y to get close to allah but
to experience
the divine in our lives to actually
experience
the presence of the divine
that we're we're in a world that has
angelic beings demonic beings
and we share this space
there's angels that come with believers
and their shale thing that come with
with the people of
foulness and misdeeds so
drawing near to allah there there are
basically
two paths you know to to getting close
to allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
one of them is the path of salvation
which is for common people
that's the path of just the man who came
to the prophet and he said ya rasulallah
if i pray five times a day if i
pay my zakat if i fast ramadan if i make
the hajj
will i enter paradise and the prophet
salallahu said yes
and there's a reward i said i avoid the
haram he's
the prophet said you'll enter paradise.
and then
he said then wallahi that's all i'm
going to do. and he left and the prophet
said
he used the diminutive the little man
he'll have success if he's truthful but
that
is the bare minimum that's salvation
that's somebody who's getting close to a
lot with the bare minimum
those are the people that just do the
bare minimum that they have to do
to get the paycheck you know there's
jobs that you have
and if you just do the bare minimum
you'll get the paycheck if you do less
than that they fire you
right but there's people that's all
they'll do just the bear and then
there's people that
they want promotion they want to get
close to the boss they want him to like
them they want this this
is the way the dunya works though
and that's the path of purification
of taskia and sanctification and
and getting close to allah of takdis of
of drawing near to allah through extra
acts these are the nawafel
so you have the pharah and then you have
the noah the more nawafil you do the
closer you get to allah but it's
predicated on the foreign
so if you're not doing the farah then
you're wasting your time doing the
nuafit
and one of the signs according to the
people
of that science one of the signs of
following
of following your own desires is that
you prefer
nawafil over farah so there will be
people that will stay up all night and
then they'll sleep through fajr
right really there's people that do that
they'll like do dikka
late into the night that they have go to
a mullet or do something and then they
sleep through fajr
these are people that's telbisu iblis
and that's the way iblees fools people
and tricks people
so the the um
the the path of of both salvation
and this other way the high this higher
way of really trying to draw draw near
to allah
and through serving his ummah
serving his creation sacrificing both of
these are predicated on knowledge
the one that is the way of just
the foreign and doing the bare minimum
you have to have the bare minimum of
knowledge which is called
the other way is the way you have to
have the
in but then you also do the kithaya
you do extra and our
tradition because of the sophistication
and the problems that are attendant with
revelation and a tradition
emerged in the islamic
ethos and the tradition emerged
in order to protect revelation from
misunderstanding
the early companions allah blessed those
people with
a level of knowledge and understanding
that's unparalleled in our tradition
the first community they they if you
study the history
they were amazing brilliant people but
if you look at the sahaba
there are only a handful of sahaba that
gave fatwa
they're called the mukthirun there's
only a handful of sahaba they gave
even though he gave had many hadith
narrations
he didn't give a lot of fatwa in fact he
gave
a moderate amount according to one
rebaya but
one of the things about the early
community is that they were loathed to
give fatwa
so if you went to ask one of the sahabah
a question they used to say go out so
and so he knows better than me
and then they would go to him imam noah
he writes this
in his book on fatwa and then they would
say
go to so-and-so go to so-and-so and and
it would go until it came back to the
original person
now you have people that are they jump
to answer
and very quick to give an opinion
imam alex tradition they call the fatwa
nazila
which means musiba and imam malik if he
was asked a question in
he used to say innalilahi
which is what you say when you get have
a tribulation
because basically a fatwa is a response
of a scholar who's trained
and in that response he is saying it is
my belief
that this is what god wants you to do in
this situation
that that's essentially what a fatwa is
you're saying it's my belief that this
is what god would want you to do this
situation now you get another person
who can give a different fatwa he'll say
it's my belief
this is what god wants you to say and in
many many
situations you can have different views
because one god is vast and two
understandings differ so
the prophet salallahu actually taught us
that there can be two correct
opinions and sahih bukhari the famous
one that the usuli scholars use
is the one of praying asar
the prophet isaiah said told them not to
pray asar
until they got to benikoreda and
the group went when assad time came
half of them said it's time to pray and
the other half said no the prophet said
don't pray until we get there.
