and its varied branches—creed, Qur’anic exegesis, hadith, legal theory, Arabic philology, and so forth.

Whenever he spoke on any discipline he captivated every listener, to the point that one might imagine the Shaykh had spent his entire life in that single field and knew nothing else!

This is no exaggeration. Whoever has read his book al-Rihla, or heard any of his lectures and debates—whether in the Prophet’s City or in the recordings made during his tour of ten African nations as head of a university delegation—will recognize the truth of what I state. His recorded lessons in tafsir are themselves the clearest proof.

He—may Allah have mercy on him—was truthful when he said, “There is not a single verse in the Qur’an except that I have studied it on its own.”

He also declared, “Every verse about which the early scholars said something—I possess their statements on it.”

When someone once told him, “Sulayman al-Jamal—the author of the gloss on al-Jalalayn—did not say this,” he replied, “I swear by Allah that I know the Book of Allah better than Sulayman al-Jamal in this respect, for I have gone through the mushaf from beginning to end and left no verse without tracing the scholars’ comments on it and learning what they said.”

He—may Allah have mercy on him—had memorized many thousands upon thousands of lines from the poetry of the Arabs and the classical linguistic citations. He had also committed to memory most of the hadiths in the two Sahihs, Ibn Malik’s Alfiyyah, Maraqi al-Su‘ud, al-‘Iraqi’s Alfiyyah, along with other didactic poems on the Prophetic biography, the military expeditions, genealogy, and the mutashabih