Three hours a week. That’s the class time. People assume studying Alimiyyah while working full-time means abandoning your evenings for four years. It means Monday, Wednesday and Friday, one hour each, plus the revision you fit around them. The programme was built for people with jobs. What follows is how to actually hold it together, including the month where you almost stop.
Quick Answer at a Glance
| Demand | Reality | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Class time | 3 hours a week, one hour on Mon, Wed, Fri evenings | Rarely |
| Revision | 2 to 4 hours a week | Weeks 6 to 10 of each term |
| Total | 5 to 7 hours a week | Manageable for most jobs |
| Duration | 4 years | Year 2 is where people stop |
| Missed class | Recordings available | Only if you actually watch them |
| Travel | Whalley Range or none if you study online | Winter evenings |
| Hardest period | Ramadan, exam season, new job | Plan for it in advance |
The four-year Madinah-based syllabus sets a fixed pace. Your job is to protect three evenings.
Why the Schedule Works for Employed Students
One hour is short enough to attend after a long day. That sounds obvious. It’s the entire design. A three-hour evening class after a nine-hour shift produces a student who is present in body and absent in mind by the second hour. An hour holds attention. Three separate hours across a week beats one long block every time, because the material gets revisited before it fades.
Classes fall on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Tuesday and Thursday are free for revision or for life. The weekend stays yours. Compare that to programmes running a full day every week or four to five nights at three hours a night. Those exist. They also assume you are not working.
The Real Enemy Is Not Time
Working students rarely leave because the hours were impossible. They leave because of a gap. Here is the pattern and it repeats every year. You miss one Friday for a work event. The recording sits unwatched over the weekend. You attend Monday and follow perhaps seventy per cent of it. Wednesday assumes the Friday you missed, so now you follow half. By the following Monday, the text has moved on and returning feels like walking into a conversation late.
Nobody quits at that point. They just stop opening the app. The fix is boring: watch the recording within forty-eight hours. Not “this weekend”. Within two days, while the previous lesson is still in your head.
Protecting Three Evenings at Work
Tell your manager in advance
A request made in September for three fixed evenings is a scheduling note. The same request made in November, urgently, is a problem. Most managers accommodate a fixed commitment they know about early.
Book the evenings in your work calendar
Blocked out, titled, recurring. A visible block prevents the six o’clock meeting that becomes a seven o’clock meeting.
Negotiate one lever, not four
If your job cannot give you all three evenings, ask for two and plan to take Friday from recordings every week. A predictable gap is manageable. A random one is not.
Shift Workers
Rotating shifts are the hardest case so treat them directly. Students on rotas usually attend two live sessions a week and take the third from recordings, rotating which one depending on the pattern. That works because the programme records everything. What doesn’t work is attending whichever sessions happen to be convenient, with no commitment to a rhythm.
Set a rule that survives your rota. For example: whichever session you miss, the recording gets watched before the next class, without exception. One rule. Four years.
If your rota makes even two live evenings impossible for long stretches, the live online Alimiyyah programme removes travel from the equation and gives back the time you would have spent driving.
Where Revision Actually Fits
Two to four hours a week and almost nobody finds it in one block.
What works for employed students:
- Twenty minutes with the morning coffee, four days a week
- A commute spent on audio rather than a podcast
- Saturday morning before the house wakes, ninety minutes
- Ten minutes re-reading the previous lesson before each class starts
What doesn’t work: planning a three-hour Sunday session. It gets cancelled by life roughly every second week and the guilt of a cancelled block does more damage than the missed hour.
Year 1 carries Quranic Arabic and Arabic Grammar alongside Aqeedah, Arbaeen Nawawiyyah, Usool Thalathah, Qawaid Arbah, Nawaqid al-Islam, Seerah, Introduction to Hadith and Islamic Manners. Arabic is the part that punishes irregularity. Small and daily beats long and occasional, particularly in the first eighteen months.
The Three Points Where Working Students Stop
Weeks six to ten of any term
The novelty has gone. The material has become properly difficult. Nothing is wrong and it feels like everything is. Push through with attendance alone; comprehension catches up.