they said no he didn't mean that he
meant get there before assad
and the other group said no no he meant
that
that we should pray when we get there
and and we shouldn't pray assad until we
get there
so they split so one group prayed asar
before they got there and the second
group waited they delayed their prayer
when they got there they told the
prophet what happened he didn't say
you're correct and you're wrong
he just left it at that they were both
correct they both made an ishtihad it
was an ishtihadi situation
and that was it now you have people that
believe there's only one way in islam
and it just ha
so happens to be their way
but you really we have this problem that
there's only one way in islam
and it's my understanding the reason
that this happens
[Music]
that they didn't start differing until
knowledge came to them
and they became arrogant with their
knowledge
says about that he says
he said that it's one group saying oh
i'm right and you're wrong you don't
you don't have anything so knowledge can
be a source of conflict
and this is why imam al-khazadi in in
his
the first book of the year he lays the
foundations for a correct understanding
of knowledge
what is knowledge what is it a lot of
people don't know what knowledge is
they don't understand the nature of
knowledge that there are knowledges that
are precise
and then there are imprecise knowledges
there are knowledges that have a lot of
ambiguities in them
uh one of the aristotle the great greek
philosopher he said that
it's the mark of an educated mind to
demand precision
only to the degree with which that
knowledge allows it
so in mathematics you can get a very
precise answer
but in in other sciences
that answer might not be precise it's
just
ambiguous by the very nature of the
subject
and one of the greatest problems with
language and the reason why the modern
world
loves mathematics so much and is loath
to to really explore language in the
ways
that it did in the past one of the
reasons for that is the ambiguities of
language
the modern world doesn't like
ambiguities
and so
people have lost the sciences that
enable them
to communicate with the least amount of
ambiguity
because you have to exhaust language
studies and that's why the muslims did
this
and one of the sciences that this was
predicated on
was the science of what they called
mantech
and and its sister science was called
in the west these are called logic and
dialectic
logic and dialectic and from these
sciences
and there are ancillary sciences that go
with this
like is one of them is another because
balarama is important
these became the foundation of islamic
studies
in the muslim world everywhere you went
they became the foundation
and all of our scholars right from this
perspective
you cannot understand any
of the major works of islamic
scholarship
without understanding these foundational
sciences that they were working with
and so uh
what i thought i'd do tonight just as an
introduction
is read
from the opening of a book which to me
it's one of the most important books
in our tradition because it's the
foundation
of what's known as the science of tasaw
and increasingly it's become clear to me
that one of the great calamities of the
modern islamic
situation is an idea somehow that tasov
is extraneous to islam that it's
not part of islam that the reality of it
is
is that it is it's a central core
teaching of islam which does not mean
that there are not
a lot of problems inherent in to soul
just like there are problems that are
inherent in fick you have
fukaha that go astray you have
muttaqielimun that go astray
you also have mutasawifa that go astray
so they're just like any other group
and in fact they're more susceptible
because of the nature of their science
to going astray but one of the things
that modern muslims have done is that
they've thrown the baby out with the
bath water to use a
english idiom in in
in trying to purify our tradition
from all of these innovations and all of
these problems that came into it
they've they completely dismissed this
uh science and so this book was written
by sidi ahmed zarooq
the great north african scholar who was
from fez
he died in misrata in libya
but he wrote a book called kawai datasov
and in this book what he wanted to do
because he was an osuli scholar
and this is called which is to
give the foundations of something
seal is very important in our tradition
because
right
he says that the one transmitting
something has to prove that it's sound
but the one claiming something has to
give his his dalio
for it so if you say
to a keta you you have to prove that ibn
massaud really did say that that's part
of our tradition so
the nakan the one transmitting has to
prove the soundness of his transmission
but the muday the one claiming something
who's just saying
here's the foundation of this that or
the other he has to give his dalio
to show why so if you have even
istimbalt
like where did you get that idea from
well i'm deriving it from the fact
of this this and this and then you make
your argument and these arguments are
done
through reasoning and this is why
reasoning is foundational to the human
condition
one of the uh
teachers in turkey he was a he was a
magician they called him mantaki
