ASalam-Alaikum,
<DUA>
It's good to see everybody, Mashallah. It's a nice hall; seems better than last year, so I was
gonna do Sinan and mohtadeen but it's
actually I because I had a family
emergency so I I didn't come I was
supposed to be here on the 20th and it's
it's a book that needs time to get the
structure out so what I'm going to do
instead is just some sections from
Amalia delay that which is shared olive
in Bayers book on all sort of cook and
before I do that though I want to
explain who he is to the best of my
ability
and also give you a sense of what he is
attempting to do may Allah give him
tophi up Sharon Donovan baya was born in
an Eastern Province of mauritania
mauritania tradition was called she
appealed in in Islamic geography Moody
Tonya is actually an ancient Roman name
for the whole of North Africa it means
the land of the dark skinned ones tanya
is usually land Britannia right and and
more is is like marisco in Spanish the
the Morrow's are the the dark-skinned
one so the Moors which are often the way
Muslims in Spain are referred to still
to this day interestingly enough they
don't say the Muslims they say the Moors
of Spain which i think is misleading but
moody tanya included morocco and algeria
and it was obviously part of the
Phoenicians
had outposts there the Romans conquered
it and you'll see still to this day
Roman ruins in North Africa the North
Africa became Christian there were
really important Christian outpost there
people should know that st. Augustine
who's probably the second most important
person of later Christianity I mean he's
5th century but he and by later I mean
after the the first the the first period
of the Apostles Paul is obviously the
most important after Jesus but Augustine
and Aquinas are probably the two most
important in terms of Catholicism
because Aquinas although it took them a
considerable amount of time before
Aquinas actually became the dominant the
dominant position of the Catholic Church
it was actually the night early 19th
century when when they finally declared
Aquinas as positions the official
positions of the church but st. Agustin
was from algeria and so you had
christians there the Berbers are very
similar to the Irish the Berbers
extremely Free People
they resisted anybody that went into
their lands they fought them they tended
to be somewhat matriarchal so they often
had female leaders and we know kahin
know who was a famous one that fought
against the early Muslim conquest of
North Africa and fought very hard they
were fiercely independent and but
eventually and it was actually through
the hello bait Elise who came fleeing
from persecution in the east after the
failed attempt of Mohammed Neffs ezekiah
to conquer
and establish a Khilafah based on the
elevat-- he was in Medina
I think his reign lasted for about 18
months and Imam addict was alive during
that time he did take me out with him he
waited til that it was considered a
fitna but he actually considered him a
righteous person and he was I mean
episode Zakia was his epithet so he was
somebody who was a pure soul but that
was a failed attempt and so what
happened is the the the mudiad Rhys and
his his mola which is a freed save his
mola
I think it's a rush adore Rasheed I'm
not sure but he they fled and ended up
going to Morocco now Morocco had already
had Muslim incursions Alfa Bonavia had
the famous story when he arrives with
his army to the ocean takes his Spurs
his horse on into the ocean and when the
horse stops as the waves are crashing
the legend says he said well nahi if I
knew there were people beyond this ocean
I would build ships to take this message
of late a lot to those people and then
there was retreat and there was give and
take so the Muslims were it took them a
while to subdue North Africa and because
of the Berber resistance but Maliha
Driss
the Berbers accepted him he married from
them he married a woman kenza this is
Moroccan legend now I mean it's not like
it's true but it's it's legendary he
married a Berber woman during the reign
of how do not Rasheed spies were sent to
actually assassinate Maria breeze he was
assassinated but his wife Kinser was
pregnant with Maria Greece the second
who establishes fast the city of Fez and
he establishes it with an amazing door
to make it a city of knowledge until the
end of time and so it really is a city
founded on knowledge and and then in the
mid 3rd century an extraordinary woman
fall Timothy idea created a really the
what
considered to be the first University in
history I mean there's an argument that
Plato's Academy was a type of university
but Paul Simon Faria founded this mosque
College madrasah that really would
become a minaret of learning in in
Africa and so knowledge spread from
these extraordinary bases in North
Africa and the there's a period of time
Yussef even tesha Fein who was the great
mirabile founder of the Mohabbatein
dynasty the Marathas on his way back
from Hajj he met a scholar in Tunisia
and he told him he lived in this desert
land and they were ignorant people and
he needed a scholar so this scholar and
this is this is a type of sacrifice that
