The Conditions for Seeking Knowledge and Its Progressive Stages
Machine translationRead the Arabic original
Question:
A questioner asks: What are the conditions for seeking knowledge? And what are the progressive stages in seeking knowledge? For example, does one start with the Qur'an, or how? Please clarify this for us.
Answer:
Its condition is sincerity for Allah. The condition for seeking knowledge is sincerity for Allah; that is its condition. It has no limited age, but rather from the moment a person reaches the age of reason, he is commanded to seek knowledge. As for the beginning, this depends on the situation of the teachers in the schools. They look at what is most beneficial and start them with something light, such as reciting Surat al-Fatihah, short surahs, the fundamentals of the religion, and the few principles they are capable of handling. And so on, progressing gradually until they reach what qualifies them for the sciences that are greater than what came before in terms of volume, and in terms of the need to understand them deeply and expand upon them.
A questioner asks: What are the conditions for seeking knowledge? And what are the progressive stages in seeking knowledge? For example, does one start with the Qur'an, or how? Please clarify this for us.
Answer:
Its condition is sincerity for Allah. The condition for seeking knowledge is sincerity for Allah; that is its condition. It has no limited age, but rather from the moment a person reaches the age of reason, he is commanded to seek knowledge. As for the beginning, this depends on the situation of the teachers in the schools. They look at what is most beneficial and start them with something light, such as reciting Surat al-Fatihah, short surahs, the fundamentals of the religion, and the few principles they are capable of handling. And so on, progressing gradually until they reach what qualifies them for the sciences that are greater than what came before in terms of volume, and in terms of the need to understand them deeply and expand upon them.
Source
واجب الرجل والمرأة — islamhouse.com (1:04:57)
The Arabic text is a machine transcription of the audio recording.