The Qur’an, written solely in Arabic, is the religious text of around 1.6 billion Muslims all over the world, of which a large proportion are non-Arabic speakers (Pew-Research-Center, 2011). Qur’anic verses are not only recited during special religious occasions, but also by practising Muslims in their daily ritual prayers. For many non-Arabic-speaking Muslims, the first (and often only) exposure to the Arabic script and language is through the Qur’an. Despite the widespread use of the Qur’an, little is known regarding how Qur’anic Arabic is processed by children and adults, and even less for non-Arabic-speakers.
In many non-Arabic-speaking Muslim communities, especially in the Indo- Pak and Southeast Asian regions, Qur’anic reading, recitation, and memorisation constitute a major component in the religious education of children, to the extent that parents send their children to special schools and classes for the sole purpose of learning to read, recite, and/or memorise the Qur’an (Boyle, 2006; Raja Yusof et al., 2011). Here, it is important to differentiate between madrasahs (Islamic schools that provide a comprehensive religious education curriculum covering various subjects, which may include Arabic) and tahfiẓ/hifẓ schools/programmes which only focus on the memorisation of the Qur’an. Tahfiẓ/hifẓ schools/programmes may either be full-time (in which students formally dedicate at least few hours a day to Qur’an memorisation) or part-time (in which students are typically given verses to memorise as homework during the week and get tested on their memorisation over the weekend). This
phenomenon of rote Qur’an memorisation has become so pervasive that tahfiẓ programmes have been founded in North America and Europe to cater to mostly immigrant Muslim communities; a simple Google search turned up more than 10 such programmes in the US and UK each, and this excluded online programmes where individuals could sign up to undertake Qur’an memorisation on their own and have their memorisation checked by a Qur’an teacher.
As the children (and sometimes adults) in these tahfiẓ schools/programmes are usually non-Arabic speakers, this rote memorisation often occurs with a limited understanding of the 77 430 words (of which approximately 19 000 are orthographically unique) in the Qur’an. To many it might seem inconceivable to undertake a massive rote memorisation task with limited understanding of what it is being memorised, especially for children with immature attention and memory skills. However, various religious and socio-cultural beliefs have likely motivated the existence of this phenomenon in non-Arabic-speaking Muslim communities, especially in the Indo-Pak and Southeast Asian regions:
1) The belief that memorising the Qur’an would provide immense rewards in the afterlife not only to the memoriser but also to his/her parents. Depending on one’s interpretation of various religious evidences, these rewards may include having special intercession on the Day of Judgement, being assigned to higher (and thus, better) levels of heaven, amongst others.
2) The belief that reciting (and thus, memorising) even just one letter of the Qur’an would provide immense rewards, with those who find the task more difficult getting double the reward.
3) The high status that a hafiẓ (m.)/hafiẓah (f.) (someone who has memorised the entire Qur’an) may hold in certain communities, which in turn, is a source of pride for his/her parents. In these communities, a hafiẓ/hafiẓah is typically given important leadership roles such as leading special congregational prayers during the fasting month (Ramadhan). 4) The belief that familiarising children with the Qur’an in an intensive
manner and a controlled environment would provide numerous benefits such as moulding good character and behaviour.
Given such beliefs, it is unsurprising that many parents enrol their children in dedicated tahfiẓ schools or programmes to provide them with a fast route to become a hafiẓ/hafiẓah, in which they typically take several years to memorise the entire Qur’an. This is perceived to be faster than learning Arabic as a third or fourth language1 as well as spending time to learn and understand the contextual meaning of the words of the Qur’an before memorising the Qur’an, which may take decades instead.
However, it is important to note that in many of these tahfiẓ programmes, children (or adults) must already be fluent in reading and reciting the Qur’an with proper tajweed (elocution) before they can fully embark on Qur’an memorisation; they will not be admitted into these programmes otherwise. Tajweed is defined as “the proper articulation and reading of the Qur’an” as received from the Prophet (peace be upon him), describing in detail how consonants and vowels are to be articulated singly and consecutively, amongst other things (Haleem, 1994, p. 173). To achieve proper tajweed, the Qur’anic text which learners read is an exacting system of orthographic representation; it not only encodes the phones but also additional cues such as consonant assimilation, emphasis, pausing, and more (see Czerepinski & Swayd, 2006; Haleem, 1994; Leong, 1998). Therefore, reading with proper tajweed not only means fluently articulating the Qur’anic Arabic letters or phones, but also means being able to follow fully specified recitation rules with regards to the text. To better understand the linguistic input that non-Arabic-speaking Qur’anic readers receive, the next section will describe the psycholinguistic characteristics of Qur’anic Arabic, namely its orthography and phonology.