—who sets out with a book he believes will profit him, but after a week or a month he grows bored and moves on to another. Of such a person we say: yes, he did seek Allah’s help and he did pursue what would benefit him, yet he still fell short. How did he fall short? By failing to persevere. The Prophet’s words, “do not give up,” mean: do not abandon the task; rather, so long as you entered upon it convinced of its value, stay with it. Consequently you find this man letting the days pass while gaining nothing, for one moment he reads a little of this book and the next a little of that.

The same deficiency shows even in a single, narrow inquiry. A student wishes to verify a specific issue, so he opens the relevant volume and begins to leaf through it. While searching, another topic catches his eye and he stops to read it, then a second, then a third, until he forgets the very question for which he took up the book and his time slips away. This occurs often with the legal verdicts of Shaykh al-Islam Ibn Taymiyyah: someone consults them for one ruling, another captivating discussion appears, and the cycle repeats. This is not sound methodology. The correct approach is to concentrate on the original point that prompted you to open the book in the first place.

The same holds true for the Companions’ biographies—take, for example, al-ʿIsābah by Ibn Ḥajar. A student seeks the life story of a particular Companion, opens the work to locate it, but another entry presents itself; he pauses to read that one, then turns a few pages and finds yet another. Thus his time is squandered and he never reaches the biography he initially set out to find. That, too, is a waste of time.