Learning to understand the Quran in its one and only language is one of the greatest and most fulfilling acts of worship a Muslim may embark upon. It is one in which the fruits are witnessed immediately and held onto forever, as there should never be a day in a Muslim’s life when he or she does not recite or at least hears the recitation of the Quran. Once this ability is obtained by Allah’s Permission, it is continuously put into practice and is further strengthened when we study the tafseer of the Quran.

 

What these lessons are and aren’t

This course is solely intended to help students understand the Quran. Conversational Arabic and even sentence creation are only given lip service as we break down the Arabic language as it appears in the Quran. Nonetheless, a course like this would serve as an excellent foundation for learning formal Arabic, whether spoken or written–not the colloquial street Arabic. Bearing in mind the desire of some students to learn classical Arabic, each lesson will come with exercises to assist the learner in cementing their skill. The main homework therefore is to look up the learned Arabic structures and vocabulary in the Quran to immediately put our new knowledge into practice as it was meant to be.

The means we’ll take to accomplishing our goal is studying Arabic grammar through Quranic examples and vocabulary. If we frequently review what we read and hear from these lessons of vocabulary, and consider it as we read the Quran daily, it will stick with us. Since much of the Quran is repeated, our understanding, with Allah’s Help, may even be able to reach 90% or even more. I have included all the vocabulary from the phenomenal 80% Quranic Words booklet (may Allah reward its compiler, Dr. Abdul-Azeez Abdul-Raheem, also available here or here) supplemented with many other examples that appear frequently in the Book of Allah and should thus be familiar to the ear.

What are we looking for when studying Arabic grammar?

Arabic grammar studies consist of two main fields:

1. Nahu/nahw النَّحْو which is syntax. Syntax is “the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.”

 

2. Sarf الصَّرْف or word morphology, “the study of the forms of words.”

 

If studying Arabic literature or even tafseer, one will likely dive into a third field, known as balaaghah or rhetoric.

As a note, syntax is usually what we study for how to form proper speech, whether written or spoken. There’s another word for dissecting proper speech, or “syntax in reverse”, and that is parsing, which is called i’3raab [الإِعْراب] in Arabic, and is learning the “inflection” of the word. Inflection is “a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender.” The word i’3raab is also used to refer to the final changeable vowel [a, u, i] at the end of each word that may reflect the inflection or meaning of the word related to those around it. For example,

{وَآمَنُوا بِمَا نُزِّلَ عَلَىٰ مُحَمَّدٍ} ﴿٢﴾ سورة محمد

“…and they believed in what was sent down upon Muhammad…” [47:2]

{وَمَا مُحَمَّدٌ إِلَّا رَسُولٌ} ﴿١٤٤﴾ سورة آل عمران

 “And Muhammad is nothing but a messenger…”

While the word “Muhammad” appears in each aayah, the ending of the word helps to determine its meaning in the sentence, in addition to the order. In the first aayah, it ends with ٍ  kasrataan, and in the second ٌ  dhammataan, or tanween of the kasrah and tanween of the dhammah. Muhammad-in and Muhammad-un. These are differences of inflection or i’raab. We’ll learn what these indicate later on insha’Allah. They do not influence the static dictionary meaning of the word “Muhammad”, but may indicate its relation to other words in the sentence. For example, is “Muhammad” doing a verb/action or is “Muhammad” on the receiving end of the action? The point here is understanding that two elements determine the word’s relationship to other words around it: the order and the ending.

However, the most important thing to help you understand the Quran is simply enriching your vocabulary. Remind yourself this every time you find the grammar confusing. If you have a strong vocabulary base, you might not be able to form sentences or know why a word took this or that form, but you’ll have a good idea of what the Quran intends, especially with a solid background in Islamic faith and seerah. Most of the vocabulary we learn we’ll take through exercises of Arabic morphology, so give that the main chunk and priority of your study schedule.

Before any other lessons, perhaps an important issue needs to be discussed, which you may have wondered about yourself. Why is it that some students pick up Arabic fairly quickly while others struggle for years and years, even decades, and never seem to overcome the first learning plateau?

 

Sources for reinforcement  

There are several websites that provide a lot of helpful material without any access fee.

 

http://corpus.quran.com/ – an amazing resource, allowing you to look up any aayah and word of the Quran and see its grammar and meaning. It also has tools for comparing and surveying.

http://www.arabic-teacher.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=49&lang=en

http://arabic.desert-sky.net/grammar.html

http://www.bayyinah.com – Nouman Ali Khan’s Institute.

If you’ve studied Arabic before, test your understanding of the 80% Quranic Words.

As for books, since the goal of the course is understanding, not so much writing or speaking, and the subject is solely the Book of Allah, suggested resources reflect that:

Access to Qur’anic Arabic by AbdulWahid Hamid

Essentials of Quranic Arabic by Masood Ahmed Ranginwala – this one might be my favorite

Basic Quranic Arabic by Jamal-un-nisa bint Rafai, Ph. D.

Arabic through the Quran by Alan Jones

Lastly, the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Arabic, and Antwan Dahdah’s Dictionary of Arabic Grammatical terms. While all these books may be found in PDF online for free, I personally encourage serious students to purchase one comprehensive resource for grammar and vocabulary. Supporting the author and publisher is certainly a noble cause, but also because having a professionally bound hard copy is better for study purposes.