rst of all i want to thank people for coming back to this i apologize for
being absent the last few weeks i was going to try to get some out but i was became really intensely
engaged in some work at zaituna college so today i wanted to
look at a sacred text message allah mentions
that those who have hashia or this awe of god are the the ulama
and allah reminds us to ask the people of knowledge if we don't know
uh and [Applause] are they equal those who know and those
who don't know and so it's central in our faith this idea of knowledge and and we were
commanded by our prophet alaihi wasallam to seek knowledge
to seek knowledge uh in weak narrations it mentions from the cradle
to the grave mentions a report that the prophet saw is im said
seek knowledge even unto china which irrespective of the senate the meaning
is certainly true the prophet saws encouraged seeking knowledge he mentioned that the indo-europeans if there was
knowledge on pleiades that they would attempt to get that knowledge
through space travel even so there's the the idea of seeking knowledge is
very important and ibn umaji and imam rabe and others relate
hadith about seeking knowledge and one of them one of the most famous ones is
that seeking knowledge is an obligation on every muslim and then in the raja of the hadith which
is mudraj hadith is something that the raoi adds the person that's narrating it
ads for clarification and so the rawi added on the narrator added on
to that muslima just so that people would not interpret that to mean the males only that
knowledge is incumbent on the male and the female but one of the most important things in
our tradition also is this idea of honoring the people of knowledge of honoring
scholars and scholarship and recognizing because as human beings what
what distinguishes us from all of the rest of creation is knowledge that we are distinguished
by knowledge it's it's what makes us different animals have all of the other aspects
of our nature so animals eat they can eat more than we can animals
procreate they can procreate more than we can animals can lift things they can build things beavers build dams
bees builds hot build hives ants build ant hills that are actually
called arya in arabic the city of the ants so and they're
they're quite intricate in that so animals do all of these different things but
what can't what can't they do that we can do they they can't reason and they can't
abstract as far as we know there is no other creature outside of the gin on this planet that
abstracts and so because of that the highest knowledges are the most abstract knowledge
and the most abstract of all knowledges is knowledge of god of metaphysics so
honoring scholars is really important in our tradition so i wanted to just look at this
aspect of our tradition one of the things that ibn mubarak said was and he's one of the great
scholars of the third generation he was a student of imamatic and a teacher in his own rights but he
said whoever makes light of the scholars
loses his afterlife
and those who make light of the rulers will lose their their worldly affairs their dunya
and then he said woman
and those who make light of their brothers they lose their dignity so this is
something that [Music] i think traditionally muslims really
understood this that you that there's a hierarchy in the world and that hierarchy is meant to be
respected and without it the world cannot exist as as as as the divine intended it and just to
give you an example we're born into hierarchy we're born into families that that
our parents are over us even we're born into a birth order that will really dictate
certain aspects of our life so we have older brothers and sisters and they have different rights
than we have being in that position being in the elderly position and in some cultures like in this
south asian culture they actually distinguish these things with titles that they give so the big sister
is is actually the word it's not just my sister it's my big sister and so when she's addressed
she's addressed as the big sister out of show a display of respect but also a recognition
of hierarchy in the world there's a wonderful moment in the the the great novelist
dostoevsky's work which is called the the demons one translation is the demons
another translation is the possessed and dostoevsky wrote this novel to really
highlight the fact that russian society was breaking down with all these new
materialistic atheistic ideas and was eroding the traditional religious culture
which which he loved um the slavophilic culture but there's there's a scene in in the
novel where they're they're debating the existence of god and there's an officer who's in this
debate and dostoevsky just makes this mention that he gets up in the middle of the
debate and shouts out as if speaking to himself dostoevsky says he shouts out if there's no god
then how can i be a captain which is an incredibly profound question
because what he was saying if if there is no hierarchy of being then
how can i how can i be in a position that of authority above anyone else if there's no one above me if there's no
god then then because once you remove god all authority
dissipates and this is this is why atheism ultimately breeds communism
which says there's no hierarchy and and yet because it's such a false doctrine it invariably
creates a hierarchy and then they have to kill each other and they have to kill everybody who disagrees with them
so this is something really important so when you lose scholars when you lose this understanding of that there are