Year 2
This is the real one. Kitab at-Tawheed, Lum’atul I’tiqad, Al-Waraqat and Muqaddimah Usool al-Tafseer arrive together, the texts get harder and the initial motivation has worn thin. Students who survive Year 2 almost always finish.
Any major life change
A new job, a new baby, a house move. The instinct is to pause for a term. The reality is that a paused term often becomes a paused year. Talk to the institute before you disappear; ask what is possible.
A Weekly Structure That Holds
- Sunday evening: look at the week’s work diary and confirm all three class evenings are protected.
- Monday: class, then ten minutes writing down what you did not follow.
- Tuesday: twenty minutes on Arabic, morning if possible.
- Wednesday: re-read Monday’s notes for five minutes before class. Attend.
- Thursday: twenty minutes on the week’s text, not on Arabic.
- Friday: attend. If you can’t, mark the recording in your calendar for a specific slot inside forty-eight hours.
- Saturday: ninety minutes of consolidation or the missed recording plus thirty minutes.
Five to seven hours. It fits inside a full-time job. It does not fit inside a full-time job plus an unprotected calendar.
Two Working Students
Imran is a delivery driver in Longsight. Fridays are his busiest day so he plans for the recording every week rather than hoping. He watches it Saturday morning at six, before the house is up. Two years in, he has watched every Friday session.
Sana works in a hospital on rotating shifts and lives in Rusholme. She attends whichever two sessions her rota allows, then catches the third within two days. Her rule is fixed even when her schedule is not. She reached Year 3, the Qur’an year, without a single unwatched lesson. Neither has an unusual amount of free time. Both have one non-negotiable rule.
About the Teacher
Shaykh Suhaib Sirajudin teaches all four years. He graduated from the Faculty of the Qur’an and Hadith, completed his Fazeelat in Islamic Sciences and specialised in Hadith and Islamic Law under scholars in the UK and abroad. Fifteen-plus years of teaching, over a thousand students across more than twenty countries and nineteen published works including Akhsaru Tafseer. More about Shaykh Suhaib Sirajudin.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three hours of class across Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings, one hour each, plus two to four hours of revision.
Yes and most students on the programme are working. The three-evening structure exists for that reason.
Classes are recorded so a missed session is caught up rather than lost. Shift workers typically attend two live sessions a week and take the third from recordings, rotating which one.
Often, yes. The online route removes travel entirely, which for many working students is thirty to sixty minutes back per class evening. The trade is accountability, since nobody notices immediately when you stop logging in. If your hours are long and unpredictable, online usually wins on attendance.
Year 2. The texts step up with Kitab at-Tawheed, Lum’atul I’tiqad and Al-Waraqat arriving together, while the initial enthusiasm has faded. Students who get through Year 2 almost always complete the four years. Knowing the dip is coming is most of the defence against it.
Speak to the institute before stopping rather than after. Arrangements depend on the year you are in and the cohort. The practical warning is that a paused term often stretches into a paused year and returning after a long gap is harder than pushing through a difficult one.
Revision is expected rather than assigned as formal homework. In practice the students who keep up are doing twenty minutes most days rather than a long weekend session.
No. It runs four years, three evenings a week and the syllabus does not shorten. The weekly load is already among the lightest of any serious Alimiyyah in the country and that is the accommodation.
Starting Without Rearranging Your Life
Studying Alimiyyah while working full time is a scheduling problem, not an endurance test. Three protected evenings, a fixed catch-up rule and a plan for Year 2 is most of it. The 2026-2027 academic year begins on Wednesday 30 September 2026 and applications are open on the 2026-2027 application page.
Before you decide, come and ask how other working students manage it. The Manchester Alimiyyah Programme holds free information evenings at the British Muslim Heritage Centre in Whalley Range and the same questions can be put to the institute directly if you cannot attend.
Have Questions Before You Begin?
If you have any questions or need further clarification before enrolling, feel free to reach out to us directly: