Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali

Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali, a Moroccan reciter of boundless generosity

He is one of the beautiful voices of tartil and tajweed in Morocco. His devout, traditional upbringing and his training under some of the finest sheikhs in the country helped him forge a path of success with the Book of Allah, both in memorizing and in reciting it. He has taken part in national and international competitions and gatherings, achieving good results. This is the Moroccan reciter Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali, born in 1980 in the Tahannaout area near Marrakech.

Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali grew up in a religious family, most of whose members know the Holy Quran by heart, especially his mother and his father, who worked as an imam and Quran memorization teacher in a number of Moroccan towns and villages. This righteous father took great care of his son Mohamed: he guided him from an early age and supervised his memorization of the entire Quran, which he completed when he was only eleven. He memorized the Quran according to the traditional method used in Morocco and stayed by his father’s side wherever he settled or traveled, hardly ever leaving him.

After memorizing the whole Book of Allah and mastering a number of classical scholarly texts (mutun), he enrolled at the Al-Hafiz Ibn Abd al-Barr Institute in Marrakech to refine his Quranic talents, becoming in 1995 the first student from outside the city to set foot in the institute. He then moved to Fez to pursue further studies in the Islamic sciences, in fields such as fiqh, Quranic exegesis, rhetoric, literature, the principles of tajweed and the qira’at. During this scholarly journey, he studied under a group of Morocco’s finest sheikhs, most notably Dr. Taoufik El Abqari and Dr. Mohamed Jamil Moubarak.

Having completed his studies, the reciter Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali moved in 2000 to Agadir, where he was appointed imam and khatib of the Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib Mosque in the Al-Dakhla district, as well as a preacher attached to the city’s local council of religious scholars. Alongside his work as a preacher and imam, he took part in a number of local and international religious competitions and events: in 2006 he won first place at the National Festival of the Holy Quran organized by the Hajj Bachir Foundation in Temara; he later took second place at the Moscow International Holy Quran Competition, as well as fourth place at the Mohammed VI International Holy Quran Competition and at the Iran competition in 2008.

Drawing on his experience in the field, Mohamed Ait El Hassan Ouali has not only competed in Quran competitions but has also served on their juries. He is currently a member of the jury of Morocco’s Council of Religious Scholars, which oversees the Quran competitions organized in Morocco by the Ministry of Awqaf and Moroccan television channels. As for his audio releases, this outstanding reciter has recorded a complete murattal Quran in the Warsh narration from Nafi’, through the path of al-Azraq, in 2013.