people who know and and there's people that don't know and ignorance is real and we're all ignorant every there's many things i
mean there's far more things we're ignorant about than that we have knowledge of about but certainly though those who know
something if for instance if i get into a discussion with a physicist about physics i'm a fool
what i should do is simply if i'm interested in physics is learn from him but this idea that i can have a real
conversation with him even though i've actually read a few
books on physics and i'm interested in physics but i am by no stretch of physicist and
so for me to debate a physicist about physics is is absolutely absurd
and the same is true for instance i was a cardiac nurse but i'm not going to debate a cardiac
physician or a professor of cardiology about whether or not striated muscle is is
real or just simply a name that we're giving to something we don't really understand or
you know is the all-or-nothing frank stark law of the heart is that really is that really accurate who am i to do
that to discuss those things i would be a complete fool if i did that and yet we live in it in
an age where people seem to feel compelled to have an opinion about
everything and i think the worst thing about it is for the muslims who should know
better because allah subhanahu clearly says
and do not go what you have follow what you have no knowledge about don't don't go there
so if you don't know allah says ask the people who know if you don't
know ask the people who know if you do not
know but the problem with that is that it demands humility
and this is the crux of the matter is that a lot of people especially semi-educated
people i heard a christian once he was asked why are all the educated people atheists
and and the real simple people believers like the africans they're all believers
and he literally said the africans you know they're believers and yet the level of education africa is much lower
than europe whereas in europe they're they're much higher levels of education but
the majority of them don't believe anymore and this christian man he said that's very easy because
knowledge tends to puff people up and and they become arrogant and they
actually think they know much more than they actually do know and whereas with with simple people
there's a type of humility that that allows their hearts to be open
to truths that only the heart can comprehend and i just thought that was a really
good answer because my experience for a lot of people that are highly educated
is that they do slip into a type of puffery
and and and it's really sad so just recognizing who that scholarship
if somebody spent their life studying for 40 50 60 70 years i mean we have
scholars that literally have been studying for 70 years like sheikh abdullah and and then
for for me to be like a 30 year old writing articles against him i just
it i mean the goal of it just to make it really amazes me and and now and people obviously oh well so
are you saying they're above criticism nobody's above criticism but who
who is the critic who is the critic the only one above
criticism is the prophet sallallahu isaac and but but who is the critic
because the word in arabic for critic is naked which means the one who can
determine what's gold and what's not so it's the person that can actually
determine whether something is pure or impure so who can do that well that has to be
somebody who really knows something but when when you're young you think you
know everything and as you get older you're you know they say that uh fruit a
heavily laden uh tree with lots of fruit
it it the branches are low because there's so much weight from the fruit and this is the reality people are
humble so one of the things that imam
[Music]
to attack the people of knowledge especially the greats among them
is from the enormities from the the major sins like just like the kebab so attacking
people that have immense knowledge is actually it's a kibera and what's amazing too it's quite
stunning is that people write things you know they say blessed is the man who dies and his sins
die with him people don't realize that when you write something on the internet and you're dead that's still on the
internet so your backbiting will go on forever as long as people are reading the
internet your backbiting is on there or or if you write an article if you write a book
against somebody and the thing is people can write books we have a great
scholars who attacked other scholars but they were great scholars so imam
razari can attack evan cena and then even russia could come along and attack
imam razali because they're they're they're critics they can determine
what's gold and what's not gold and they can be wrong just like any critic can be wrong but they're at that level where
they can do that and so it's always interesting to me that the people that tend to attack the
scholars tend to be nobody's ever heard of them they haven't written anything
they haven't really established themselves as great intellects i mean i'll be the first to admit that
i just i don't like i don't know who i could really criticize amongst the great scholars
because i would feel like such an idiot just like to write a book against i love ibn
rushid he disagreed with imam al-ghazali and i love imam
but i'm not going to write a book about why even russia was wrong in his criticism of imam al-ghazali i
just wouldn't do that even though the ulamas say generally our olympus say that he was wrong in certain
of his critiques but i'm not going i might quote a scholar saying that but to to say that
is it seems like just an extraordinarily uh overarching uh thing to do
