The 17 Makharij — Where Each Arabic Letter Comes From

Ask a student who has been reciting for years to say ح and then ه, and very often the same sound comes out twice. It is rarely carelessness: nobody has shown them that the two letters are made at different depths of the throat. The map of those places is called the makharij. Our overview of what Tajweed is and why it matters introduces them in a paragraph; this is the walk through all of them.

What a makhraj is

Makhraj (plural makharij) means "place of exit". Every Arabic letter leaves the body at one identifiable point — in the empty space of the mouth, in the throat, along the tongue, at the lips, or in the nasal passage. Pronouncing it means narrowing or stopping the airflow at exactly that point and nowhere else.

To find one, teachers still use the method Ibn al-Jazari described: take the letter with no vowel on it, put a hamza carrying a vowel in front, and listen for where the sound is cut off. Say aq and the stop happens far back, where the tongue meets the soft palate; say at and it happens at your front teeth. That stopping place is the makhraj.

Getting it wrong is not an accent. Arabic separates meanings by makhraj alone, so a letter produced a centimetre off is usually a different letter, and therefore a different word.

The five areas and the seventeen points

The makharij fall into five areas, subdivided into seventeen specific points:

• Al-jawf — the empty space of the mouth and throat: one point
• Al-halq — the throat: three points
• Al-lisan — the tongue: ten points
• Ash-shafatan — the two lips: two points
• Al-khayshum — the nasal passage: one point

Seventeen is the count of Ibn al-Jazari and the majority of reciters, and what nearly every modern syllabus teaches, including our structured Tajweed course. It is not the only view: Sibawayh counted sixteen and a smaller group fourteen, disagreeing over whether the empty space of the mouth counts on its own and whether certain tongue points should be merged. The sounds are not in dispute, only how they are filed.

Al-Jawf: the empty space

Al-jawf is the hollow running from the throat up through the mouth, and the one makhraj where nothing touches anything: the sound travels through open air until the breath runs out. Three letters come from it, the letters of madd (prolongation) — alif with no vowel after a fatha, waw with no vowel after a damma, and ya with no vowel after a kasra. Teachers usually demonstrate all three with the word nooheeha (Surah Hud 11:49).

Alif belongs here always, since it never carries a vowel; waw and ya only when stretched like this, since with a vowel of their own they come from the lips and the middle of the tongue.

Al-Halq: the throat

Six letters, in three pairs, taught from the deepest point outwards.

The deepest part: ء and ه

Hamza (ء) and ha (ه) are made at the bottom of the throat, nearest the chest. Hamza is a complete closure and release — the catch in the middle of the English "uh-oh". Ha is the same place left open, a plain outbreath.

The middle: ع and ح

Ayn (ع) and haa (ح) come from the middle of the throat, where the passage can be squeezed without being closed. Ayn is the voiced one, haa the whispered one.

The nearest part: غ and خ

Ghayn (غ) and khaa (خ) sit at the top of the throat, closest to the mouth. Both carry a rasping friction; ghayn is voiced, khaa is not. Urdu and Persian speakers usually manage these two.

Why ح and ه are the hard pair

This one distinction defeats more non-Arab students than any other. Both letters are whispered, both land on an English or Urdu ear as "h", so the ear files them as one sound and the tongue obliges. But they are not neighbours. Ha (ه) is at the deepest point and completely relaxed — air passes without resistance, which is why it sounds like a sigh. Haa (ح) is higher, in the middle of the throat, and not relaxed at all: the throat walls press together so the air forces through a narrow gap, giving a hoarse, audible friction. In short, ه costs you no effort and ح does. If your throat feels nothing on ح, you are saying ه.

Al-Lisan: the tongue

Ten of the seventeen points belong to the tongue, which produces eighteen letters — the longest section to learn.

The back of the tongue: ق then ك

Qaf (ق) is made at the very back of the tongue, rising against the soft palate — the fleshy part of the roof of the mouth. Kaf (ك) sits slightly forward, where the soft palate meets the hard. Two separate points, and the gap is small enough that most learners collapse it.

The middle of the tongue: ج ش ي

Jeem (ج), sheen (ش) and ya (ي) carrying a vowel all come from the middle of the tongue pressed against the palate directly above it. One place, three sounds, because of how the air is released: jeem stops it completely, sheen spreads it, ya lets it flow.

