Safar is the series a lot of weekend schools quietly settled on, and if your school has just sent home a list with "Safar Book 4" on it, you probably want to know what you are buying before you buy three of the wrong things.

Here is how the series is actually built, level by level, and how to work out where your child starts.

How the series is put together

Safar Islamic Studies, now in its third edition, runs across eight books. Each level has up to three separate components, and this is where most first-time buyers go wrong:

• The textbook — the core book, used in class and kept.
• The workbook — consumable, written in, one per child.
• The teacher's guide — lesson planning and delivery notes, for whoever is teaching.

The single most common ordering mistake is buying a textbook for each of three siblings and one workbook. It is the other way round. The workbook is what gets written in, so it is per child; the textbook can be shared between siblings taking the same level in different years.

Worth knowing before you plan a syllabus: teacher's guides are published for Books 1 through 7. There is no separate guide for Book 8. If you are teaching the final level, you are working from the textbook itself.

The primary levels: Books 1 to 6

These form the primary syllabus, designed to run one level per academic year. The publisher's stated aim is cumulative: each year builds essential Islamic knowledge, character and God-consciousness rather than treating subjects as separate blocks.

Every one of these books covers elements of all the core subjects together rather than one per year, so a single level will move between Qur'anic stories, aqeedah, fiqh and character in the same book. That integrated approach is the main reason schools pick Safar over a subject-by-subject alternative.

The books grow with the reader. Book 1 runs 126 pages and Book 2 is slightly shorter at 118, then the load steps up: Book 3 at 140 pages, Book 4 at 192, Book 5 at 163 and Book 6 at 168.

That jump at Book 4 is real and worth planning for. If a child has been coasting through the early levels on one short session a week, Book 4 is usually where a school needs to add time or a parent needs to start reading along at home.

• Textbook 1 · Workbook 1 · Teacher's Guide 1
• Textbook 2 · Workbook 2 · Teacher's Guide 2
• Textbook 3 · Workbook 3 · Teacher's Guide 3
• Textbook 4 · Workbook 4 · Teacher's Guide 4
• Textbook 5 · Workbook 5 · Teacher's Guide 5
• Textbook 6 · Workbook 6 · Teacher's Guide 6

The secondary levels: Books 7 and 8

Book 7 is where the series changes character, and parents should know this before their child reaches it. The secondary syllabus is written for ages eleven and above, and it is not simply a harder version of Book 6.

It is built to give young Muslims knowledge alongside practical advice: dealing with the emotional and mental pressures of adolescence, building confidence, strengthening practice. The publisher's framing is that these are life guides rather than classroom texts, usable by advanced learners, homeschoolers and youth groups as much as by schools. At 160 pages, Textbook 7 pairs with Workbook 7 and Teacher's Guide 7.

Book 8 takes two years, and the publisher says so

This is the detail that catches schools out. Textbook 8 runs 235 pages, substantially longer than anything before it, and Safar explicitly advises teaching it over two academic years because of the depth of content.

Read that against the rest of the series and the arithmetic changes: eight books, but roughly nine academic years of teaching. A school that plans one book per year will hit Book 8 and either rush it or run out of calendar. Plan the two years in from the start. Workbook 8 completes the level, and as noted there is no teacher's guide at this stage.

Placing your child at the right level

Level numbers are not grades. A nine-year-old who has never done formal Islamic studies does not belong in Book 4 because of their age, and putting them there is the fastest way to lose them.

Three rules that work:

1. If the school assigns a level, use it. They are placing to the class, and being in step with the class matters more than being at a theoretically perfect level.
2. Starting from nothing? Start at Book 1, regardless of age, and expect to move faster than one year per level. A confident older beginner can often cover two early levels in one year.
3. Coming from another series? Compare content, not numbers. Book 4 of one publisher is not Book 4 of another, and Safar's integrated structure makes direct mapping unreliable.

The one hard boundary is Book 7. It is written for eleven and above and addresses adolescence directly. Do not move a bright nine-year-old into it because they finished Book 6 early. Let them consolidate instead.

The Qur'an-reading strand is separate

Safar also publishes a Qur'an-reading line, and it is genuinely a different track from Islamic Studies. Families regularly buy one assuming it includes the other.

The sequence runs from a Qa'idah, for letter recognition and decoding, through Juz' 'Amma, into the Rules of Tajwid. There is also an Essential Duas and Surahs pair for memorisation.

The important detail: most of this line is published in two scripts, Madinah and Urdu. Buy the one your child's teacher uses, because a child decoding in one script and being taught in the other will read hesitantly for no reason anyone can diagnose.

• Qa'idah: Complete Qa'idah (Madinah Script), Complete Qa'idah (Urdu Script), or the shorter Abridged Qa'idah
• Juz' 'Amma: Madinah Script or Urdu Script
• Tajwid: Madinah Script or Urdu Script

If your child is still at the decoding stage, our guide to Qur'an-reading primers explains how to tell when they are genuinely ready to move on, and our du'a book guide covers the memorisation side by age.

Using Safar at home

Safar was built for classrooms, but the secondary books in particular are written with homeschoolers, youth groups and informal study circles in mind, so teaching it at home is not a workaround.

Three things make the difference between a series that gets finished at home and one that stalls in November:

• Buy the teacher's guide. Parents skip it to save money and then improvise, which is exactly what burns them out by mid-year. The guide is the difference between teaching and winging it, and it is the cheapest hour of preparation you will ever buy. Available for Books 1 to 7.
• Keep the session short and fixed. Thirty minutes at the same time twice a week beats a two-hour Sunday session that gets cancelled whenever something comes up. The series is cumulative, so consistency matters more than intensity.
• Do the workbook. It is tempting to read the textbook together and skip the written work. The workbook is where retention actually happens, and skipping it is the most common reason a child "finishes" a level without having learned it.

If you are teaching several children at different levels, run them in the same session on the same days rather than separately. They work from their own workbooks while you move between them, which is how the classroom does it and it works at a kitchen table too.

A note on editions

The current series is the third edition. If you are inheriting books from an older sibling or buying secondhand, check which edition you have before assuming it matches the class. Content and page references were revised, so a child following along in an older edition will be on the wrong page whenever the teacher gives one.

What to order, in one line

For each child: the workbook for their level. For the household: the textbook for that level. For whoever teaches: the guide, if the level has one.

Browse the full range in Safar Publications. If your school uses a different Islamic studies series, our Weekend Learning series guide covers the main alternative and how its levels are structured.

Not sure which level? Tell us your child's age and what they finished last year, and we will place them.