and i mean obviously to point out things that our scholars have said uh that are
that are wrong if it's agreed upon or if there's reasons to do it then
you know i would make an exception for that probably but again you have to know your place in the grand
scheme of things even the angels say each one of us has
a fixed station like not to go beyond your station and it's better to think you're below
your station than to think you're at your station or above your station
says that whoever is has a station
that he genuinely has and he claims it allah will take it away from him and if he claims the station over his
station allah will expose him with scandals and and if he claims a station less than
his station allah will elevate him to a station over he says that
and and he looks at that like a metaphysical um so it's it's really important not to
uh you know to not to know who you are and where your
place is in the grand scheme of things it's it's actually a very important thing to know that's why self-knowledge is so
important because how can you know anything else if you don't know yourself how really can you know anything when
yourself is the closest thing to you and yet so many people do not know themselves they don't know their limits
they don't know their intellectual limits like to recognize at a certain point which i had to do at a certain point
i just realized i have real intellectual limitations genuine intellectual limitations and and
largely because i i i read a lot and then i
see what really profound thinking is and i see what really original thought is
and i see what really illuminated thought is and then i look at my own thinking and i look at what my what i have
produced myself and i recognize what an immense gap is between
myself and my own understandings and that of the people i read and one of the things that i've noticed that a lot
of people do a lot of people read books you know there's a great line
by a poet laureate who he won the nobel prize for poetry that says you know
people read books and repeat quotations draw conclusions on the wall that
there's rooney said if you want to be considered a great scholar just say whatever you
want and then attribute it to somebody else and so there's so many people that
like they read tafsirs and then they they speak it as if it's their own
insights like they don't tell who they're quoting like i i heard one person giving a talk
and i knew exactly where he was getting everything because i'd read the same thing and yet never once did he say it's from
so and so it was as if he had all these amazing insights into the the book of allah
you know or something you make of the quran and like oh this is uh you know
or something how does he know it's he read in the tafsir that it was
he didn't produce that and this is the difference between a student of knowledge and real scholars
is that students in all we read what others have said but for us to think that we can produce something
that from our own quote unquote original thought hey hatsa like the arabs say so it's
just really important to know that and i think the older you get the more the more you you kind of you realize
that that that uh that we're just so limited in our understanding but attacking scholars is just really
really dangerous attacking anybody is dangerous unless there's a real reason to to to do that and obviously delusion
is an important part of human existence many people are deluded and so obviously they'll say oh i'm just protecting the
dean and and i mentioned that imam al-khazad's great quote in the book of knowledge but abdullah
bin maser said um
this is the sahabi a companion of the prophet him and he said that all of tribulation
is related to speech he said if i mocked a dog i would be
afraid that i would be turned into a dog that it's just it's something we have to
be really careful about just making fun of people uh or attacking people doing these
things i mean it seems to be the the zeitgeist now is all about attacking other people that
that's what there's so much of it there's so much uh negativity out there and
and i i think if you go online and and and look at this you're going to get sick i'll tell you
something that uh uh said he said something amazing
and and and this is uh mentioned in mustafi it's uh it's a very interesting
statement but so it's recorded that you imam ahmed himself in london said this the flesh of the scholars is poison
whoever smells it will get sick but whoever eats it will die
meaning the heart it's the death of the heart so whoever smells it that means that if you just read it if you're reading people making fun of
or attacking or and there's a lot of it and i'm not putting myself in here let me let me
make something perfectly clear i don't i am a student of knowledge i do not consider myself
one of the ulama by western standards people can consider somebody a scholar
that's fine but not by islamic standards i know what a real scholar is because i've actually
been blessed to study with them this is who they're talking about they're talking about these people who
allah has chosen because the prophet sam said in the hadith
sahih that illinois relates the prophet isaiah said
whoever allah wants good for he will give them understanding of the
religion that is called the joomla it's a conditional sentence
which means that if somebody has understanding of this deen allah wanted good for them so who are
you to want bad for them if allah wanted good for them woe unto you
woe unto you and and and so when you look at people who've been given great knowledge if you
say oh he's this or he's that or he's you don't know what his ishtihad is you
