Explanation of Important Lessons (for every Muslim)

Shaykh Ibn Baz's Ad-Duroos Al-Muhimmah li-'Ammatil-Ummah is deliberately terse. It states the minimum every Muslim must know, in outline, and leaves the explaining to a teacher. This volume is that explanation — the same eighteen lessons, worked through at the length they need.

The Eighteen Lessons

• One — Surah Al-Fatihah and the short surahs, from Az-Zalzalah through to An-Nas, each with its meaning
• Two — The pillars of Islam
• Three — The pillars and branches of faith
• Four — The categories of Tawhid and of shirk
• Five — Ihsan, and its levels
• Six to Eleven — The prayer in full: its conditions, its pillars (arkan), its obligatory elements, the tashahhud explained, its Sunan, the prostration of forgetfulness, the disliked actions within it, and what nullifies it
• Twelve to Fourteen — Wudu: its conditions, its obligatory elements, and what nullifies it
• Fifteen and Sixteen — The manners Islam legislates, and taking them on
• Seventeen — A warning against shirk and the various kinds of sin
• Eighteen — Preparing the deceased, praying over him and burying him

Study questions are included, which makes it usable as a course rather than only as reading.

Why the Prayer Gets Six Lessons

Because it is performed five times a day and performed incorrectly by a very large number of Muslims who have never been taught it properly. Separating conditions from pillars from obligations from Sunan is not pedantry — it is the difference between knowing that a mistake requires a prostration of forgetfulness, invalidates the prayer entirely, or does not matter.

How It Is Used

This is one of the most widely taught texts in the Muslim world, and the lesson structure was built for teaching — one lesson per session, with the study questions closing it. It works equally for a determined reader alone, since the commentary supplies what a teacher would otherwise have to.

Related Reading

• Essential Lessons for Every Muslim — the original text on its own, short and inexpensive
• Authentic Creed and Invalidators of Islam — the same author on creed and the invalidators of Islam
• A Guide to Salat — a practical guide to performing the prayer