How to Arrange Your Studies: Why Students Trip

This is the third in a series of articles on how a student ought to arrange their studies, drawn from a seminar delivered by Shaykh Talal al-Azem. You can watch the full seminar here: How to Arrange Your Studies of Islamic Sciences

Some students put in years of sincere effort, even decades, and never reach the heights of mastery they set out for. Why? 

Intelligence is Not the Issue

Imam Sajaqlizada tells students plainly that earlier generations produced scholars of real brilliance, and that his own age had grown dull by comparison. He is careful to rule out the obvious explanations before offering his own.

It was not that people’s raw capacities had changed between one century and the next, nor that the scholarship available to them had somehow grown weaker or thinner. Something else had shifted: the way they studied. This is the first core argument of his book.

Mastering the Core Text 

Earlier students built their understanding from the core primary texts (mutun) of each discipline. For every science, they conceptualized every important issue that text raised. They did not sample a few favorite chapters and skip the rest, nor go deep into one or two questions while ignoring the rest of the book. A discipline, to them, was something grasped as a whole, start to finish, not picked over in pieces.

One Science Is Only One Window

The second habit ran alongside the first: students studied across every discipline, not just one. Each science is a window onto one part of reality, not the only vantage point there is. 

The core texts themselves never disappeared. What changed was everything built around them. Commentaries, super-commentaries, and marginal glosses multiplied. The Ottoman curriculum he was observing grew heavy and, for many students, simply confusing.

Sometimes, the teachers did not help the situation. Instruction would narrow from a whole science down to a single book, and sometimes down to a single question within that book—a student could spend an entire year on one issue. 

It is not to say the issue is of no relevance, but such focus crowded out the wider understanding. Lost inside these layers of commentary, students abandoned systematic study. Some abandoned whole disciplines altogether.

A Critique Heard Across the Muslim World

Imam Sajaqlizada was not alone. Similar complaints surfaced among scholars of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent from the 1700s through the early 1900s.

In each case, the shape of the problem was the same: reaching straight for the super-commentaries rather than first working through well-known foundations. This led to acquiring nothing of substance. Their minds were not incapable. They simply were not ready for the complexities and debates. 

The Cost: A Duller Mind, Not a Sharper One

The result was not brighter students but duller ones. Students spent months on end, sometimes a whole year, reading commentaries they could not follow. Understanding builds a mind up; confusion, repeated long enough, wears it down instead.

The way to avoid this is to know what to study and when to study it, the topic of the next article.

Related Articles

How to Arrange Your Studies: The Author – Why does one’s learning journey require structure? First in this series.

How to Arrange Your Studies: Knowledge Carries Moral Weight – Knowledge is never a matter of mere utility. Second in this series.