you know a lot a logician and he had a
student
and he taught him logic and when he
finished all his classes because logic
is
it's not that difficult it has
abstractions that are
sometimes a little complex to grasp but
basically
all of you are logicians everybody in
here is a logician unless you're
mutually in you know like somebody who's
who's just handicapped intellectually
uh or uh majnun
which is possible also
right but if you
if you are
a sane human being then
you are always reasoning you're either
doing it well
or you're doing it poorly but you are
definitely reasoning
the heart has reasons that the head has
no knowledge of
but when if you fall in love you get
married people say love is irrational
it's definitely got some irrational
components but
there's a reason why you get married
there's a reason why
you most people love for reasons
they fell in love with their beauty
their goodness in fact
they say about the prophet saw i saw
them that the reason why you learn the
shema
is because attraction to the beautiful
qualities of a person is one of the
reasons
that love is cultivated so just reading
about him he was very beautiful he was a
very
physically a very beautiful person he
was the most beautiful
of of man and he
he was everything was was was balanced
with the prophet he had beautiful
hair he had very wavy black hair it
wasn't curly it wasn't straight because
everything about him is balanced so even
his hair was balanced
it wasn't straight and it wasn't cruelly
the extremes was the two extremes of
hair you have curly hair
you have straight hair his was right in
the middle of those two extremes he had
wavy hair
parted in the middle it went sometimes
to the bottom of the earlobe
sometimes to his shoulders he had a very
very beautiful
uh complexion they said it was like the
moon
and i asked one of my teachers
we were watching a harvest moon rise and
it was that beautiful
color that's not white it's off-white
it's like a wheat color
and i said is that the color they meant
he said that's the color they meant it's
not because
he was not pasty white like the moon
when it's right up on the sky
no he had a reddish tint to his
complexion he had beautiful eyes he had
very very white
his whites what they call
ophthalmologists in america call happy
eyes
when the very white he had very very
white
the whites of his eyes were very white
and then he had very striking
dark eyes that were penetrating he had a
beautiful aqualine nose
it was which is an aristocratic nose uh
in
in many many cultures an aquiline nose
is seen as a
a beautiful nose and one of the reasons
that's called aqualine is because it's
it's akna in arabic but in in in english
uh they call it aqualine because it's
like the aquila the eagle
an eagle has a very beautiful i once saw
an eagle perched on a fence outside my
house and i just watched it for a little
while and i just
i realized the eagle completely
is aware that it's an eagle
if you observe an eagle even for a short
amount of time you will see that an
eagle is so
aware that it is superior to every other
bird
and the way it just it just looks around
like i am not afraid of
anybody or anything
it's just got this amazing and so the
arabs love
eagles and they name their children
after them and
they're very very noble birds but they
have these beautiful
aqualine beak and the prophet sally
saddam had a beautiful
forehead and he had very strong he had
broad shoulders he's very strong and he
had beautiful
he had a very small light uh
hair that went down and but he wasn't
hairy at all he was his body was very
um his skin was did he did not have a
lot of
body hair but he had very slight uh hair
on his
on his chest that went down to his navel
very strong legs he had
strong hands he walked in a very
distinct way
those are all qualities that if you
study them you
it actually makes you want to see him
you want i want to see that i want to
experience
that and then they describe how he spoke
and the mellifluous nature of his
speech it was when people listened to
him they were enraptured
and when he spoke it was like birds
perched on their heads
it was as if there were birds perched on
their heads they were just
so intent to hear what he had to say
but the reason that they describe that
is because that's one of the reasons
that you love a person for physical
beauty
and then you love them also for their
character and that's another reason but
the main reason that people love is
because of
when people do good to you and that's
why allah subhanahu wa ta'ala
he's the moisen i mean he's constantly
doing good to us
and that should engender love in you
and so love has reasons there are
reasons why we love it's a rational
thing
as well and so anyway this
turkish logician taught this
this man logic which is basically three
things it's
it's it's understanding is the first
operation of the mind basic
understanding what they call
a um
what they call a uh savage
it's a simple apprehension just
understanding something what it is glass
of water
and then the second act of the mind is
is judgment
tasadil or the proposition making a
statement
either negating or asserting something
about something
so it needs a subject and a predicate
the moldur and the mahmoud