we used to find in our community that
you still find in the in the Christian
community
you'll meet Christians that literally
will come they have MD degrees and
you'll find them in treating Ebola
patients in in West Africa fortunately
this is not as common in our community
because the sense of sacrifice I think
has diminished greatly but he left a
very nice lifestyle in Tunisia which was
a very civilized beautiful place to go
to a very harsh climate to teach these
people Islam and that begins the marabi
phone and shavelev India is from one of
the tribes there mazuma tribe and it's
difficult kabila tribe is it's it's
problematic for me in some ways tribe is
actually originally what they call
venery noun do you know the memory nouns
there the venery is like the hunting
nouns so you have like a tribe of goats
a murder of crows a murmuration of
starlings an army of frogs a plague of
locusts those type you know those those
are called venery nouns their type of
collective noun so tribe is used
for goats in the English language so
it's I think it's there's a derogatory
aspect it's interesting that we call
African tribes but we call Scottish
clans right so he's from a clan in in
and then tribal is seen as it's really a
derogatory term in the West I think you
know there's a an association with
primitive people and and true primitive
this is one of the most primitive
civilizations in human history the West
it's very sophisticated technology but
if you actually look at the people their
language is totally impoverished and in
that way it's a very primitive Society
all you have to do is look at the the
type of I mean this film the interview
what's the artistic merit of that film
it's unbelievable though this is freedom
of speech its freedom to produce garbage
I mean that's a troubled civilization
when this is held up as art and freedom
of speech I haven't seen the film but I
I know enough about Seth Rogen and James
Franco to know that there is absolutely
nothing of merit in that piece of tripe
to use a word related to tribe
in any case the mazuma clan is from a
group of Mauritania is known as Hawaii
the Sawaya the Mauritania Yusef
advantage Fein basically segregated the
society into functional components so he
was quite brilliant in that way and this
is a even though it's not necessarily
Islamic it's something that happens it
tends to happen organically in societies
you get a scholastic class the mavens
they're called in if you want to use a
term from from Gladwell Thank You
Malcolm Gladwell's book the the mavens
so these are the the intellectual elite
they're called Brahmans in India right
now it's the obviously the technological
mavens are really the dominant ones the
scientists now because we're in the age
of quantity and not quality so what was
traditionally considered early edition
is no longer but he came he used to have
in tishreen classified these different
groups so they they had different
functions so you had the xariah which
were the Brahmin you had the out of
which were the warrior class in in
Hinduism the Castilla class and then you
had the you had the Zen Agha which were
like they took care of the animals but
they were really like the vaisya class
in in the hindu classification which
which Gandhi was from Gandhi was
actually a third class Hindu he was not
a Brahmin very interesting his
solidarity with the other classes so
this the zoo ayah class was they were
committed to learning and literally you
if you were a male from that class it
was a given that you memorized the Quran
until very recently every single person
from that class
memorize the Quran and learned grammar
and sip but a tradition developed in
Mauritania that was very very
interesting because what would happen is
they would get to a certain level of
knowledge and then very often they would
go too fast to study in the pada Wien
this was the common practice and they
they ended up in the last few hundred
years they have produced some of the
most remarkable scholars of late because
they've held on to a pre-modern
tradition of learning that was quite
right widespread in the Muslim world and
is no longer in fact it's almost
non-existent now in most of the Muslim
world and so the Muslim community is no
longer producing the type of scholars
that they used to produce now undeniably
there's an ossification that occurred in
this madrasa all of the Muslim schools
unfortunately fell into a type of a type
of just dereliction they were no longer
producing scholars that were really
engaging the the world as it was
changing one of the Mauritania scholars
told me that we're like the people of
the cave we went to sleep for 300 years
we woke up and the world was different
and but what they did do was they
preserved in the desert of the Sahara a
tradition that was very very functional
in the desert of the Sahara it worked
very well for them they had their Foca
they had their Muftis they had their
judges chef development they his father
Shekinah
Michael was what he was considered the
greatest scholar of Mauritania of his
time when they met in the nineteen when
they got their independence in the early
sixties all of the scholars of
