← All five levels / Level 1
Foundation
“I am starting from nothing. I cannot read Arabic.”
The first rung. You learn to tell a noun from a verb, you meet the forty-two hadith students have always begun with, and you learn how to pray correctly. No Arabic assumed — every word is explained.
What you can do after it: By the end you can identify the parts of an Arabic sentence and read a short hadith with help.
The books at this level
Read across, not down — these are studied alongside each other, not in sequence.
Al-Ājurrūmiyya
Ibn Ājurrūm al-Ṣanhājī · d. 723 AH
The first grammar every student meets, and about thirty pages long. It names the three kinds of word, then works through every case ending in the language. We teach it on the forty-two hadith rather than on invented sentences.
4 of 30 lessons HadithAl-Arbaʿūn al-Nawawiyya
Imām al-Nawawī · d. 676 AH
Forty-two hadith al-Nawawī considered foundations on which the religion turns. Accepted across all four schools, short enough to finish, and the standard first hadith text for eight centuries.
6 of 42 lessons FiqhNūr al-Īḍāḥ
al-Shurunbulālī · d. 1069 AH
Ḥanafī worship — purification, prayer, fasting, zakāh, ḥajj — set out as a beginner’s manual rather than an argument. Where Qalam, DarusSalam and SeekersGuidance all start their fiqh.
Planned BeliefsAl-ʿAqīda al-Ṭaḥāwiyya
Imām al-Ṭaḥāwī · d. 321 AH
A short creed written in the third century and accepted far beyond the school that produced it. It states what is held, in order, without arguing for it — which is why it is read first.
Planned SpiritualityBidāyat al-Hidāya
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · d. 505 AH
Al-Ghazālī’s short handbook on the shape of a day — waking, worship, company, avoiding what harms the heart. The traditional first book in the inward sciences.
Planned Qur’anTuḥfat al-Aṭfāl
Sulaymān al-Jamzūrī · d. after 1198 AH
Sixty-one lines of verse covering the rules of tajwīd — the nūn sākina, the madd, and the rest. Memorised by beginners because it is short and because it is complete.
Planned SpiritualityAyyuhā al-Walad
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī · d. 505 AH
A letter al-Ghazālī wrote to a student who asked what all his learning had been for. A few pages, and the standard answer in this tradition to the question of why knowledge without practice is a burden.
Planned EtiquetteTaʿlīm al-Mutaʿallim
Burhān al-Dīn al-Zarnūjī · d. c. 620 AH
How to study: what to read first, how to sit with a teacher, when to memorise and when to move on. Written in the seventh century and still set at the start of the course, because the method has not changed.
Planned Prophetic StoriesAl-Luʾluʾ al-Maknūn fī Sīrat al-Nabī
Muḥammad al-ʿAlawī al-Mālikī · d. 1425 AH
The life of the Prophet ﷺ as a first sīra text — the events in order, with the sources named, before a student meets the longer classical accounts.
Planned Qur’anAl-Muqaddima al-Jazariyya
Ibn al-Jazarī · d. 833 AH
The second tajwīd poem, taken after Tuḥfat al-Aṭfāl. It covers the points of articulation and the qualities of the letters — the part of recitation you cannot learn from a page alone.
Planned