and then the last operation of the mind
is chias or reasoning
going from what's known to what's
unknown
and so he taught him these things and
then he said
i want you to go into the marketplace
spend the day in the marketplace and
come back
so he went spent the day in the market
he finished his because he's going to
give me jazza and mantel
right so he went to the marketplace
spent the day in the marketplace he came
back
he said how was your day
he said i did what you told me i was in
the marketplace all day he said
did you notice anything he said no
he said you're not ready we need to do
this again so
they studied logic second course
did it all understanding judgment
reasoning finished his course
so he said to him i want you to go and
spend the day in the marketplace
okay so he goes spends the day in the
marketplace
comes back he said how's your day in the
marketplace all day just like you told
me
nothing he said we have to do this again
did the course in logic again went
through the three operations of the mine
when he finished it he said listen i
want you to go to the marketplace spend
the day in the marketplace
come back he goes spends the day in the
marketplace comes back
he said how was your day
he said oh my god i couldn't believe it
they're all practicing logic
he said now you're ready he gave missy
jazza
because that's what that's what it is
the whole world is
people reasoning making
understanding basic things
asserting things or negating things and
then making arguments
that's what's going on everywhere you
look that's what's going on
come in there's a discount today
all right there's a discount today
so what's going on in the mind oh
if i buy today i'm going to save money
therefore i should buy today
right it's logic the whole thing is
predicated
on reasoning and that's what the student
finally got that it's happening all
around you
and that's one of the really interesting
things about studying logic
is that you begin to
refine that process and are better able
to understand what's being said to you
and better able to communicate what you
want to say to others
so i just want to show you
this is the book by sidi ahmed zarrow
called
and i'm going to read two kawaii and
talk about them quickly and then we're
done
the first kaidah he says fisher
[Music]
[Music]
of him so he says
that kalam before we can talk about a
thing
in other words before we can do make
judgments about things
we have to understand what the nature of
that thing is
this is a qaeda before you can make a
judgment about a thing you have to
grasp what that thing is so this is what
he's saying he's saying
that at kadam
it is a branch of comprehending its
essence
and and comprehending what its benefit
is
be sure so this occurs in the mind
mukhtasebin al-badihiyan it either
occurs discursively
through reflection through being taught
or it's intuitive you just grasp it
immediately so you have immediate
knowledge
and then you have mediated knowledge so
immediate knowledge is two is greater
than one
nobody needs to teach you that a child
will understand that
but that one that 2.5 percent
in zakat is 140th that's
that you have to understand because you
need to understand what
fractions are you need to understand
what decimals are and you need to
understand the relationship between the
two
so that's a different type so those are
the two types so he's saying
that before we can speak about something
we have to grasp
what its essence is and what its benefit
is through this
mentation through this mental
rashi assignation would be a big word
for it in the west
and then he says in order
these are all logical concepts so this
is called extension
in logic so the afra that this is
all those things that it extends to
because you have what's called
comprehension
and extension all right the
comprehension
is is the the or the understanding of it
what it is and then uh
what it applies to all the things that
it applies to
so in order for you to for it to be
understood through it
and also the encouragement to know it's
to know its benefit we'll encourage you
to study it
and to to be able to articulate
its subject matter and so you should
understand this so here's the beginning
of a book on
which is all based on mantak
like you cannot understand this if you
haven't studied manta
so here's a this is our tradition if you
read tafsir
if you read apida if you read
any of the major sciences of islam
especially
you will find that they're all relying
on the the reader's understanding of
this mustard
and not just these but several other
sciences especially when you get into
the later scholastic tradition
by the time you get to somebody like
he's he's got bellare going he's got
mantak going he's got grammar going he's
got what that going
it's it's a mustar hadith
all of these subjects he was well versed
in
and this is how he's teaching
so then he says
the essence of something is its reality
the the essence of a thing
is its reality to understand the essence
is to understand the reality
right
and its reality is what
it it's some summarily means what it
means by summation
what it can be summed up into
with and the definition of that
is through ahad which is a term
in latin terminus means the end of
something so a term
