I think my hifz experiences wont make much sense if I don’t tell the whole scenario,so to convey the full meaning(ie what I actually mean),I will tell the whole history and you will have to bear a long post.
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As for my experience, the motivation was not quite right initially, but Alhamdulillah it became more meaningful with time. I first started thinking about hifz when i was around 8,mainly because my bro(two years younger than me) had joined a madrasah where he was to do hifz(my mother was very eager to make him a hafiz),and he had become a celebrity in the family...As i competed with him in everything fiercely,loved to dominate him and could not bear the thought that he is doing something that i am not doing,i asked my parents that i wanted to do do hifz too...they werent convinced because they believed that women should better not do hifz,because there was always a great fear of them forgetting the quran when in their practical life they become too overwhelmed with their responsibilities,houshold chores etc etc.while this debate was going on,my uncle gifted my bro an audio cassete set of Sheikh Sudais taraweeh(my uncle lived in saudi arabia),when i first listened to it, it sounded so good, so good that i literally fell in love with the way he recited the Quran. I used to listen to sheikh sudais' recordings for like 9 hours a day or so!i firmly decided that i was going to be a hafiza and was going to recite the Quran like him
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my parents had not agreed yet,so i protested by refusing to go to school(i was in grade 4 then).Realizing how serious i was,they finally gave up and got me admitted in another madrasah, not as good as my bro's which was and still is the best and the greatest madrasah for hifz in Pakistan with over 150 branches and very good tajweed, the reason being that they(my bros madrasah) dont give admissions to kids with age over 5,and at an advanced age of 8 and a half i was far too old for them. I was over excited at being given the opportunity to do hifz and poured all my energy to make it possible. But there were enormous problems there, the madrasah did not have very good teachers, females taught girls and the one who taught me was not even hafiza herself. they did not have a good arabic accent, they would recite Quran more like reading urdu rather than arabic. and soon i was facing another dilemma...my bro would criticize me for every single ayah i would try to recite, saying that it ought to be recited like this and not the way i was doing, pointing out my mistakes in tajweed,in pronunciation, in everything, and teasing me with remarks like” its better not to recite Quran at all than reciting it wrong!!":raging:haha lol.after considerable thought i worked out a way to fix this problem. memorizing my "sabaq", I would listen to the recordings and would try to recite with it, would keep rewinding and listening until i thought i could pronounce the words like that and could feel a very faint tinge of that style in my recitation.Alhamdulillah, within no time, my tajweed began to improve tremendously, so did my style of reciting and Arabic accent.
and yes, The way I used to memorize the Quran was, say, I am given 10 ayahs, I would read like half an ayah or an ayah(whatever the amount was convenient),recite it like 3 times or so until i could recite it without mushaf and then move on to the next ayah. After memorizing the second ayah, I would give the first two ayahs a read and then see by reciting them without mushaf if i had retained them or not. if yes,good.i would move on to next ayah, if not, I would first learn the first two by heart and then move forward. Now i would memorize the third ayah the same way and then read all the three ayahs, read them without mushaf and go on. Memorize the fourth one, read all four of them, once with mushaf, then without it, and go on. And so on and so forth....according to my experience, it was the best way to memorize, I had ever tried, because it helped me memorize efficiently and I think it made what I memorized easy to retain…
An important and rather revolutionary change happened when I started juz 28.(the juz sequence that I followed was rather funny for some reasons, first I memorized the last 5 juz,going backwards from 3am to ha-meem,then I memorized juz 1 to 9 (forwards) and then from juz 25 to 10(backwards))…as I listened to the records, well there was something strange.surah mujadala was not in sheikh sudais’ voice, it was some other person, whose voice I found quite deep, resonant, impressive and stunning, also I found his style even more attractive, soothing, and just beyond everything. I had no idea who the imam actually was.