Mauritania convened in Norwalk shop and
they put chef chef Abdullah bimbe his
father as the Imam to lead them in
prayer and this is some really really
truly great scholars so he was
recognized even at that time he was a
judge
in the eastern province and from a very
very notable clan the mazuma clan
they're noted for their humility in
knowledge and in learning and they're
noted also for their mastery of the
Quran but what what's interesting about
chef abdullah bin baby because in the in
the eastern part of Mauritania they tend
to focus on Quran and fill and in the
western part they tend to focus on the
Arabic language
chef Abdullah's father his own father
was a master of the Arabic language and
so he focused on in his early education
on learning language and one of the
important things about our civilization
is it was a civilization entirely
predicated on knowledge and this is
something that the great Jewish
orientalist in his book knowledge
triumphant Franz Rosenthal writes that
as far as he could tell and he's a
world-class historian as far as he could
tell he could find no other civilization
whose entire reason for existence was
the pursuit of the the development of
and then transmission of knowledge he
said the Islamic civilization was a
society that was completely obsessed
with knowledge in all of its forms and
but at the center of that civilization
was language and the mastery of language
more important than numbers
was the language and in particular what
we would call in the West the Trivium
although it's Trivium I think is a
misnomer in that it's not really three
the the Trivium indicates three Sciences
the Arabs called them asana at the
ffedith the three arts asana is like a
craft and and that was originally what
the Trivium was seen as but the first
one grammar has many dimensions so it
has literature I was looking there's a
poem that gives the number of Sciences
that you have to learn twelve language
Sciences but although there's over 30 in
the Islamic tradition one of them
emanuelle that is almost gone they still
teach
in Turkey but I haven't seen it taught
anywhere else and it's a very
interesting science it's unique to its
although Glavine and eg really developed
it out of rhetoric and logic and it's
the science that enables you to
determine quickly the context of a word
it's it's its position in a sentence in
any case one of the sciences was Mahara
and and there was a discussion on on the
internet like what did Muhammad I mean
and nobody knew what it meant it was
very interesting like all these Arabs
writing you know what cinnamon
Mahabharat and then somebody said oh
it's lecturing because that's a modern
term Mohammed and then somebody says no
I think it's something else I mean I
don't know you know none of them knew
what it is Maha Dada
was what we what et Hirsch who some of
you might know he wrote The Dictionary
of cultural literacy and emphasized the
fact that you needed to be culturally
literate in order to to become somebody
who could who could understand the
society then read books understand we we
tend to forget how complicated literacy
is how sophisticated it is when we're
speaking we're using words and that's
why there's so much breakdown of
communication now because we're all
saying things but understanding
different things from the same words
that we're using and this is a problem
because we no longer have a unified
knowledge domain knowledge was the
knowledge that was necessary to
understand your culture or civilization
so for instance those of you who are
born in Canada or in the United States
even though your parents migrated here
there are things that you know about
this society that they'll never get
because they didn't get the domain
knowledge it's as simple as that
there's metaphors that they won't
understand there's linguistic idioms
that they'll never get or never
understand in the same way that if you
go up in Britain if you grow up even and
then we have micro culture so if you if
you grew up speaking Ebonics there's a
whole aspect
of that culture that you will not get if
if you're outside of that culture and
the same is true even within the the
dominant soon-to-be minority culture in
America of what's called the white
anglo-saxon Protestant culture that is a
culture but there were other cultures
that were minority cultures that are now
considered white that weren't considered
white so for instance Italian Americans
they have a whole set of references that
somebody outside of their culture won't
understand if you grow up in an Irish
neighborhood in Boston there's a whole
set of cultural references that people
outside of that will not understand and
these are the micro cultures but then
you have a macro culture and this is
what enables multicultural societies to
function effectively when we have common
ground and we can understand each other
and this is education this is not
learning a culture as a master culture
so there's people that argue that this
is just the dominant culture forcing or
imposing itself on minorities no there's
a reason why it's dominant because it
has certain tools that those cultures
that are not d