is is the end of something in arabic had
is the end of something
so the head is the end of something and
so this is
that's that is the most comprehensive is
as a definition but then you have what's
called a rasam
which in western logic is called the
descriptions so something
and and when we get into i'm just giving
you this is just
a you know it's like at the restaurant
when they give you a sample
so don't we're going to go into this in
detail over the course
of the next couple of weeks inshallah so
don't worry about not getting any of
this
right now when when you get a hadoo or
something you need to know what are
called the five predict predictables
which are the al-father khamsa
right so you have gins the genus you
have the knot the species
you have the hassa the differentia and
then you have
the the the the the um the arab
which is like the it's uh you have the
proprium
which is the uh and then you have the
fossil sorry the fossil which is the
differentiate the hasa which is the
propium or the property
and then you have the arab and some call
the those two types of
accidents the aradon lazy moon and then
so those five things are going to enable
you to give the hud
the definition or the description the
hud is is
is the genus and the difference
so the genus is what you can say about a
lot of things
the khasa is what's specific to that one
thing
so with a human being what's our
definition traditionally in
in in logic
what do they call the human being
what's that
which in arabic means the speaking
animal but they really mean the rational
animal
in the west we call it the rational
animal so our genus is rational
this is different from biology because
you know they talk about genus and
species so yeah those are biological
terms this is logical terms they're two
different sciences
so don't get them confused the gene i
mean they're they're related but they're
used
very specifically in in these sciences
for different for
things that they mean in that science so
the the
the genus is the general
and then the the the the fossil
is the difference so with the human
being we're an
animal but many types of animals so what
makes us unique what's the fossil
what differentiates us from other
animals rationality
this is the definition so this is a
logical definition
everything can be defined in this way
and this is the foundation of defining
things
because when we speak in language when
we want to know what
is right what is us
very often it's in the thing itself
if you understand those two words then
you'll understand what the definition
of us is and these are called
right so this is this is how this works
and so he says
the the rasam the description is clearer
or it can explain something
it helps you understand it quickly
see now all of this was to introduce the
definition of tasawolf
all of this so he's given you now he's
told you before we can talk about
something we have to define it
what's its definition it's it's reality
what is the reality of tasawolf
has been defined it's been described and
it's been explained
in many many different ways
it will reach up to about 2 000
different definitions
all of those definitions go back
to one fundamental meaning
sincerity in your
god-directedness
its sincerity in your inner direction
towards your lord
that's the definition
so what does that mean what it means is
the genus of tasawolf is ichlas
that's the genus it's sincerity
but the difference because you can be
sincere
as a doctor you're sincere like you say
he's a very sincere
doctor just means he doesn't cheat you
he's doing what should be done
right so that's the genus sincerity
applies to many many different things
he's a sincere student
he's a sincere son
we can apply that but what is the
difference
what's the fossil it's sincerity
in your directedness towards god in
those things that apply
to your lord so you are sincere in your
ibadah
you are sincere in your muammar for the
sake of allah subhanahu wa tala that's
tasawolf and that's why you can be a
sufi
and and and be
like have nothing to do with that word
there's people
in in in uh
places that they might even not even
like tessault
they don't want to have anything to do
with it but they have sitka
to allah and in that way they have tasov
so the name is just a name
what's the reality of the name if you're
stuck on the name you're a nominalist
the name is just a name whether you call
it tasw
right whatever you call it it doesn't
matter those are names
the muslims for centuries called it
tasawolf there's no reason to abandon
that name really there's no reason
there's people that have tried to get
rid of it
but there's no reason to abandon it once
you clarify what it is
and the early the earliest sufis imam
al-junaid said
no one can speak about this matter that
hasn't mastered the book and the sunnah
that's what imam junaid said
imam tasturi said i hear
things about this matter but i always go
to two just
witnesses to hear their testimony
the book and the sunnah and this is why
siri ahmed zarooq says
the sufi has to submit to the faki
and the fakie doesn't have to submit to
the sufi
if your tasof is not in accord and not
some narrow-minded provincial faki who
only has one way of doing thing no
