Gifts of Knowledge

“One of the teachers at Dār al-Ḥadīth, Shaikh ʿAbdullah ʿAwaḍ said, ‘One time we were sitting with the Shaikh after we had come back from Ḥajj break. A few minutes before starting the lesson he asked the students sitting there what points of benefit they might have picked up during the break, so we hung our heads [out of embarrassment]. Then he asked me, ‘What about you, ʾAbdullah, what’s something beneficial you picked up?’ I said, ‘I read a small book on the manners of differing.’ Then he told us that in the break he had memorised 667 lines of poetry from al-ʾIrāqī’s work on the Prophet’s ﷺ biography [which al-ʾIrāqī had written in the form of one thousand lines of poetry, an ‘alfiyyah,’ a ‘thousand-liner’]. The break had been about 12 days long. Then one of the students asked him, ‘Shaikh, how many lines of poetry do you memorise a day?’

He said, ‘60 or 70 while I’m drinking a cup of tea.’”
Ṣafaḥāt Muḍīʾah min Ḥayātil-ʾAllāmah Muḥammad ibn ʿĀlī ibn Ādam al-Ityūbī, Durūsun wa Mawāqif, p. 61.

His memorisation of numerous texts was exemplary, more to come on that, but we will start with what he said here:

“I saw the Prophet ﷺ in a dream when I was small and he was teaching me Sūrah al-Fātiḥah. After that whenever I looked at a page I memorised it easily and didn’t find it difficult.”
Ṣafaḥāt Muḍīʾah min Ḥayātil-ʾAllāmah Muḥammad ibn ʿĀlī ibn Ādam al-Ityūbī, Durūsun wa Mawāqif, p. 61.