← All five levels / Level 2
Intermediate
“I know the basics. I want to read the text myself.”
Where a student stops relying on translation. Morphology joins grammar, the fiqh moves from a summary to a real matn, and the first book of legal theory appears.
What you can do after it: By the end you can parse an unvowelled sentence and follow a page of Qudūrī in Arabic.
The books at this level
Read across, not down — these are studied alongside each other, not in sequence.
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.
Planned ArabicHidāyat al-Naḥw
The second grammar, taken after al-Ājurrūmiyya. It covers the same ground in far more detail and introduces the disagreements between grammarians.
Planned FiqhMukhtaṣar al-Qudūrī
Abū al-Ḥusayn al-Qudūrī · d. 428 AH
The most widely taught Ḥanafī matn in the world, and the one book that appears in nearly every US seminary curriculum. Worship and dealings both, stated with no evidence given — the evidence comes at the next level.
Planned HadithRiyāḍ al-Ṣāliḥīn
Imām al-Nawawī · d. 676 AH
Al-Nawawī’s large thematic collection — roughly 1,900 hadith arranged by subject rather than by narrator. The bridge between the forty and the full collections.
Planned HadithNukhbat al-Fikar
Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī · d. 852 AH
How a report is graded. The terminology of hadith criticism — ṣaḥīḥ, ḥasan, ḍaʿīf and the rest — compressed into a few pages by the man who wrote the commentary on al-Bukhārī.
Planned FiqhAl-Waraqāt
Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī · d. 478 AH
Legal theory in about four pages: what a ruling is, where it comes from, and how a scholar gets from a text to a position. The first book of uṣūl anywhere.
Planned Qur’anTafsīr al-Jalālayn
al-Maḥallī and al-Suyūṭī · d. 864 / 911 AH
A commentary on the whole Qur’an roughly the length of the Qur’an itself — a word of explanation where a word is needed and nothing more. The first tafsīr a student reads cover to cover.
Planned FiqhUṣūl al-Shāshī
Niẓām al-Dīn al-Shāshī · d. c. 344 AH
The Ḥanafī school’s own first book of legal theory, and the one the South Asian curriculum has begun with for three centuries. Where al-Waraqāt states the Shāfiʿī method, this states the Ḥanafī one.
Planned FiqhMabādiʾ al-Uṣūl
Saʿīd Aḥmad Palanpūrī · d. 1441 AH
A modern primer written for students who found the classical uṣūl texts too compressed to enter. Set today in both Pakistani madāris and at Qalam.
Planned Qur’anAl-Tibyān fī ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān
Muḥammad ʿAlī al-Ṣābūnī · d. 1442 AH
The sciences that surround the text rather than the text itself — revelation, the seven readings, the abrogating and abrogated, the clear and the ambiguous.
Planned HadithAl-Shamāʾil al-Muḥammadiyya
Abū ʿĪsā al-Tirmidhī · d. 279 AH
Reports describing the Prophet ﷺ himself — his appearance, his manner, how he ate, sat, slept and laughed. Read alongside the legal collections because it is the one that makes him a person rather than a source.
Planned BeliefsAl-Bidāya min al-Kifāya
Nūr al-Dīn al-Ṣābūnī · d. 580 AH
Māturīdī theology at the point where a student stops receiving statements and starts following proofs — the step between the Ṭaḥāwiyya and al-Taftāzānī.
Planned