What the Ājurrūmiyyah does and does not do When students...

What the Ājurrūmiyyah does and does not do When students begin to learn Arabic they are often not aware of what such learning really entails. Even well into their learning they might still not be aware of how wide a field Arabic study is and what is needed to become proficient in all the main areas. Often they are told to study this or that book without knowing precisely what its main focus or concentration is.

Consequently, they spend a long time studying a particular work while they could have studied another work that is more suited to their specific needs. We will now take the Ājurrūmiyyah and see exactly what it is that it does and does not do.

The Ājurrūmiyyah aims at doing the following: Providing the student with a general framework within which to understand, think and communicate about Arabic Naḥw rules in a clear and coherent fashion Acquainting the student with the relevant Naḥw terms, concepts and basic rules Enabling students to perform simple and small-scale syntactic analysis ( i‘rāb ) Serving as an introduction to Arabic grammatical texts of much wider scope and much greater detail Enabling the student to cover all the basic Naḥw rules within a very short period of time Equipping the student with the requisite grammatical knowledge needed (amongst other things) for performing basic communication tasks such as the production and reception of grammatically well-formed sentences Providing the student with a working knowledge of Naḥw to enable him to tackle basic Islamic texts On the other hand, the Ājurrūmiyyah is essentially a basic Naḥw text and not a full Arabic language course and as such it does not: Develop the student’s productive and receptive skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) Build the student’s vocabulary except in the field of Naḥw Provide the student with an in-depth knowledge of Naḥw Give a comprehensive treatment of Ṣarf Cover any of the other Arabic linguistic sciences such as***‘Ilm al-Balāghah*** (rhetoric or stylistics), ‘Ilm al-Lughah (lexicology), ‘Ilm al-‘Arūd (prosody), etc.

Provide the students with exercises and drills i.e. it focuses only on theoretical Naḥw and not applied Naḥw The student, who, therefore, wishes to learn Arabic holistically, is advised to augment his Arabic studies with other Arabic language material.