The fadhaa'il of seeking knowledge

This post is from my old blog... certain things just don't leave the mind, alhamdulillah, and this is one of them:

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"Abu Dharr relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: 'Attending a session of knowledge
is better than praying a thousand raka's prayer,*
visiting a thousand sick people,
attending a thousand funeral prayers.'
Someone said: 'O messenger of Allah,
Is it better than reading the Qur'an?'
He (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:
'Does reading the Qur'an benefit without knowledge?'"

Very nice... I heard Hafiz Aslam tell me this, then a couple days later or so I heard it on sunnipath.com, in Shaykh Nuh's commentary on Imam Ghazzali's (rahimahullah) iHya uloom ud-din. I don't have riwayah on this, if anybody else does, send me an email: sonyplaystation AT excite dot com

But even if that's not a hadith, the fact that Imam Ghazzali (rahimahullah) mentions it in his iHya, shows the significance of knowledge.

* Hafiz Aslam Patel also told me that those 1000 rakats are from the nafl prayers. Obviously you can't just sit down w/ some scholars for a session of knowledge then have the license to skip the next 1000 rakats' worth of fardh (obligatory) prayers... needless to say, but hey, we live in ignorant times.

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I truely feel sorry for the people who fill their mind-real-estate with music. Sure our minds have a lot of capacity, but your focus is limited AFAICT, and filling that buffer with music is such a horrible waste.

They say "a mind is a horrible thing to waste" about drugs, i say it about music as well.