Analysis of Male Students' Lived Experience of "Failure" in Memorizing the Qur'an (Study Case: Specialized Quranic Schools in Isfahan City)

Memorizing the Holy Qur’an is one of the most prominent ways of socializing Qur’anic beliefs and values and promoting it in Islamic societies. The institutionalization of these norms requires a mechanism that can be used to achieve the goal of promoting the Holy Qur’an. Specialized schools for the memorization of the Holy Quran are a clear example of such a mechanism, which have sought to promote the Holy Qur’an for more than a decade alongside the structure of formal education. Although the methods of memorizing the Qur’an and its psychological effects on the personality of successful memorizers have been studied in these schools, but the lived experience of students who did not succeed in this path has not been analyzed. However, the purpose of this research is to discover and construct the lived experience of students who were in these schools and did not succeed in memorizing the Qur’an.The approach in this research was qualitative, and the phenomenological method was used in data analysis. To collect experimental data, a purposeful sampling method was used and an in-depth and semi-structured interview was conducted with 12 students and members of the community involved. The result of this research was made in the form of 141 descriptive codes and 16 interpretative codes, and then reduced to five explanatory codes as follows: "Lack of reliance on values in (memorizing) the Qur’an, stressed ethical behavior of teachers, stereotypes about intellectual belief, lack of follow-up, and increasing boredom".