Safar Learn to Read Series: Abridged Qaidah

At Safar Academy we use our own unique qaʿidah compiled by our development team which is now taught in many religious schools across the UK. This qaʿidah draws from numerous other qaʿidahs from around the world and contains many new, innovative features based on years of collective experience gained by teaching students at Safar Academy.

In this abridged version of our complete qaʿidah we have kept most of the unique strengths of the complete qaʿidah and presented it in a shorter and compact size.
Unique Features We found that most other qaʿidahs do not have any chaptering or breakdown of learning objectives. The students, and sometimes teachers, progress from one exercise to another without realizing what the goals behind them are. This lack of breakdown of objective is also unhealthy for the student’s morale as they have no short-term targets to work toward and can lose motivation. Therefore, the Safar Qaʿidah has been divided into several sections with each being labeled a level. In each level, a new skill or topic will be introduced and covered. The level system has proved to be very effective in focusing and motivating students.

In selecting examples for each exercise, certain considerations have been taken, such as not inundating students with too many examples to follow a single vocal pattern. This is to avoid students guessing the pronunciation of an example based on the last one, when they are supposed to work out each example separately. We have also tried to make sure that not a single example contains any element that they have not yet covered. For example, no examples will have the diacritical mark "fatha " until the fatha has been formally introduced. Likewise, examples containing ikhfa have been left out until the student has learned about ikhfa, and so on. We then arranged the examples in each exercise so they progress from the easiest to the most difficult, taking into consideration the number of letters or words in the examples as well as the weight and difficulty of the letters.

A complete overview of the Qaʿidah and the Learn to Read series can be found here.

The differences between the Abridged Qaʿidah and the Complete Qaʿidah can be viewed here.
Quranic Examples The words in the Quran are Allah’s سبحانه و تعالى words. This not only makes their recitation more rewarding in the hereafter, but we also believe they have a positive impact on the student’s learning and progress; Allah سبحانه و تعالى said, "We have made the Quran easy to remember" (54:40). In most other qaʿidahs, we found that many words had made their way into the qa'idah which were not found in the Quran. This is by no means incorrect, but the words of the Quran will always hold superiority. Some qaʿidahs have tried to use examples only from the Quran but have either not found enough examples for the students to master the level, or they have had to make slight alterations to the writing to make it fit specific levels. For example, some texts have written a standing kasrah instead of the letter "ya," or taken a word written together in the Quran and omitted part of it. We were not satisfied with all of the above-mentioned, so we carried out a comprehensive survey of the Quran, to the best of our abilities, combining direct human efforts and modern technological aids, to find sufficient examples from the Quran for each level. Occasionally, we have removed the "waw" of from the beginning of some individual words, but have not made any other amendments.