- Pick a specific time every day to just sit down with the Qur'an and try to memorise. For a fixed time as well (I'd say ideally an hour, but you might be able to do more or less). Recently, when I went to India, I found that the first night I was having a lot of trouble sleeping. I woke up at Fajr, and then just stayed up. So I went and picked up the Qur'an from the shelf, and sat at my musallah (I think I sat for more than an hour the first day, I was feeling quite eager :)). I did this for about 3 days, and managed to memorise Surah al-Qiyamah (I'd already memorised some ayaat before I had got there). For some, that may seem like a long time, but for me it was a pretty big achievement. I found that in each hour, I managed to commit to memory around 7 verses. Alhamdulillah, I found memorising that way to be extremely beneficial, it's unfortunate that I never kept it up after that. If you do stay up after Fajr to memorise, why not just stay seated on your musallah until the time for Salatul-Duha? That was my intention in India, but I didn't know the correct time or fiqh of praying it (I had, and still have, never prayed it before - in my defence, I had no access to any books or the Internet to figure it out, although I'm sure I still could have made more of an effort to have prayed it...).
- Load your iPod (or whatever MP3 device you inevitably have :)) with what you're trying to memorise. Personally, I like editing that specific track on my laptop before, so I can just get it to repeat a few verses at a time, and then when I've learnt it, I'll make it repeat over the next few verses (it's easy to do on iTunes, right-click, Get Info..., Options, Start/Stop Time - it's a bid fiddly).
- Listen to several qurraa'. Be it on YouTube or on your iPod again. I always find that that particularly helps with pronunciation, and it's nice to hear different styles at once - it helps you to develop your own style.
- When you've commited a portion to memory, recite it in your salah. This is a good way to make sure you don't forget anything. When I'm trying to memorise something, I'm constantly reciting it to myself throughout the day. And I mean constaaaantlyyyyy. The wajib length of recitation of a surah after al-Faatiha in salaah is the equivalent of 3 short verses (hence the allowance for reciting ayat al-Kursi, which is longer than, for example, surah al-Kawthar, which is only 3 verses long).
- Even after you've committed some ayaat to memory and moved on, make sure to refer back to what you've learnt every now and then. It's really easy to miss out some of the finer details, like holding down that shadda, stopping at that hamza, elongating that mudda, etc.
- Finally, make du'a to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to aide you. I must admit that this isn't something I remember to do all the time, but as the hadith goes, "prayer is the weapon of the believer", and how can we expect to be able to memorise the book of Allah wa ta'ala without requesting His help. This is definitely something I need to remember and do more often also.
A lot of these pointers I got myself from this article: http://muslimmatters.org/2009/10/27/13-steps-to-memorize-the-quran-by-yasir-qadhi/. There are a few extras there which will undoubtedly be helpful, so I highly recommend checking out that link, even before reading this post (hmm, maybe I should have put it at the beginning... well, I'm too lazy to cut and paste so it can just stay where it is).
There are a few websites I sometimes use also when trying to memorise Qur'an. The websites can all be found on my Islamic Link page, but here they are anyway:
- www.quranbrowser.org
- www.searchtruth.com
- www.mounthira.com
- www.tanzil.info
Like I said before, this is by far a comprehensive list. Who am I to give pointers, I'm too ashamed to say how little of the Qur'an I know by memory. Nonetheless, maybe something I've written will be of benefit for you, and that in turn will also be of benefit to me. InshaAllah.
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