6 Etiquettes of Seeking Knowledge

Welcome to the Friday Khutbah! A series on the AlMaghrib Journal based on sermons delivered by our esteemed instructors! We hope you find it beneficial!

All praise is due to Allah, who is magnificent in His essence, perfect in His attributes, undeniable in His presence. All praise is due to Allah, who has the most magnificent names, a praise that is forever for Him, a praise that eternally remains. May He send peace and blessings in their most perfect fashion.

May He send greetings and salutations that are complete and everlasting upon the best of His creation, Muhammad ﷺ. May He perfect his rank and elevation, for he taught us what we did not know. And he gave, and he gave, and he gave, because he loved us so.

Allah ﷻ says in the Qur’an:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ حَقَّ تُقَاتِهِ وَلَا تَمُوتُنَّ إِلَّا وَأَنتُم مُّسْلِمُونَ

O you who believe, fear Allah as He deserves to be feared and do not die except in a state of Islam. (Surah Al Imran, 3:102)

And Allah ﷻ says:

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ اتَّقُوا رَبَّكُمُ الَّذِي خَلَقَكُم مِّن نَّفْسٍ وَاحِدَةٍ وَخَلَقَ مِنْهَا زَوْجَهَا وَبَثَّ مِنْهُمَا رِجَالًا كَثِيرًا وَنِسَاءً ۚ وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ الَّذِي تَسَاءَلُونَ بِهِ وَالْأَرْحَامَ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ كَانَ عَلَيْكُمْ رَقِيبًا

O mankind, fear your Lord who created you from a single soul and produced from that soul its mate, and made from their combination many men and women. So fear Allah whom you ask each other by and by the ties of kinship, verily Allah is ever watchful over you. (Surah An-Nisa, 4:1)

And Allah says:

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اتَّقُوا اللَّهَ وَقُولُوا قَوْلًا سَدِيدًا ﴿٧٠﴾ يُصْلِحْ لَكُمْ أَعْمَالَكُمْ وَيَغْفِرْ لَكُمْ ذُنُوبَكُمْ ۗ وَمَن يُطِعِ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ فَقَدْ فَازَ فَوْزًا عَظِيمًا ﴿٧١﴾

O you who believe, fear Allah and say that which is correct. He will correct for you your deeds and forgive you your sins. And whoever obeys Allah and His Messenger, then they are indeed victorious. (Surah Al-Ahzab, 33:70-71)

To proceed, we have come and spent or intended to spend a number of our days for the purpose of seeking knowledge. And the Prophet ﷺ said:

Whoever traverses a path to knowledge, Allah ﷻ facilitates for them a path to Paradise. (Narrated by Abu Hurairah رضي الله عنه, Sahih Muslim)

And so we begin by asking Allah ﷻ that the journeys that we take for knowledge, near and far, to make them a path to Paradise for us. اللهم آمين

In this khutbah we will explore the etiquettes of knowledge, the important etiquettes that we should always place in front of us. And in sha Allah, we will mention six quick points to remember and to remind others of.

1. Sincerity

The first is sincerity, the most important quality before doing any action, because the Prophet ﷺ says:

إِنَّمَا الْأَعْمَالُ بِالنِّيَّاتِ، وَإِنَّمَا لِكُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا نَوَى

Actions are by their intentions, and everyone shall have what they intended. (Narrated by Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه, Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)

And so if a person is seeking knowledge, why should they be seeking knowledge in the first place? Imam Malik رحمه الله says:

تَعَلَّمْتُ الْعِلْمَ لِنَفْسِي وَهَكَذَا كَانَ النَّاسُ

I learned knowledge for myself, to remove ignorance from myself.

I was once sitting with a Shaykh when a person said to him, “Shaykh, I want to be a person who lectures all over the country. What do I do to be like you?” And the Shaykh said to him, “Well, I did not go and study Islam to lecture all over the country. That was not my goal. My goal was I wanted to learn how to worship Allah ﷻ correctly. I wanted to benefit myself. Not to have a name anywhere, not to be famous, not to be followed. That wasn’t my goal.”

