My Hifz Journey

 I am nowhere near completing my Hifz. I'm still very much a beginner. So technically I have no place to offer advice to those starting out or thinking about starting Hifz--so let's just call this sharing. In case there are people who's reading this who are thinking about starting their own journey.  Things to consider when first starting Hifz: Intention. The intention to start memorizing Quran has to be for the sake of Allah alone. Not to show off. You will have to recheck your intention regularly to make sure it is still for Allah. Use the same Mushaf and dont keep changing. Believe it or not, while most mushafs appear the same, theyre not. Even if theyre both 15 line mushafs, they will differ in verse spacing and placement. The madinah mushafs differ to other mushafs (dont believe me, try compare madinah mushafs to the standard translation ones). If you keep changing mushafs, your brain will have difficulty to picture the verse. I made the mistake of changing mushafs dur...

 Wow keeping a blog isnt as easy nowadays compared to previously. I used to come back from class and type away everyday but now I just cant find the time to. So anyway, my Hifz journey take two began just after Ramadhan. I'm always full of determination after Ramadhan. One of my post Ramadhan goals was to memorize the Quran again. This time I was going to really focus on my revision and not move on from a surah until I got it perfect and fluent. So I began rememorizing the surahs and set a limit of about 2 lines a day. Some days I could go more but I read other hifz blogs that you should always memorize just a bit less of what you think you can do daily. And revise, revise, revise. Even when I got so bored of reciting the same verses over and over again-- I still persevered.  2-3 weeks into my Hifz journey I started hunting for a teacher. I was so torn over this, half scared half excited. Scared that I couldnt commit to Hifz for the rest of my life and to be scolded by the tea...

 My first attempt at Hifz was circa mid 2023. I was on a roll, working hard to perfect my recitation, listening to famous reciters and trying to emulate their pronunciation and tajweed. I was reading the meaning and understanding the backstory of these surahs for the first time. But something was missing.  I felt like I couldnt get enough, not tasting the sweetness of the Quran like how other people were describing it.  Then I started to watch youtube and instagram videos of people talking about their Hifz journey. The struggle and the feeling of accomplishment. I was envious and instantly knew that I wanted to revisit my long forgotten Hifz days.  It took me 3 months to complete Juz Amma and 2 surahs into Juz 29. I felt good, finally tasting the sweetness of the Quran. Memorizing new verses everyday after Maghrib. I practiced the verses in my prayers. I thought I had it.  Major Major Mistakes I made this round was.... I DID NOT REVISE REGULARLY. I skipped days....

  So yes in the next 21 years. Dunya seeped in and made no room for the Quran in my heart. Yikes that was really scary. One year before the Covid pandemic, everything changed.  Allah opened up my heart to start taking care of my prayers and to pray on time. And I during that Ramadhan I picked up my very dusty Quran and just read ONE surah in that month. Then I closed it and never came back to it that year. My recitation was slow and many many mistakes were made. My makhraj and tajwid? Gone. Enter Covid 2020. The fateful pandemic that put everyone in lockdown. Time to sit and stew and contemplate the meaning of life. That was life-changing for many, including me.  That Ramadhan I read more Quran than the year before, and I continued reciting and reading the meaning for months after. I had to relearn how to recite, how to pronounce the letters. How to read with tajweed (back then I thought tajweed only meant the Nun rules. Never thought that tajweed spanned way beyond that)...

 Okay let me re introduce myself and my story. I was never the perfect Muslim girl.  In Malaysia where I'm from, after "normal" (somewhat secular) school, some of us had to attend Islamic school (think Sunday school or something similar)- and for most of us that meant learning about Quran, Fiqh and other Islamic values from 2-5pm.Every. Day. Needless to say I would skip class and probably ended up attending class twice or at most three times a week. I was a kid, I had better things to do with my time..and also it was so darn tiring!  As lazy as I was to attend Islamic school, Quran Hifz was my favourite class. When my classmates would play games or doing their own thing, I diligently went up to the ustazah to recite every few days. The best part was I never studied or revised, I just somehow had the verses in my head from my Recitation class and just regurgitated it to my Hifz teacher. It was fun and magical at the time. Despite my skipping class, I would win an award eve...

 Alhamdulillah. This has been a long time coming. Feels odd yet familiar. Like a hug from an old pal. I've been blogging all throughout my teenage and young adult life and when work got in the way, all that just stopped. I do miss writing nonsense sometimes, there's only so much I can type on an Instagram post, and Facebook..well Facebook is for old people nowadays aren't they? The Old in question being my generation of course. Let's see. Last I left the blogging world I had just graduated from medical school. Fast forward about 13 years later, I am an Anaesthesiologist, working at the same hospital I started my career in. All in all pretty boring, Dunya stuff. As my age creeps up, I find myself longing to upgrade my life and to start banking into my Akhirah account. Midlife crisis you say? If it means bringing me closer to Jannah, then I'm all for it. So here I am again, with a new goal in life. That goal is to MEMORIZE the ENTIRE Quran. Yes. All 604 pages and all ...