don't he's working with a whole other set of criteria that you don't have you don't
know what you don't know what he's going to defend himself on the day of judgment how are you going to defend yourself if
you attack him and he has an ishti had that allah said
on the tongue of his prophetizing because all of what comes from the prophet saw he said is revelation the prophet saw isam said
man
whoever does he had and is correct in his ishtihad has doubled the reward and whoever makes
his jihad as an incorrect in his ishti had he in other words he's mistaken
so the scholar could be mistaken but he has the criteria that enable him to make that ishtihat
if he's mistaken allah is going to give him a reward anyway but who are you what what reward
are you getting other than the accrual of sins by attacking people you have no business
attacking no business attacking and so
people can and i know this is a democratic age and everybody says everybody's entitled to their opinion
and and people say um you know that they can say whatever they
want well that's that's true you can say whatever you want but you just have to know that like imamatic said
that
when a man realizes that his speech is from his deeds his speech will
diminish in other words he'll begin to speak less and less because he knows he's going to be taken to account for
every single thing that he says in this world and that includes what you write on the internet you will be
taken to account for it so you should just know that i mean this is just to myself
and to everyone else you should just know every comment you make just like it's preserved on the internet
it's preserved in your sahifa and it's going to be show you're going to see it all that mockery
those little emojis that you put all that making fun of people whatever you're doing and i know the
people listening to this aren't those people so a lot of you don't need to be hearing this but it's something for all of us to
think about and maybe just maybe there might be somebody listening to this who actually does participate
in these types of things and will say us they'll you know i i really need to change my
ways because in the end of the day in the final analysis
we're all moving towards the at such a rapidly increasing rate that we need to be getting ready and one
of the best ways to get ready is to guard your tongue to guard your pen which is just an extension of your
tongue to guard your keyboard which is just an extension of your pen this is life on earth
and this is what we all need to know one of the poets says
that the flesh of the people of knowledge is poison and whoever opposes them is quick to
perish so be a helper to the people of knowledge and should you one day attack them
right just be prepared to take what comes
so may allah purify our tongues make us people of purity and
righteousness elevate us make us people of tawbah of repentance of forgiveness
i mean you can be talking about somebody and they're in sajdah doing taubah and allah is accepting their tauba and
you're backbiting them and the hadith that said backfinding is worse than fornication in islam people say how could that be
that ultimately the thing about somebody who fornicates can make tawba and allah accepts the
toba but if you backbite you've attacked another person
and you you technically that can't be redressed until that person forgives you
so it's worse in that way in that it's more difficult to remove from your
sahih than even something as enorm and and it is an enormity so i'm not belittling and certainly the
hadith i'm just quoting the hadith at least in english so so i
you know i was thinking just about sheikh dala mimiya who who i've known
personally for many many years he was my teacher in the 90s and
can i continue to learn from him and benefit from him and increasingly he got involved in
a lot of forums to where he was attempting to mitigate a
lot of the attacks on muslims and and there's people that have clearly
disagreed with his approach and his views but one of the things that is remarkable to
me about people that attack people like sheikh abdullah is it's
the question is never about is is what he's actually doing haram or
like what's the of this and then are you somebody that can determine that
because you have to be at the level of some level of ishtihad to be able to determine that i once heard somebody was telling about
some criticism that he was getting and he said i haven't done anything haram and
i just that really struck me it's a very simple statement but it just really struck me as something
wow you know that's that's how he's looking at things halal and haram is is this permissible
what i'm doing or is it not and obviously he has a whole set of criteria
for why he would be doing what he's doing because he obviously thinks some greater good is going to come out of what he's doing
that's his ishtihad but what what really strikes me is that
the the people who attack him essentially i mean very often it's pure ideology
it's just because he's not an ideologue and they happen to be following some type of
ideology and so so they
somebody like that who is recognized as one of the greatest living scholars
of our tradition when in pakistan when the hanafi ulama
came to an impasse in dealing with certain questions in in in in some issues that had arisen in
pakistan uh chef takadin osmani who's one of the greatest scholars of the hanafi school
in in the subcontinent seven problems and that is actually part
of the hanafi ulsual according to uh told me
that in the future that they will go to the maliki opinions if they don't resolve the problem within the hanafi
