Memorising ...

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

This is the story of Imam Al-Ghazali (Rahimahullah). About the virtue of memorising.

Memorising his lessons was tough. And he was not too keen either. Instead he took copious notes as he listened to his teachers.

This story tells how an incident brought him to the realisation that MEMORISING is truly a learning process that must be respected and one must train oneself for it.

The following screen captures from a PDF version is available in my laptop. 

Briefly it is about how Imam Al-Ghazali was robbed during a journey home. After years of studying. 

He was very upset about the loss of his study notes, that he followed the robbers and beg them for the return only of his notebooks.

The chief robber asked why the notes were important. And Imam Al-Ghazali explained that the notes were from his years of study, leaving his country, to hear, write and learn knowledge of great teachers.

The chief robber laughed at Imam Al-Ghazali, saying "How can you pretend to have learned their knowledge, when I have taken them and stripped you of your learning so that you have no knowledge?"

The chief robber then asked his people to return the notebooks back to Imam Al-Ghazali.

And Imam Al-Ghazali said that 'this man was sent by God to teach me'.

As he was not emphasising Memorising as a requisite in his learning, he realised that he almost lost whatever understanding and knowledge he had compiled in his study notes.

The robber was only a tool.

Allah Ta'ala sent him to teach Imam Al-Ghazali a lesson for his remiss.

Imam Al-Ghazali then spent the next three years of his life committing to memory the lectures that he had learned from his teachers.

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As a learner we have at our disposal a variety of learning strategies to acquire knowledge.  Memorising is one of the most difficult strategy as we age.

But for the young, it is a valuable innate skill that should not be passed in loss.

Some of us may think memorising is not a worthy skill. 

This is because we link memorising to regurgitation during examination. This is truly a misunderstood purpose of memorising.

Memorising makes higher order thinking and concept elaboration easier. Because we have in our memory bank the knowledge capital to support our complex thinking and generating learning process.

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Rabbi yassir wa la tu'assir. Rabbi tammim bil khair. Rabbi zidni 'ilma.