The Miftah Curriculum takes students with no knowledge of Arabic and gives them a solid grounding in the language in preparation for the Sibawayh and Inheritors Curriculum. Miftah focuses on reading fluency through systematically introducing you to the basic rules of Arabic, until you can independently understand and decipher classical sentence structures as found in the books of the various religious disciplines. You will complete Miftah with a strong vocabulary and exposure to a variety of classical sentence structures.

Philosophy

An Old Yet Innovative Approach to Learning Arabic

Arabic is sacred: it is the language of the Quran, the language of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), and the language of authoritative scholarly works in every religious discipline. Traveling far along the path of sacred knowledge requires taking a short detour to learn Arabic.

Muslims have been learning Arabic for centuries with this sacred goal in mind. Non-Arab Muslims—such as the Turks, the Persians, and the Indians—have formulated rigorous methods of teaching their children Arabic so that they can directly access sacred religious texts. These methods have stood the test of time and produced thousands of top-notch scholars.

The Miftah Diploma and Sibawayh Degree take you forward by going back to the classical methods of teaching Arabic that are prevalent to this day in many centers of religious learning in the non-Arab world. It is innovative because it is—to our knowledge—the first of its kind in the English-speaking world.

The Miftah Diploma is not only a bridge to the Sibawayh Degree, but also will assist you in completing the Seekers Degree, which then bridges to the Inheritors Ijaza tracks. Unlike other Arabic learning programs, these courses have a purely religious focus: to learn Arabic to understand the Qur’an, the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad (Allah bless him and give him peace), and the works of classical scholars.

Upon Completion

After successfully completing the Miftah courses and taking the final assessment and oral interview, you are eligible to receive the Miftah Diploma.

Receiving the Miftah Diploma means that you have been certified in your understanding of the material. You will have learned how to tap into your grammatical mind and will now have the key to access classical texts, which will assist you in the Sibawayh, Seekers, and Inheritors programs.

Basic Arabic Reading (ARB101)
This gateway to the Introductory Arabic courses will teach you how to read the Arabic script and articulate the Quran. By the end of the course, you will be able to open and read any vowelled Arabic text, as well apply basic tajwid rules to both the Quran and standard Arabic texts.

Introductory Arabic – Part 1 (ARB111)
The first step in a multi-year Arabic program that will take students from no knowledge of Arabic to a high-level of proficiency. Introductory Arabic 1 focuses on understanding simple sentence structures, word constructions, verb conjugations, and pronouns.

Introductory Arabic – Part 2 (ARB112)
The second step in a multi-year Arabic program that will take students from no knowledge of Arabic to a high-level of proficiency. Introductory Arabic 2 will build on the first part of this series and will delve further into grammatical states; verb forms; word roots; sentence breakdowns; and more.

Intermediate Arabic – Part 1 (ARB201)
Go beyond the basics and apply introductory Arabic theory to read, understand, and grammatically analyze a hundred noun-sentence hadiths.

Intermediate Arabic – Part 2 (ARB202)
Go beyond the basics and apply introductory Arabic theory to read, understand, and grammatically analyze a hundred verb-sentence hadiths.

Intermediate Arabic – Part 3 (ARB203)
In this study of a famous classic primer of Arabic grammar, gain a comprehensive map of the theory of Arabic grammar that you will refer to for the rest of your life and use as a basis for further study.

The central courses of the Miftah program, ARB201, ARB 202, and ARB 203, teach Arabic through hadith. The three courses combined cover about 300 hadiths using a variety of sentence structures and on a variety of topics. Currently, the text used for this course is Zad al-Talibin, which is a selection of hadiths from the famous Mishkat al-Masabih. However, the courses will be transitioning to use hadiths from Riyad al-Salihin.

Hadith are chosen and organized according to the rules studied in each lesson, getting more difficult as you progress through the three courses. By the end of arb203, you will have seen hadiths from most of the chapters of Riyad al-Salihin, meaning you will have topically covered the book, and you will also have seen all the major sentence structures used in these hadiths. This will provide you with the requisite knowledge and training so that you can read the rest of the hadiths yourselves, using a dictionary to look up any words that you don’t already know.

Hadiths are examined both for their Arabic and for what is being said, so these courses are cross-listed in the Arabic and Hadith departments. Ideally, you will memorize each hadith that you cover, providing you with a large pool of classical Arabic vocabulary, a large pool of eloquent sentences, and exposure to the rules and sentence structures that are most commonly encountered in hadith literature and classical Arabic usage.

One of the most important skills that you learn in this series of courses is sentence breakdown. This teaches you to look at language formally and technically instead of informally, thus preparing you for formal study of grammar and other Arabic disciplines in the Sibawayh program.