(it was only after considerable research that I found out the imam was sheikh shuraim!!!) I asked my family, no one knew his name…no one I knew had any information about him. The problem was, I wanted to ask my uncle to send me his taraweeh set. But I had to have his name to ask him that please send me cassettes of imam so and so and sadly no one knew his name. I had asked everyone I knew questions like you know the name of the imam , he leads in kaba’ and he recites very good and his voice is very good too? No one had that vital piece of information! I had searched all the Islamic books available to me, but I couldn’t find that anywhere. To add to my frustrations, we didn’t have internet at home then (I doubt if it had arrived in Pakistan by then) and we didn’t watch TV nor listen to radio. to make it short, one day, at my grandmas house, I listened a recitation with that same voice on radio and the commentator said in the end “you were listening to sheikh Saud bin Ibrahim al shuraim….” i ran to my mom jumping excitedly, exclaiming, mom his name is this!!!. Lol.Simple afterwards, I never listen to anyone’s recitations other than him since that day, .….till today.(its been nine years).i think there was hardly a day when I didn’t listen to his recitations
I completed my hifz in a year and a half by grace of Allah, at the age of 10.and Alhamdulillah I didn’t fall behind in education cuz I left school when I was in the mid of fourth grade and joined grade six after a year and a half. Actually I could have completed it in less than a year if the teachers at my old madrasah (not where my bro studied)were kind enough to let me memorize more than ten lines a day in the beginning. But they didn’t, I memorized 14juz in like a year, and then my bros madrasah had accepted me, because according to them I had memorized it very quickly. They were nice. They let me memorize as much as I wanted and Alhamdulillah within 5 months, I had memorized the remaining 16 juz.
When I was a kid and I dint know Arabic, I admired Quran for its beauty only ,for the flow it has, for the way it sounds and how lovely it felt to recite it, it was only much later, when I learned Arabic(mainly because I found it a very attractive and sweet language too), that I was able to appreciate the wisdom that’s there, and still later when I read Harun Yahyas books like miracles of Quran etc, that I came to know how scientific and accurate it was. that was the first time when I found scientific proofs to the fact that Allah exists, He is the creator and Quran is his word)
It was indeed by Allah’s utmost mercy and blessing that I was able to do hifz. I am very grateful to him that he had blessed me with amazing memory (which sadly, I don’t have anymore).he had made it so easy for me that I could easily memorize fourth of a juz in like 30 minutes or so. I never studied at home when I was doing hifz, I was always able to memorize what I was supposed to in madrasah. And what bro ehafiz said,holds true for me as well. Those were indeed the best years of my life; I have never done anything in my life with so much passion and zeal as I did hifz. i never felt I was doing any kind of hard work or anything. i enjoyed it more than everything else, may be it was like or even more enjoyable than a favorite sport, or an interesting hobby. All was because of Allah’s help and bounty. And yes, an important thing that I forgot was that I used to read what I was supposed to memorize the next day 10 times beforehand, so it would become very easy the next day. I followed that routine for the whole period. (my mom suggested me to do this,jazahallah khair!)…thanks to these records, I became a star pupil in my madrasah.(same as my bro’s)and afterwards I got my school education from there as well, till grade 10(they have a huffaz school, where you have hifz’s period as well),I always stood first out of 500 girls or so and was awarded best hafizah certificate every year. Alhamdulillah
…teachers and heads etc who came to examine us from different branches said I recited the best,had excellent tajweed and arabic accent and had stronger grip than all the students in various branches of madrasah. so much that I had become famous over all the 150 or so branches and they still remember me, though I am in uni now,left school 4 years back.they (teachers)refer to me talking to my younger sibs who still study there.
As to answer the questions like how much time hifz takes, well it differs from person to person.i took one and a half ,all my sibs(2 bros and a sis)took 3 years roughly. and I know of a girl who studied in a branch of my madrasa in northern areas who had taken just 9 months to complete her hifz, at the age of six!!
but duration doesn’t matter I think. i believe as long as one is passionate about something, theres no need to worry, passion is the greatest guide and the best companion.
Out of that longest ever post of mine,I think whats important for prospective huffaz and people who are doing hifz is 4 things.
1. Listen to imams of haramain records
2. read your sabaq for the next day 10 times
3. be passionate
4. try to adopt that way of memorizing Quran
Good luck to all who are trying to do hifz:thumbs_up, may Allah help them memorize as he helped me and may he help us all to retain what we memorize. if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask, I will be very happy to answer:happy:
