How to Arrange Your Studies: The Right Order
This is the fifth 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
Whether a student begins as a child or comes to faith as an adult, the same principle applies: nothing before its proper time.
The Same Path
Imam Sajaqlizada (Allah have mercy on him) gives the adult beginner the same general sequence as the child, foundational faith first, tailored to what an adult can actually take in.
An adult, unlike a young child, is already obligated to pray. So the first practical step is memorizing Surah al-Fatiha and a few short surahs. After this, the adult student moves to correct recitation of the Quran under a proficient teacher.
Belief, Ethics, and Prayer
Next come the detailed articles of belief, ethics, and the rules of prayer, again delivered in the adult student’s own native language.
After this, the student would fully memorize the Quran, which in his own period of study was the norm. Then, he would go to memorize a primer in Arabic diction.
The Quran and Arabic Diction
Memorizing the whole Quran comes before the Arabic primer because nothing teaches Arabic diction better than the Quran itself. Even non-Muslim Arabs in Lebanon during the late 1800s and early 1900s are known to have memorized parts, or the whole, of the Quran, simply because they recognized it as the highest form of Arabic ever produced.
Knowledge is never just a matter of diction. It is something to be internalized, and something that in turn protects the one who internalizes it. Whatever science a student goes on to study after this, its ultimate point of reference remains the speech of Allah.
Tools Before Texts
Once the child and the adult beginner have completed these foundations, their paths converge. The student turns to Arabic morphology (sarf) and then syntax (nahw). These instrumental sciences equip a student with the tools needed for everything that follows.
A student may spend years reading advanced texts and translations in circles of learning, without ever acquiring the tools that would let them study properly.
Rulings Before Reasons
Next comes the science of rulings (ilm al-ahkam). Imam Sajaqlizada is careful to distinguish these from knowing Islamic jurisprudence. Knowing rulings means simply knowing what to do.
Islamic jurisprudence means having a deep understanding of the ruling together with its evidence and reasoning, which requires the study of legal theory (usul al-fiqh). A student studies the rulings first for a practical reason: married life, business, and daily affairs raise questions a person needs answered, whether or not they have studied the underlying proofs.
Knowing the rulings also lays the groundwork for legal theory and legal maxims (qawaʿid al-fiqh). Both of these subjects move quickly through specific cases a student would otherwise struggle to follow.
After rulings comes logic (mantiq), another tool rather than an end in itself. This is followed by dialectics (munazara).
A Caution About Theology
Following the above, the student turns to theology (kalam). Imam Sajaqlizada is not endorsing the kind of deep, unproductive speculation he felt many students of his age wandered into, questions of little benefit pursued for their own sake.
What he means is something narrower: the foundational questions of creed, understood well enough that a student can express and defend them.
Imam Sajaqlizada authored theological works himself, and later renounced some of them. His advice carries the weight of that history: focus on the questions of real benefit to a scholar’s formation and to the soul.
A Foundational Skill
Before studying Islamic jurisprudence, Imam Sajaqlizada inserts one more tool: the knowledge of signifying meaning (ilm al-maʿani), a branch of rhetoric (balagha). This science is concerned with how word choice and sentence structure convey meaning.
This does not entail mastering all of rhetoric, only this particular skill. It prepares a student to follow the kind of interpretive reasoning found in legal theory, the next subject in the process. Only after the study of legal theory does Imam Sajaqlizada mention Islamic jurisprudence.
Islamic jurisprudence and theology are two sciences students have long tended to jump into ahead of everything that should precede them.
Hadith, Then Tafsir: The Crowning Sciences
After Islamic jurisprudence, Imam Sajaqlizada turned to the foundations of hadith.
Hadith is studied in two dimensions. The first dimension is the transmission, reading, hearing, correcting, and memorizing of hadith (riwaya). The second dimension is the understanding and interpretation of hadith (diraya).
The Quran is the foundation and totality of all knowledge. A student needs to already appreciate jurisprudence, the questions of creed, and sound reasoning before they can truly follow what an exegete is doing.
By this point, the student has likely long since memorized or become deeply familiar with the Quran through recitation.
What Can Wait, and What Cannot
Not everything fits neatly into this sequence. The rules of correct pronunciation (tajwid), the variant Quranic readings (qiraʾat), and writing the Quranic script have no fixed place in the order.
A student should take them up whenever the opportunity arises, so long as it is before Quranic exegesis. A graded approach is important. A person can spend years mastering the finer points of theology and still invalidate their prayer through faulty recitation.
The same flexibility broadly applies to arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and prosody, which a student may pick up whenever convenient. There is one exception: arithmetic must come before the study of inheritance law, since calculating shares of an estate depends on it.
Next, Imam Sajaqlizada discusses the pedagogical levels of the sciences.
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.
How to Arrange Your Studies: Laying the Foundations – Effort alone is never the standard for a student. Method is. Fourth in this series.
