he difference is
even tamiya really wanted to
just keep it at the book and the sunnah like he really want he did not
want the type of edifice that was emerging out of the um
of the tradition of islam and and in some ways you have to
appreciate that because there's something very profound about the simplicity
of teachings and and in many ways tradition becomes very cumbersome
and and and i think kierkegaard has a very similar uh attitude towards what
happens within christianity um so i i appreciate him tamiya i really
do i appreciate what he's trying to do but i really feel like you cannot deny
the the human uh creativity that comes out of that
initial inspiration and you can't deny the fact that the prophet saws was a syncretist
in that he said seek knowledge the quran says seek knowledge it says go out explore
the world um go look how creation began that's that's that's a recommendation to
go study geology the quran has history it says look at
the people that went before you the quran certainly has metaphysics
so all of those are there and so the elaborations that come out of that initial inspiration
what you want to do is mitigate the the influences that are dangerous like
and they're going to slip in but you want to to prevent them and i think that was his
project i i think and i have to say this and i'm not the first person that said this
but i think imam al-azadi's his his intellect is just so vast
and and and i think um imam subhki syria zaruk and others
said that even tamiya was more reliable in his nakan than in his actual
the way that he uh looked at the knuckle so i think that's
fundamentally at the heart of the differences so like i said i appreciate and i actually understand
what even temiya was trying to do but i i really think in the end he's
he he's his his project was a a critical pro like he is criticizing a
lot like a lot of his books are criticizing imam al-razadi's project is a project he's building like he's
really trying to to build a normative islam that will
withstand the onslaughts of materialism of philosophy
of uh of atheism of all that's what he's trying to do he wants to
he wants to build a fortress around the book and the sunnah imam ibn tamiya he wants
he feels like the book in the sunnah doesn't need a fortress says no it needs a fortress and i'm
going to build it and i think that's fundamentally the difference aloha but we respect both of them and
and traditionally uh there were far more
critics of the bentaymia in our ummah than there were of imam they both have critics far more are
critical of ibn taymiyyah's project than they are of of imam al-khazadis but people are going to differ on this and
there's people that are going to stay with ibentemia i don't think it's
like you have to choose one or the other but but i think you have to recognize that one of them
defines the tradition and that you do need to recognize and
arguably for for a thousand years the ummah considered it was hajjit islam and it's
interesting he's called the proof of islam what do you use a proof for you use a proof against
people that are questioning you whereas even tell me it's called sheikh islam
he's one of many but that is a lockup that he was given so why was imam initially vilified by
the scholars of andrews well i think i said that they were
i you know this is something that a mauritanian friend of mine says that
the murabiton were like the taliban which i don't think is totally fair but they they were very um
in in in kalam they were dogmatic they did not like speculative theology
and many scholars did not ibn abdulbar who's one of my favorite scholars he's one of the greatest scholars in the
history of islam he attacks the terribly i mean he really really just sees them as
something really really uh bad for islam like ibn tamiya although even tamiya
he's mixed because he sometimes he praises them and other times he he condemns him but he does recognize
that they did play a role in defending islam so he's not entirely antagonistic so these
these are debates amongst the ulama it's it's uh you know his books were burnt
at one point in morocco although the men that burned him had a dream where the prophet sam came and had him
flogged by imam al-qazali so he actually repented publicly for burning them he burnt them
in a in a you know in a masjid and and then he had that dream and so he
repented that's a well-known story are there english translations imagine's works or other resources
fortunately he's he's he's been fortunate to have some good translators
um there's there's there was a translation done it's an abridgement of the yeah that was done by maulana
he was a south asian scholar mawlana
fault i think yeah and that was reprinted by the malaysians
and they edited a lot of it because he originally did not want he was actually a very formidable scholar he
uh he did a commentary on the mishkat and translated the into bengali i think
so he he that is is is good uh fonz vidai um has done some i
actually wrote the um the introduction to a couple of those books uh including the book of knowledge and
then also um the islamic text society has done a good job
i mean dr winter abdul hakeem winter is i think a
really excellent beautiful stylist in the english language and imam razali deserves
a good translator because he is so eloquent in arabic and it's a crime
to translate him poorly i was recently reading a translation of one of his i won't say who did it because he's actually a good scholar
but it was so bad the english was so bad and and i i i just i felt sad for
anybody who read that book and thought that that in any way reflected the style of imam al-qasadi
so and i know he's a great persian stylist i i'm not able to read him in persian but i i know from people that do know persian