to the broad-based interpretive
tradition of the fukaha which includes
the methodology
of the great imams of this ummah so
there's imams that say
that you can do the maulid and that's
the majority of the later scholastic
reason there's
imams that say no don't do that that's
fine it's a hilar issue
if you don't want to do it that's fine
but if you do do it
it has to be free of things that are
moon karat
but to say it in and of itself is a
munkar
no because
the worst that can be said about it is
that it's macro
according to the uluma but to say that
it's prohibited or something like that
i mean that's an extreme position that
very few scholars ever took so anyway
that
that's my introduction so inshallah
tomorrow i'm going to
start with the 10 mabadi which
are foundational in our tradition what
are called the body
one of the great 18th century scholars
versified the 10 my bad in that it's in
your book
and then i versified it for you in
english if you want to memorize it in
english
so those are the ten mibadi i'm going to
do those tomorrow inshallah and that's
usually that was the introduction
to any islamic science always began with
this it begins from an early period
they started doing this and the reason
for it was to give the student
a comprehensive view of the subject
before you went into it
it's like seeing the forest before the
trees
which helps just to see the whole thing
before you go in and say okay that's an
oak and that's the elm tree and that's
an acacia tree and
just to understand what a forest is and
so
the subject is uh
is uh part of that and the name
and its sources where it comes from
it's also it's ranking one of the things
that we fail to do now
in in western education we don't rank
knowledge anymore so
nobody knows what's more important i
mean if you go
if you look at the if you go to any
college
most of you have been to college some of
you are in college some of you are going
to be going to college
next year or something if you go to
college they have these
catalogs they begin with astronomy and
they end with zoology
this is a to z
there's no ranking they don't tell you
what you should take
what's important this is more important
than the other muslims
always rank their sciences it's called
the
or
what's the virtue of the science and the
shut-off is
what it what the subject matter so if
the subject matter is god
it's a very high science if the subject
matters dunya
it's the lower science if the subject
matter is language it's a very high
science because it's a
it's a tool to understand god
so these are the rankings hierarchical
nature of science because we believe in
marathi there are degrees of knowledge
there are degrees of existence we have
four levels of existence you know
there's degrees in our tradition of
existence then you have
metaphysically you have other realms as
well the molk the markov
so um anyway
questions answers
dumbfoundedness
any questions
i've been teaching for about 10 years
and
obviously before that i was a student
and i'm worried that modern education
has
deconstructed our reasoning skills and
we'll
if if it has in your opinion do you
think we'll need 13 years to reconstruct
them also
yeah i mean you know the modern world is
it's in a mess i think all of us are
pretty aware of that
and that's not to say that the
pre-modern world wasn't either
in some ways there's a lot of good and
and in in some ways this is one of the
better times that people have been
living
so um i'm not completely dismissive
of uh the modern world but there are
there are
things about the educational system in
the past that were very problematic
and but there are things with the modern
system of education that are also very
problematic
um there are still places where you can
get a reasonably good education
i would say but in terms of
those basic fundamental skills that are
very important to grasp
and should really be learned at a
relatively early age
in the west they they were grammar and
logic and rhetoric and then also the
skills of numbers so these are the two
types of literacy what we call uh
literacy with language and then numeracy
or literacy with numbers
and these are the two ways that human
beings think
we think qualitatively which is
linguistically through language and then
we think
think quantitatively through number so
and when we get into the categories
which are part of the tradition of logic
there are ten categories
and after substance you know the two
categories
that immediately follow that are
quantity and quality
come and cave in arabic and so
we it was a book by a french philosopher
the turn of the century it was written
the reign of quantity and a lot of
people noticed this about the modern
world that it was a world of quantity
and quality was being taken out of the
world
not completely and not entirely but
quality is
much less important to the people today
than it ever has been the idea of
mastery
is is is we have mastery in a few things
i think in music there's still a
commitment to mastery
uh in certain sports there's a
commitment to high levels of mastery
but the idea of mastering the mind the
idea of mastering the soul
the idea of mastering arts and crafts
becoming
great craftsmen becoming uh really
you know masters of these