companion of the Qur’ān is that of a tied camel. If he is committed to it, he will keep it. If he releases it, he will lose it.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 5031, Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim 789)
The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “It is a bad thing that some of you say, ‘I have forgotten such-and-such verse of the Qur’ān,’ for indeed, he has been caused (by Allāh) to forget it. So you must keep on reciting the Qur’ān because it escapes from the hearts of men faster than camel do.” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī)
The Prophet (ﷺ) said, “Commit yourself to the Qur’ān, for by Him in whose Hand is my soul, it is surely more prone to break away than a camel in its bind.”
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