How to Arrange Your Studies: Knowledge Carries Moral Weight

This is the second 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

Knowledge is never a matter of mere utility. It is a means of drawing near to Allah.

Knowledge Has a Moral Address

Imam Sajaqlizada lays out how knowledge can be beneficial or harmful. He also expresses how certain studies could be either, depending on the intention behind it and the use it is put to. He ties this directly to the five rulings of Islamic jurisprudence: an act, including the act of seeking knowledge, can be obligatory, encouraged, merely permissible, disliked, or forbidden.

Modern law tends to know only two categories: legal and illegal. Imam Sajaqlizada’s categories carry a moral weight. He stands here in a long line of scholars who framed knowledge the same way, not because knowledge is a matter of mere utility, but because it draws a person near to their Lord.

A Book Built in Two Parts

The bulk of the book, its first part, surveys and defines nearly every classical science taught in the Ottoman madrasas of his day, the late 1600s and early 1700s. Sajaqlizada shows what is beneficial in each science, then turns to something more practical: the poor decisions students make while pursuing them. 

A book or a science can be sound in itself, he warns, while a student’s own choices in how they study it slow them down or cause them to miss the point entirely. He closes this part with bibliographies of the texts used in his own time, tied once more to the moral categories laid out in the introduction.

Part two is where he addresses the order in which the necessary and beneficial sciences should be studied. He outlines three levels of mastery, from beginner through intermediate to advanced. He then closes the book with reflections on theology, a field in which he was himself a specialist. Though, he criticized certain trends of his age.

A Long Line of Guides

Imam Sajaqlizada was not writing in a vacuum. Classifying and ordering the sciences was already a long-established genre across the Islamic world, running from early figures like Farabi, Kindi, and Khwarizmi through Avicenna, Imam Ghazali, Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, on to later authors in India such as al-Tahanawi. It remained a popular genre within the Ottoman realm itself.

What sets Imam Sajaqlizada’s book apart within that long tradition is its purpose. It serves as a handbook addressing students directly. Students who want structure and want to avoid the very pitfalls he had watched trip up students of his own age.

Where the Religious Sciences Stand Apart

Imam Sajaqlizada does discuss disciplines outside the religious sciences, usually judging them merely permissible or, at times, recommended, but he does not weigh them on the same moral scale. 

The reason lies in the purpose he assigns to knowledge itself: the religious sciences provide the framework for human well-being. This is well-being for the individual and for mankind as a whole. Everything else is a means, judged by its use, its help, or its harm.

Following in Imam Ghazali’s Footsteps

Imam Sajaqlizada draws on Imam Ghazali, citing him in almost every chapter. Like Imam Ghazali, he closes on the same note: morality and knowledge are not two separate concerns but one, each incomplete without the other.

Writing in the twelfth Islamic century, the eighteenth of the Common Era, Imam Sajaqlizada was direct about his aim. He saw dysfunction in the seminary education of his own time, and he was not the first scholar to say so. 

What he offered students instead was a better way to pursue the sciences and reach real mastery of them, a book that remains, in the end, a window into questions of pedagogy and curriculum that outlast any single age.

The next article will turn to address where students tripped up.

Related Articles

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