And so make your intention for seeking knowledge that you benefit, learning how to worship Allah ﷻ correctly, and be wary of intentions that deviate you from that path. Because we learned in the great hadith of Abu Hurairah رضي الله عنه that the first three people whom the Fire will be kindled with on the Day of Judgment are people who had deviated intentions. And of them was a person who learned knowledge and taught it, but they did it because they wanted people to call them a scholar. And it was said, they got what they wanted. (Narrated by Abu Hurairah رضي الله عنه, Sahih Muslim)

Because Allah ﷻ says:

مَّن كَانَ يُرِيدُ الْعَاجِلَةَ عَجَّلْنَا لَهُ فِيهَا مَا نَشَاءُ لِمَن نُّرِيدُ

Whoever wants this world, We will give them what We want to give them of this world. (Surah Al-Isra, 17:18)

They’ll get some of it. Not what they want, but what We want to give them. And then they’ll have the Hellfire as a punishment.

And so make your intention crystal clear as best as you can, and always work on that intention, because intentions are shifty, and they change, and they alter.

2. Implementation

Sometimes you’ll attend a khutbah and say, “You know what, this khutbah wasn’t really beneficial. Everything the khatib said, I knew already.”

Have you ever had that feeling before?

You might be sitting there while the khatib is narrating a hadith, thinking to yourself, “I actually heard this hadith before this khatib was even born.”

But that’s not the question that you should be asking. The question should not be, “Do I know this already?” It should be, “Do I do this?” If you alter the question that you’re asking as you’re engaging with knowledge, then you benefit from every reminder, no matter how basic, and every khutbah, no matter how repetitive. Because we always fall short of doing the things that we know we should be doing.

Something as basic as, you should be good to your neighbor. And then we ask ourselves the question, am I good to my neighbor? If my neighbor was surveyed right now, would I get a 10 out of 10? Would I get a 7? Would I get a 5? Do neighbors get excited when they find out that a Muslim has moved next door to them? Because they know how greatly our Prophet ﷺ commanded us to look after the neighbor.

It isn’t about what we know. We all know the hadith about the neighbor. We all know the hadith about taking care of your parents. But do we do these things? Do we implement them?

Ali ibn Abi Talib رضي الله عنه said:

Knowledge calls out to action. If the action arrives, the knowledge stays. And if the action does not follow, then the knowledge disappears. (Al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Iqtida’ al-‘Ilm al-‘Amal)

When a person is sincere, it leads to implementation. I’m seeking knowledge for the purpose of implementing, not for intellectual curiosity.

If you learn a new du’a and then you start to say it, then of course you’re going to remember it. But if you learn a dhikr or a du’a and never implement it, the knowledge doesn’t stay.

3. Teaching

The third is teaching. Teaching is incredible when it comes to your own journey of knowledge. That’s why one of the things that we should be committed to, when we’re attending a conference like this and going back to our towns and our places, is that we teach what we learn.

How does teaching benefit you? As Shaykh Yaser Birjas mentions, it’s the zakah of knowledge, the tax of knowledge. But it also, crucially, will showcase the holes that you have. A person will ask, “What about this?” And you’ll say, “I never thought of that. I have no idea.” “I didn’t realize that I had a gap in the information that I have, so let me go and fill this hole. Let me go back to my notes. Let me research this further.”

We who are teachers also all know that when you teach, it forces you to prepare even more than you would have otherwise when you were passively learning.

4. Du’a

The fourth is du’a, and this is crucial. I’ve heard this question my entire life, and I’m sure you’ve heard it as well: Where is the best place to go and learn? Where is the best program? What’s the best book? What’s the best teacher? Where’s the best country to go to?

Shaykh named Muhammad al-Mukhtar al-Shinqiti حفظه الله. When he was asked where the best place to go and study is, he said: take all of the programs, all of the books, and all of the teachers, and cast them to the side, and make your preoccupation that you ask Allah ﷻ for knowledge. Because if Allah ﷻ decrees for you to have knowledge, then He will guide you to the best programs and the best teachers and the best books. And if Allah ﷻ doesn’t will for you to have knowledge, then you could be in the greatest bastions of learning on earth and still come out ignorant.

That is something that we’ve all witnessed. You might have gone to the same university program as a friend of yours. You benefited, but that friend did not. Your degree means something, but this classmate or that person- you wouldn’t trust the ink that their paper is written on. Not because they didn’t have the same opportunity, or weren’t exposed to the same people in the same places, but because Allah ﷻ didn’t give them that tawfiq.