The side of the tongue: ض

Daad (ض) is made by pressing the edge of the tongue against the upper molars — left side, right, or both, depending on the reciter. It is widely considered the hardest letter in the alphabet, and Arabic is often nicknamed lughat ad-daad, "the language of the daad", because so few languages have anything like it. It is heavy and it is held — not a heavy d, and not a ظ.

The tip of the tongue: ل ن ر

• Laam (ل) — the edges of the tongue nearest the tip, meeting the gum above the upper front teeth along a broad stretch.
• Noon (ن) — the tip itself, slightly forward of laam, against the gum above the two front incisors, with sound also running through the nose.
• Ra (ر) — the tip again, slightly further back than noon, its upper surface touching the gum and giving a single light tap.

The tip against the teeth: three rows

The last three points each hold one heavy letter with two light companions:

• ط د ت — the tip against the roots of the two upper front incisors, where teeth meet gum. Ta (ط) is the heavy one.
• ص س ز — the tip against the area just above the two lower front incisors, with a narrow channel left for the air, which is why all three whistle. Saad (ص) is the heavy one.
• ظ ذ ث — the tip against the edges of the two upper front incisors, so the tongue shows between the teeth. Zaa (ظ) is the heavy one.

Ash-Shafatan: the lips

Two points. Fa (ف) uses the inside of the lower lip against the tips of the upper front incisors — lip to teeth, not lip to lip. The other three use both lips: ba (ب) closes them firmly, meem (م) more lightly with sound running through the nose, and waw (و) carrying a vowel closes nothing, the lips rounding forward and leaving a gap. Press the lips shut on waw and you push it towards a ba.

Al-Khayshum: the nasal passage

The seventeenth point is the nasal cavity above the roof of the mouth, and it produces no letter of its own. What comes out of it is ghunnah, the nasal hum built into noon and meem and held longer in certain rules — noon or meem with a shaddah, the merging rules, and concealment. Pinch your nose and say a doubled meem: if the sound chokes off, the ghunnah was in the right place.

The pairs non-Arabs most often merge

These are the collisions teachers correct week after week, during fluent reading from the mushaf as much as in a dedicated course:

• ح and ه — middle of the throat against the deepest, and the commonest merge of all. It is why al-hamdu goes wrong in the very first word of Al-Fatihah.
• ق and ك — back of the tongue against slightly forward of it. Al-falaq is the daybreak; slide the ق forward to a ك and you have al-fulk, the ship.
• س and ص — light against heavy at neighbouring points. Saara with seen (سار) means he travelled; with saad (صار) it means he became.
• ت and ط — same region, different weight. Teen with ta (تين) is figs, as in Surah At-Teen; with taa (طين) it is clay.
• ذ, ز and ظ — three letters flattened into one "z" by most Urdu, Persian and Turkish speakers. ذ is the tongue between the teeth, light; ز is behind the lower teeth, whistling; ظ is between the teeth and heavy. Nadheer with ذ (نذير) is a warner; with ظ (نظير) an equal.
• ء and ع — a stop at the bottom of the throat against a squeeze in the middle. Amal (أمل) is hope; amal (عمل) is a deed. Swapping them in rabbil-aalameen is very common.

Why you cannot learn this from a book alone

Everything above is description, and description is the weakest part of this subject. Nobody has ever produced a correct qaf by reading "back of the tongue against the soft palate". You cannot see your own throat, and these are parts of the mouth your first language never taught you to move deliberately.

Your ear is on the wrong side of the problem too. It was trained early to sort sounds into the categories your mother tongue uses, and it rounds an unfamiliar Arabic letter to the nearest one it knows. So the ح you produce registers to you as a ح while a listener hears ه. Listening harder does not help, because the fault is in the listening.

Which is why makharij has always been taught mouth to ear. A teacher makes the sound, you copy it, they say what was wrong, you adjust — sometimes twenty times on one letter. They also catch what you would never check: a ض drifting onto the tip of your tongue, a ر rolled three times instead of tapped once. It has to be done by a qualified teacher listening in real time, which is what our one-to-one online lessons are built around.

Where to start depends on where you are. If the letters are still uncertain, begin with the Noorani Qaida, which drills the makharij letter by letter before any rule is introduced. If you read comfortably but were never corrected, go into a Tajweed course with a teacher who checks each point. Either way, book a free trial lesson or create an account and recite for someone. Ten minutes of correction will tell you more than this whole article.