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A festal occasion took place at the women hall of Kyiv Islamic Cultural Centre mosque after the Friday prayer: one of the participants of the Qur’an reciting circle “Al-Firdaws” (facilitated by the Centre of Women Development “Maryam”), Ms.Samia Arada, completed reciting the Holy Book on hafth an Asym degree.

The event itself, with all the female parishioners present, began with Ms.Arada’s recitation of her final Surahs under the supervision of Staikh Haydar Al-Hajj. Now she’s waiting for her certificate to be verified in order to have a possibility of teaching this style of recitation herself.

Ukrainian woman of Palestinian origin started learning the Qur’an at the age of 8. Her family lived in Saudi Arabia back then, where Samia started attending the local school of hafidh for girls with her sisters. Their mom and dad dreamed to see all of their daughters becoming hafidh one day, and this dream came true. Samia, in particular, completed learning the Holy Book by heart at the age of 15.

A human’s memory, however, is imperfect, and she gradually started forgetting the words of the Holy Scripture. Having moved to Ukraine, Ms.Arada struggled to overcome this problem on her own by refreshing her memory with constant revisions. The only problem she had it that there was no other hafidh better than her to check her reading and point out the imperfections of her style. The process is quite time-consuming — it took her three month to complete her recitation, in particular  — so the shaikhs coming to Ukraine with temporary visits couldn’t help her.

Still, if it weren't for bad luck have no luck at all: Shaikh Haydar Al-Hajj, a teacher at the Higher Medrese of Hafidh in Crimea, was forced to leave the peninsula after Russian occupation and move to Kyiv. He heard the young woman’s suit and eagerly agreed to help her. While congratulating his student upon her success, the Shaikh drew everyone’s attention to the importance of reading and overlearning the Qur’an, and also spoke of the structure of the Holy Book.