So it’s not just about the program, and it’s not just about the teacher, and it’s not just about the places. It is that you ask Allah ﷻ to grant you knowledge. And as you know, the only thing that we were told in the Qur’an to ask Allah ﷻ for more of is knowledge:

وَقُل رَّبِّ زِدْنِي عِلْمًا

Say, my Lord, increase me in knowledge. (Surah Ta-Ha, 20:114)

May Allah ﷻ make us of those who have a great share of knowledge. اللهم آمين

5. Taqwa

The last two, crucially, are taqwa, having taqwa of Allah, which is what the masters of knowledge would advise each other of.

Imagine the brilliance of a young al-Shafi’i, who has a photographic memory and memorizes the collection, the life’s work of Imam Malik, before he ever meets him. He travels from Makkah to Madinah and meets this man whom the entire world considered to be the scholar of Madinah. They used to say:

مِنْ زِينَةِ الدُّنْيَا أَنْ يَقُولَ الرَّجُلُ: حَدَّثَنِي مَالِكٌ

It is one of the greatest adornments of the world that a person says, “Malik narrated to me.”

That was like graduating from the best universities on earth. And so this man, who has the entire world coming to him, meets and sees the brilliance of this young man, Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i. He advises him, saying:

إِنِّي أَرَى اللَّهَ قَدْ أَلْقَى عَلَى قَلْبِكَ نُورًا، فَلَا تُطْفِئْهُ بِظُلْمَةِ الْمَعْصِيَةِ

I see that Allah ﷻ has cast light upon your heart, so do not extinguish that light with sins. (Ibn al-Qayyim, al-Jawab al-Kafi)

You’ve got something special, so do not extinguish that light with sins. That was the advice he had for him.

And it’s not just Imam Malik who told that to al-Shafi’i. Al-Shafi’i famously complains to his teacher, Waki’ ibn al-Jarrah, about his memory. His memory was so incredible that he notices any deviation in it. And he recorded his teacher’s advice in couplets:

شَكَوْتُ إِلَى وَكِيعٍ سُوءَ حِفْظِي ۞ فَأَرْشَدَنِي إِلَى تَرْكِ الْمَعَاصِي وَأَخْبَرَنِي بِأَنَّ الْعِلْمَ نُورٌ ۞ وَنُورُ اللَّهِ لَا يُهْدَى لِعَاصِي

I complained to Waki’ about my memory, and leaving sins is what he guided me to address. And he told me that this knowledge is light, and the light of Allah is not given to those who transgress. (Diwan al-Shafi’i)

And Allah ﷻ says:

وَاتَّقُوا اللَّهَ ۖ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ اللَّهُ

Have taqwa of Allah, and Allah ﷻ will teach you. (Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:282)

And so we recognize that there is a spiritual element to this knowledge. It is not simply memorizing a lot of things, but it is a light that Allah ﷻ casts into our hearts.

6. Patience

The final is patience. There has to be endurance. There has to be resilience in this journey. There are ups and downs. There’s dedication that is required, there’s discipline that is required. There’s nobody who achieves anything worth achieving except that it requires patience, dedication, and discipline.

Ibn Taymiyyah رحمه الله says that no one has ever acquired anything good, neither a prophet nor anybody less than them, except with sabr, except with patience.

And Imam al-Shafi’i رحمه الله says:

أَخِي لَنْ تَنَالَ الْعِلْمَ إِلَّا بِسِتَّةٍ ۞ سَأُنْبِيكَ عَنْ تَفْصِيلِهَا بِبَيَانِ ذَكَاءٌ وَحِرْصٌ وَاجْتِهَادٌ وَبُلْغَةٌ ۞ وَصُحْبَةُ أُسْتَاذٍ وَطُولُ زَمَانِ

My brother, you will never achieve knowledge except with six things that I summarize for you in this rhyme: intelligence, striving, commitment, and means, a teacher, and a long span of time. (Diwan al-Shafi’i)

We ask Allah ﷻ to allow us to hear this speech and follow the best of it.

وَصَلَّى اللَّهُ وَبَارَكَ عَلَىٰ سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