5 minute Quran Arabic :Understanding Verb in the Quran

By the end of this article, you would understand one more awesome thing what Fi’il (Verb) is. You will be able to do something that most people who have been reading the Quran all their life can’t. 

Arabic is made up of three parts of speech which is Ism (Noun), Fi’il (Verb) and Harf (Particle). What is amazing about Arabic is it is very much like mathematics. Once you understood the concept, it is lock inside your mind. You will remember it. 

Understanding Fi’il (Verb)

Every word in the Quran either fall into Ism , Fi il or  harf. But Fi’il is one of the hardest things to grasp because it is often misunderstood ]. What does Fi’il means? A Fi’ll is a A word that points to meaning in of itself and connected to time frames, immediate past present future. That is the most friendly definition given to students of Arabic who is suffering from grammar blindness.

But here is how I understand what Fi’il means. It represents words that are constantly stuck in the present, past and future. The word is either in the past tense, present tense, future tense. Fi’il have some similarity with the English verb like eating, ate and will eat.

 It always, always, always have to do with some kind of action and because it is an action it is somehow usually connected to the doer of the action. At this moment all you have to do is just know that Fi il is a word that that has tenses, it is frozen in time either past future or present. 

Alright, by default every Fi’il is in the past tense and linguistically past tense are called Fi’il madhi . The Arabs love the past tense so much usually every fi’il  (action word) is in the past tense form and it is by default masculine. What this means, when you look up a word in an Arabic dictionary it is presented in the root word would be past tense and masculine. 

English verb and Arabic verb are similar but they are not the same. So it is important for you to know the Arabic term and get comfortable with them. Another way of saying it is English and Arabic words are not identical twin brothers but. Arabic words have similarities with English verbs so it is important for you to know the Arabic terms because it is misleading to call the Arabic verb a verb. 

So before you can study Arabic Fi il, you have to also know the Arabic pronoun because they usually go hand in hand. Simply because Fi i is an action word and it needs somebody to do the action.

How To Identify Fi’il (Verb) in the Quran

Alright as promised I’ll let you in on one simple fact about the Quran. The next time you open the Quran and see a word ending with a Fattah sign which gives it the vowel sound ‘a’ like in jar. All of the past tenses in Arabic would end with Fathah. 
Here is some example, the word نصرَ which sound like nasara. What is the sound at the end of the word? The ‘ra’ carry a vowel sounds ‘a’ signify that it is Fi’il madhi or past tense. So the next time you open the Quran and see a fathah at the end of the word there is a big chance it is a Fi’il and in the past tense or terminologically known as Fi’il Madhi.