and to avoid the prohibited acts and the rest of the legal duties. Among those duties is that seeking knowledge is obligatory for both men and women, for it is impossible to worship Allah—glorified and exalted be He—for the very purpose for which He created us except by learning the knowledge through which we know how to worship our Lord. Accordingly, it is incumbent upon men and women alike to learn the matters of their religion, above all the matters of creed.

His words, “three matters”: here, learning means receiving knowledge directly from the scholars, committing it to memory, understanding it, and grasping it fully. That is learning. What is not intended is merely reading or what they call casual browsing; that is not learning. True learning is to take directly from the people of knowledge while preserving, understanding, and thoroughly comprehending what one receives. This is authentic learning. Simply reading and perusing books is not enough for learning—even though it is recommended and beneficial, it remains insufficient and one may not rely on it alone.

Nor is it permissible to make books alone one’s teacher, as is common nowadays, because apprenticing oneself solely to books is extremely dangerous. It breeds many kinds of corruption and a counterfeit scholarship that is worse than ignorance itself: the ignorant person knows he is ignorant and stops at his limit, whereas the pretender thinks he is a scholar, thereby declaring lawful what Allah has forbidden, declaring forbidden what Allah has made lawful, and speaking about Allah without knowledge. The matter, therefore, is exceedingly grave.