While driving back home on Wednesday, I tuned to the Holy Quran FM. They were announcing the start of the annual competition for the His Majesty Sultan Qaboos prize for Quran memorising and reciting.
The announcer then read the rules of how marks are awarded and taken off including if the judge has to correct the reciter.
The first category was for memorising the last two parts of the Quran which are called the short suras. Well, they are short indeed but that’s a total of forty-eight suras or forty-four pages.
The contestant was a girl called Jumana. Judging by her voice, she must’ve been less than ten years old. Jumana was asked to recite a few suras and she did it admirably.
I read along with her — making mistakes in many places and learning how to pronounce things in the correct way after twenty-two years of leaving school! Her infantile voice and reciting manner brought back fond memories of my own childhood where I had to learn those two parts by heart.
I was a pupil in Qatar, where my father had worked for three years. I started my first primary year there and left by the third. The Qatari curriculum was at the time one of the most challenging yet effective systems along with the Kuwaiti curriculum — both countries being the education pioneers in the Gulf. By the time the student ended the twelve years of education, he/she would’ve memorised the whole of the Holy book (that’s thirty parts or hundred and fourteen suras).
On our summer holidays before heading back to Muscat, my mom would spend a month making us memorise the parts needed for the following year. This was done to the dismay of my brother and I as we were fed up from studies and from staying away from her side of the family for too long.
Being the eldest and a good pupil, I would memorise it effortlessly. Unlike my brother who wasn’t a fan of memorising and gave mom a hard time arguing and sneaking out. To shut him up and keep him still, she would let him — actually both of us — copy the verses down in a futile effort to enhance our handwriting. Sadly, it never worked out and till now we have bad but readable handwriting!
I still remember dad announcing our move to Muscat and the relief we felt skipping a whole month of memorising! On my first days of school here I was shocked to learn that my classmates were memorising verses that I’d already covered two years back.
Years later in middle school, we had an Arabic teacher called Latif (meaning gentleness in Arabic, but he was anything but!). Before any reciting class (be it Quran or poetry), Latif would make us form two lines (boys and girls) and we’d go down with him to his favourite neem tree. Latif would break a branch and clean it before heading back to class.
When the boys didn’t recite well, Latif would lash their legs with the stick (which made the whole class laugh as he did it so dramatically and with no damage at all). Even our parents thought it was funny and excused him.
Many of my classmates still remember him fondly and lament the days when education was taken seriously by all parties (parents, students and teachers). Nowadays, Latif’s technique would’ve never worked. Parents would’ve cried before students about physical abuse and rights. Maybe they’re right in a way, but who else could recite along with Jumana other than old schools like us?
Rasha al Raisi is a certified skills trainer and the author of: The World According to Bahja. rashabooks@yahoo.com
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