What are the stages of seeking knowledge that one must go through?

The questioner : He says: Are there stages in seeking knowledge that one must necessarily pass through?

The Shaykh : Are there stages, he asks?

The questioner: Yes.

The Shaykh : I do not know. In truth, I do not imagine that there is a stage in Islamic knowledge that can be bypassed; because knowledge is attained gradually. So I do not know the answer to this question except that it be negative; that is: there are no stages, but one proceeds as the poet said:
"If you seek knowledge, it is much
And life is too short to acquire it
“So prioritize the more important of them, then the more important.”
The Shaykh: I imagine now an answer to a question like this regarding some Muslims; a student of knowledge distinguishes between the Arab and the non-Arab. If he is an Arab, it may be said that he is able to bypass the stage of learning what is known as the science of grammar, the science of morphology, and the science of language and its vocabulary. This is unlike the non-Arab; for him, it is obligatory to study these sciences until he is able to understand the Book and the Sunnah. But the reality we see and touch with our own hands is that Arabs today have become close to non-Arabs in their failure to understand the texts of the Book and the Sunnah. So it seems that they, too, must study these sciences that non-Arabs study, perhaps in a period shorter than the time a non-Arab spends studying the language, its grammar, morphology, rhetoric, and so on.
The Shaykh: On this occasion, I advise the student of knowledge, if it is not possible for him to study these sciences of language, to increase his study of the Qur'an, recitation of the Qur'an, and reading of the hadith of the Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him); for in that is correction of his tongue and enrichment of his mind and thought. This is all I have.