A scholar came to my house and validated what I’d long suspected!
Malam Abdullahi Lamido of Gombe visited my house in Abuja because we couldn’t meet in Minna, where we had teed up a meeting. He went to IET in Minna and wanted to see my food forest, and I wanted to learn — well, what do you learn from a scholar? Everything.
He ended up teaching me and my son how to memorize the Qur’an easily and quickly, and I taught him how to turn one tree into 100 trees using air layering. See the attached video.
It started after we prayed Zuhr together and I mentioned to him that my son was facing the challenge I gave him of memorizing Suratul Baqarah during the holiday.
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So, he invited my son to show him how he was memorizing the Qur’an.
I then explained the 3 x 3 system I taught him. That is, he would read a verse three times, then read the next verse three times. Before going to the third verse, he would read the first two verses three times together. After adding the third verse, he would go to the top of the page and read the entire verses three times. He would continue to do this until he gets to the bottom of the page.
“There’s an easier way,” Amir said, “the trick is not to try to memorize the verses.”
He told me the story of how he visited Zamfara as a young man. After he just arrived, he was given a portion of the Qur’an to recite to lead the tarawih prayers. It was Ramadan.
“Interestingly, I had not memorized that portion,” he said, “but I used this method to memorize and retain the portion and led the prayers with it that same night.”
Amir has two daughters who have memorized the entire Qur’an. “They are twins. One uses this method and the other doesn’t care about it that much,” he said.
“But my son who is about the same age as your son and not as attentive as his sisters uses the same technique to memorize half a page in half an hour,” Amir said.
The Technique
Step 1:
“Take a verse but don’t try to memorize the whole verse,” Amir said, “instead, memorize a group of words, such as three or two words. Repeat this chunk of words until you can recite it without looking at the Qur’an and without mistakes.
Step 2:
“Add another group of words and repeat until you’ve mastered it as in step one. Now go back to what you memorized in the beginning (step 1) and try to recall everything from memory.
Step 3:
Repeat step two until the end of the page.
The Remarkable Results
1. The student soon realizes that he’s discovered an amazing ability that he didn’t know he possessed. While memorizing an entire verse can be too effortful, anyone can memorize two words. If you can memorize two words, you can memorize two or three more.
2. My son started memorizing an entire page a day. Even though my wife later told me that the speed was because he was already familiar with part of the Qur’an from school. However, when he got to where he wasn’t familiar with, he memorized half a page every day until he returned to boarding school.
The Discussion
I realized that I use the method in my “one verse a day” routine but only for long verses. It’s easy to memorize one verse a day, but there are verses that are so long that they stretch to half a page. So, I just chunk those words because it’s almost impossible to take them in at once.
But Amir’s lesson showed me that I can do that for smaller verses too. And when dedicate the time, I find that even an old man like me is able to do half a page a day.
The Conclusion
Whether you’re five, 55, or 80, you can do this. Because it’s difficult to find an individual who can’t memorize three words at any age.
The only real difficulty is finding the time. But you can dedicate five minutes after every Salat to this. A total of 25 minutes a day.
Bragging Rights
Envision a conversation with a friend where you can proudly state, “I didn’t memorize any verses today, I memorized three words!”