The excellence of learning the Qur'an

There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes with starting something late. You meet someone who memorised the Qur’an at nine, and the arithmetic runs itself: they are decades ahead, and you will never catch up.

The narration below does not answer that anxiety by softening the standard. It answers it by relocating it.

خَيْرُكُمْ مَنْ تَعَلَّمَ الْقُرْآنَ وَعَلَّمَهُ

Khayrukum man ta'allama al-Qur'ana wa 'allamah.

The best among you (Muslims) are those who learn the Qur an and teach it.

What the wording actually says

Read it closely and the criterion is a pair of verbs, not a rank. Learned and taught. Neither is a state you arrive at; both are things a person does, and can begin doing today. There is no threshold in the wording — no minimum number of chapters, no age past which the door closes.

That matters practically. Someone who learns the correct pronunciation of one short surah this month, and then sits with their child until the child can say it too, has done the thing the narration names. So has the scholar with an ijazah. The scale between them is real, but the category is the same one.

Learning is a road, and the road is the point

The second narration puts the emphasis on the walking rather than the arriving:

وَمَنْ سَلَكَ طَرِيقًا يَلْتَمِسُ فِيهِ عِلْمًا سَهَّلَ اللَّهُ لَهُ بِهِ طَرِيقًا إِلَى الْجَنَّةِ

Wa man salaka tariqan yaltamisu fihi 'ilman, sahhala Allahu lahu bihi tariqan ila al-jannah.

And he who treads the path in search of knowledge, Allah would make that path easy, leading to Paradise for him.

The verb is treads a path. It describes someone in motion, not someone who has finished. The reward attaches to the travelling.

This is worth holding onto on the days when progress is invisible — when you have read the same page four times and it has not stuck. On those days the travelling still counts, because the travelling is what was named.

Even the Prophet ﷺ was told to ask for more

The one instruction in the Qur’an where the Prophet ﷺ is told to ask for an increase of anything is an increase in knowledge:

114

وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدْنِى عِلْمًۭا

Wa qul rabbi zidni 'ilma.

And say, "My Lord, increase me in knowledge."

Whatever else this establishes, it settles one small question completely: there is no station at which a person has enough. If he ﷺ was taught to ask for more, nobody below him has grounds to consider the matter closed.

Where to actually start

Three things, in order, if you are beginning:

1. Fix the recitation of what you already know. Most people carry a handful of short surahs learned by ear as children, with errors baked in. Correcting those is higher-value than adding new material on top of them.
2. Find a teacher, even a remote one. Recitation is transmitted by hearing and correction. An app — including this one — can put the text and the audio in front of you, but it cannot hear you back.
3. Teach the next person one thing. The narration pairs learning with teaching, and teaching one surah to one child is not a lesser version of that. It is that.

None of this requires you to have started at nine.