Tajweed

To give your recitation a quick boost, try ‘Itmaam-ul-Harakaat’. No, it’s not a medicine from Yemen. ‘Itmaam’ simply means completion & ‘harakaat’ could be loosely translated to mean vowels. It means fine-tuning the vowels. Unlike English, unitary vowels in Arabic are not letters – thus not written out explicitly. Instead, they are shown with either of the following 3 marks above or below a letter.

Fathah: straight stroke on top of a letter, pronounced like the ‘a’ as in “bat”. The common mistake is to pronounce it as the ‘a’ in “ball”, thus making it heavy. Bear in mind that heavy letters are only a minority (7 of 28), so for most cases pick up the “bat” and throw the “ball” away. Trust me on this.

Madd (pronounced like “mud”), literally means “extension”. In recitation of the Qur’an (tajweed), madd is when you extend and stretch a vowel sound (aah, ooh, etc.).

There are two types of madd: fard (obligatory: you have to recite it) and mustahab (recommended: you should recite it). The general rule is that a madd inside a word is fard, while a madd that connects two words is mustahab.

For example, in Surah Baqarah, Allah says:

In Arabic, there is the letter Ya: ي. It is pronounced similar to the letter Y in English.

However, there’s also another type of ya–the ya without dots, which looks like this: ى. As for that ya, sometimes pronounced as a ya, and sometimes, as an alif (ا).

For example, the word على (ayn-lam-ya) can be read as ‘ala (on top: عَلَى) or as ‘Ali (as in the name: عَلِي). So how do you know when to pronounce it as a ya, and when to pronounce it as an alif?

Mnemonic: Something used to help you remember.

Qalqala is best described as an “echo noise” or “bouncing noise”. There are five qalqala letters. If any of them appears with a sukoon on top, you perform qalqala. (Prime example, if you have no idea what qalqala is: the end of the last word of every verse in Surah Ikhlass.)

Qalqala letters: qaff (ق), ba (ب), taw (ط), jeem (ج), and dal (د).

Surah Fatiha contains almost all the Arabic letters that the English language lacks: ‘Ayn (ع), Saad (ص), Daad (ض), Taw (ط), Qaf (ق), and 7a (ح). Once you learn to pronounce these letters correctly, you practice them 17 times a day, every day, in every state of mind. Bi ithnillah, once you learn them, practice, and you will master them quickly.

If you know your tajweed (Qur’anic rules of beautifying recitation) but feel a bit rusty or need to review them, this website explains it very well. The website helps more if you already know tajweed but need a refresher. It’s very difficult to learn tajweed without a real, human teacher.

May Allah accept our reading of the Qur’an as ‘ibadah. Ameen.