school and so they actually sent him and he solved all seven of those problems
these are recorded as well but then if you look also at his service i mean first of all
he comes from one of the most notable mortanian families his father was
aldi his father was one probably the the greatest living scholar of the 20th century in muritania
um and that was recognized even by people like uh sheikh mohammed ramirez
who the great mulfair of quran recognized uh his his position his maqam so that
was his father and he spent his life there studying and then at the age of 20 went to tunisia
with some of the top scholars in muritania he was the youngest of them and he graduated first in his class
amongst these scholars he actually gave a interview on the voice of america in 1961 i think
60 or 61 representing the students there in the mauritanian students in tunisia
so even the elders put him forward as their spokesperson so he was recognized just for having a genius in
fact i was told by his son muhammad
who died recently he was one of my teachers in when i was in medina he's a beautiful man from the
clan of tejakanet in mauritania but he told me we were talking about sheikh abdullah
bin bay and he said you know my father used to say that he's one of the geniuses of muritania
and he said you know that he had a creative mind that that he wasn't he wasn't like a
run-of-the-mill i mean the muritanians are very it's very difficult to impress a mortalian scholar
because they you know they really do have a lot of knowledge so but the mortality and ulama all
recognize but even more importantly this idea somehow that
he would support you know anything that's unjust and people say oh well he's supporting this or he's supporting that again
he does his ishtihad and in the late 70s he was sent by
the president of of muritania [Music]
he sent him to libya when there were problems between mauritania and qaddafi who had
taken power in libya and he sent him there and
the only reason i know this story is because the mauritanian bastard at the time who was in in libya at the
time actually recently revealed this last year on uh on to arab television this story even
the children of sheikh abdullah bibi were unaware of the story so sheikh abdullah bibaya gave his
delivered his message in the presence of the ambassador because always when a visiting
politician visits another country the ambassador will accompany them to the palace or to whatever the
president's residency or his office and so the mortality ambassador said that sheikh
abdullah when he finished delivering with deda's message the president of
muritania he said look this was from my president but i have something personally to say to you
and qaddafi said qaddafi said he said you need to fear allah he said you
cannot attack the our our sahaba you
what you've said about abhorrent what you've said about sahih bukhari what you said about things in the quran
i want you to make tawba and badhafi the ambassador related all
this it's you can see it it's on youtube he said that when he said that but daffy was
taken aback and this is somebody who killed people like literally as far as we know dumped
scholars into the ocean uh in in in the mediterranean um
there's still nobody knows what happened to poor bakker the great shia scholar from iraq but
it's believed that he was dumped into the ocean so you know this is a mokaf like this is
speaking truth to an unjust ruler who amongst us has actually done that like really
like who amongst us has actually done that you know put their lives into jeopardy
for their belief and so the ambassador said qaddafi started arguing with him and he said i'm
not he said you're wrong and you need to make taubah and i will not leave here until i hear
you retract your statement
so the ambassador said that he didn't find that gaddafi relented and said no no you're right i stuff for the law
you're right and then he left so that's something to think about
you know and and that if that's a man who was
now he's 87 years old and he spent his life serving this
religion he's going to sell his religion at this late stage when when he knows
that just by being a mortal that he's looking at his own mortality
i mean that's just i don't know how what people how they reason it just doesn't make sense so
but i know who he is because i've spent years i've spent over two decades living with him traveling with him
translating for him i know who he is i have no doubts i have no doubts
you know we can't only allah knows the reality of people but i in myself personally i believe that he's
one of the olia of god because i've seen it like i've seen and many people
who have worked with him have felt the same thing only allah knows these things we can't
it's not our business to determine but that's my belief so when i look at
him i don't i don't judge him i i might disagree
i i can actually disagree with something and and think i would have done this
differently or something like that but the idea that i don't recognize the level of
scholarship and the sincerity and the valid authority that he has
to determine his own path i mean that seems to me to be something
just really obvious and clear and i just feel sorry for people that
the way that some people have talked about him it just to me i i would just not want to be
in their shoes on the day of judgment i really wouldn't um i mean there's always time for toba
but it just it's it's amazes me
so may allah subhanahu wa'ta'ala inshallah elevate all of you and increase you and keep you
going inshallah until jalal we meet again assalamualaikum