that he's a beautiful stylist in persian so he was a very gifted orator a gifted writer
so i would say that those are good dr winter did the breaking of the two desires was
excellent book and i and i i think he did one other yeah the remembrance of death how can we
pursue pursue the spiritual pathways i pursue today stay tuned because that's
essentially what i'm going to talk about really what his project is because that is his project and so inshallah if allah gives us life
and maybe we to meet again did he reject the relationship between cause and effect
i'll get into that a little bit he did not and that's one of the big problems
the asha'ira are accused of being occasionalists which are people that
don't really believe in cause and effect it's very important it's a very sophisticated
understanding we cause and effect is the way allah has created the world
it's the sunnah of god in the world to deny it is tonight to deny reality
and so we do not deny cause and effect but we have i think a very profound understanding of
the divine um the divine
nature of what's happening in the world and and and and and that's where the
imam al-qasadi is a mystic so i would look at it you have
newtonian physics and you have quantum physics sharia is newtonian haka is quantum
if you this is an analogy i'm not saying don't say oh he said that kalam is quantum physic
i'm saying that in the same way that the quantum laws do not work
in the newtonian world that's the same that's happening so it's two different
way we have something called you know we live in a multiplex universe uh that
in fact it's not a universe it's it's a multiverse and he's the lord of all the world so
there are many worlds universe is this world it's one world but there are many
universes and so what's what we know if you look at a
persian carpet the ant knows nothing of the pattern of the persian culprit that is our intellect before the glory
of allah's creation and the prophet indicated that in a hadith about
the the mulk in relation to the melakut was like a ring in the midst of a desert a small ring
so he's all so this whole idea oh people lost their faith because they realize the universe is vast
our prophet's lies him knew how vast things were he didn't it increased his
faith you know this is something material say oh why are there so many galaxies
well you can do the same thing if you go inward like if you magnify yourself inwardly
you'll see the same number of of miraculous whether you go out or in
in fact there's a nobel prize winner alexis carroll who showed basically that the largest
things in the universe if you take the largest things that we know of and you take the smallest things we know of and and you divide them by to add
them together and divide them by two you get the basic human proportion he won the nobel prize
so we are the microcosm like the the cosmos is out there but it's also
in here everything's in here and in fact it couldn't be out there if it wasn't in here that's how we can see it and
understand it so anyway we'll get into that inshallah
and then did imam khazadi only acknowledge virtue ethics in his works how about other normative
ethical theories such as consequentialism deontological ethics i mean these are terms that come later
islam does have a kind of deontological approach i mean we do believe in duty-bound ethics
and we also have consequentialist ethics because there are situations where like kant
said you couldn't lie in any situation right and that's his deontological approach but
uh we know that lying is permitted to save somebody from a tyrant for instance
so that's a kind of looking at the consequences so um
i think ver the point of virtue ethics is the foundation of all ethics and and
it has to be studied to understand cultivation of virtues and
why it's important so i think traditionally virtual ethics has been the most important approach to ethics
in our tradition can you please recommend an introductory book on the quran that one can share with non-muslims the quran
you know i found it's very interesting quran
i would not recommend a non-muslim reading the quran because it's such a difficult book in
translation first of all it's it's a non-linear book but second of all
there's a lot of lacunae in in the quran and and i actually had a young
singaporean a really wonderful muslim lady that that worked with us
with the rehla group when we were in singapore and she was very troubled she had taken a a
a course in university and the course made an argument that the quran needed you know that it needed
commentary and she was like why would god reveal a book that is not sufficient unto itself
and initially i didn't really have an answer for her i didn't give her an answer i just thought about it but i actually realized
it's a reminder for you and for your people imam malik said that is saying so and so on so and so on so and
so that allah has made his book
impossible to reach without the intercession
of scholars of the waratha envia so you cannot understand the quran
without the prophet saw isam and you cannot understand the prophet's license without the scholars
so you always need commentary and and that is because the meanings of
the quran are locked in the hearts of human beings and
it is men like and women sometimes but it's men like imam al-khazali
who unlocked many of the mysteries of that book and that's what we're going to look at with the quran but before we do that i have a
few more things i want to say about the imam so inshallah may allah bless all of you maya i hope you remember
all of us at iftar remembers etuna all the people at zaituna also support
zaytuna inshallah we we have some really really big plans
but we need your help to do what we're doing may allah bless all of you and thank you subhana kalam
alaikum