Do you advise a student of knowledge to memorize the poetic treatises in religious knowledge?
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
He says: Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success, I find it easy for me to memorize the poetic treatises in religious knowledge. Do you advise me to memorize them and then memorize the evidence for them?
Answer:
My brother, memorization alone is not sufficient and does not benefit. You must read to the people of knowledge. If the memorization is accompanied by reading to the people of knowledge, that is good. But mere memorization does not benefit, it tires you out, and later it may harm you: you think you are a scholar when you are not.
He says: Honorable Shaykh, may Allah grant you success, I find it easy for me to memorize the poetic treatises in religious knowledge. Do you advise me to memorize them and then memorize the evidence for them?
Answer:
My brother, memorization alone is not sufficient and does not benefit. You must read to the people of knowledge. If the memorization is accompanied by reading to the people of knowledge, that is good. But mere memorization does not benefit, it tires you out, and later it may harm you: you think you are a scholar when you are not.
Source
قناة «العلامة الدكتور صالح الفوزان»، هل تنصحون طالب العلم بحفظ المنظومات في العلم؟ للشيخ صالح الفوزان — youtube.com
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.