Arabic اللغة العربية
Reading the language the sources are written in — grammar taught on the hadith you are already studying, not on invented example sentences, until you can parse a line yourself.
The books, level by level
Which text comes when. Start at the top unless you already read Arabic — each book says how much of it exists here.
Foundation
Intermediate
ʿIlm al-Ṣīgha
Morphology — how a three-letter root becomes fifteen different words. Grammar tells you what a word is doing in a sentence; this tells you where the word came from.
PlannedHidāyat al-Naḥw
The second grammar, taken after al-Ājurrūmiyya. It covers the same ground in far more detail and introduces the disagreements between grammarians.
PlannedAdvanced
Durūs al-Balāgha
Rhetoric — why a sentence is arranged the way it is, and what is lost when you rearrange it. The science that makes the Qur’an’s style legible rather than merely translatable.
PlannedAl-Kāfiya
Ibn al-Ḥājib
The grammar a student reaches after Hidāyat al-Naḥw, and the one the commentaries argue over. From here grammar stops being rules and becomes a discipline with disputes of its own.
PlannedMukhtaṣar al-Maʿānī
Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī
Rhetoric at full strength — al-Taftāzānī on al-Qazwīnī’s summary of al-Sakkākī. The text that stands between a reader and any serious claim about the Qur’an’s style.
PlannedSpecialisation
Sharḥ Jāmī (al-Fawāʾid al-Ḍiyāʾiyya)
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jāmī
The commentary on al-Kāfiya, and the last grammar in the classical course. Famous for being hard, and for the fact that finishing it is what the tradition treats as knowing naḥw.
PlannedMaqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī
Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥarīrī
Fifty short episodes written to show off everything Arabic can do — rare words, double meanings, whole passages that read the same in both directions. The traditional test of whether you truly have the language.
PlannedLessons
Al-Ājurrūmiyya — the matn of Ibn Ājurrūm (d. 723 AH), in thirty lessons