I Bukhari

The Grand Imam of Nahw (Arabic grammar), Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad b.100AH (from the teachers of Imam Sibawayh himself), has some golden advice on how to achieve mastery of a subject: "No one will attain what he needs to know in Nahw, except after learning that which he has no need of." This was reported by the historian Salah-al-Din Al-Safadi in an encyclopedic work who commented further: "Every subject is like this, a man will not attain mastery until he obtains that which he does not require." Sheikh Abdul-Fattah Abu Ghuddah mentions the above in his footnotes and commented further, highlighting its importance today. In my experience, many seekers of knowledge today - in particular Westerners - out of either eagerness or arrogance try to rush knowledge by skipping steps in curriculum with the excuse of 'needing to know whats important' or 'skipping what is irrelevant to our times' or 'skipping outdated rules, ideas, concepts, texts and topics'. You see them saying absurd things like "Nahw is not that important, You don't have to study all that long and tiresome fiqh from the old days, or what's the point in learning Sarf..." etc. Such people will never master any subject let alone Islamic ones. Never take knowledge from those who dismiss entire fields of Islamic knowledge and/or do not show respect to the scholarship and Imams of the past. When I first started studying, I was one of them, And the more I learned what I thought I didn't need; the more I realized how much I needed to know what I thought I didn't need, to master what I needed and wanted to learn.