Abdullah Hakim Quick – Caliph Al-Mamun and The Scholar Al-Khawarizmi – Minarets and Thrones- Class 11
AI: Summary ©
The conversation covers the importance of the relationship between Gods in Islam and the "mon chips" that come with it. The "mon chips" are physical appearance and reflect the physical appearance of humans on their skin. The "mon chips" are also important for religion and politics, and they relate to religion and politics. The "mon chips" have led to new science and medicine, including the development of new drugs and new materials. The "mon chips" have also led to the rise of artificial intelligence and the modernization of technology.
AI: Summary ©
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen,
wa salli wa sallim ala Sayyid al-awwalin
wa al-akhirin, nabiyyana Muhammadan wa ala alihi
wa sahbihi wa barak wa salam.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of
the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon
our beloved Prophet Muhammad, the Master of the
first and the last, his family, his companions,
and all those who call to his way
and establish his sunnah to the Day of
Judgment.
As to what follows, as-salamu alaykum wa
rahmatullah.
Alhamdulillah, this is another of our sessions on
minarets and thrones, and it is the relationship
of scholars to the rulers.
And this relationship is critical.
It's critical for the movement of the community,
and that synergy, when the two power forces,
the ones controlling the dunya, and then the
ones leading to the akhirah, the next life,
when these two forces come together, then leadership
is complete.
And sometimes if we have one and not
the other, there's some good things happen, but
it's not really the type of achievements that
we find when both sides are working together.
And that is part of the tawheed in
a sense, the unity, which is so critical
for Muslims and in how we move.
And we will find out that leadership, the
Muslim world has gone through a lot of
changes, and we're talking about over 1400 years,
and all over the world, all types of
races, religions, nationalities, who have entered Islam, different
classes of people, different experiences, and so it's
complex.
And we are trying to look at this
complexity to take out the best of it,
to show where the brilliance came.
And sometimes, strangely enough, you can find positive
and negative, even within the same individual.
And our job really is to follow the
positive, to be aware of the negative, but
also to celebrate the positive achievements made by
certain individuals, because really they were used by
Allah in order to carry things out.
And so the basic concept of tawheed, which
means to make things one, that can be
looked at in a lot of ways.
Of course, the basis is monotheism, which is
our belief in one God and not many
different gods, because that would be polytheism.
But there's also the tawheed of the human
family, that we as a race, we as
Homo sapiens sapiens, that we are actually one
family.
Even though people see themselves today as very
much different, based upon where they live, or
the color of their skin, or their language,
or whether tall or short.
But if you go through the skin of
people, and there's been scientific experiments done, an
investigation done, that when you take a person
from Africa and China and Europe, and you
put them together, different races, and when you
go beneath the skin, when you take out
the differences of the facial structure, the nose,
the skin color, and you go beneath the
surface, you find that people are basically the
same.
The internal organs are not European organs, or
African organs, or Asian organs.
They are the organs, the internal part of
a human being, as so because one human
being.
Okay, so that's where the tawheed comes in.
Tawheed also comes in with the unity of
knowledge.
And that is that we believe all knowledge
comes from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
There's not some knowledge as what we find
today in the secular modernistic world, where they
cut out the concept of the creator, and
they try to divide church from state, spiritual
things from material things.
That didn't happen in the Muslim world.
And unfortunately today, because our countries were conquered
by European colonial powers, and our educational systems
were changed, many Muslims still have this concept
in mind, that there's a difference between religion
and politics, or religion and economics, the masjid
and the state.
But originally in the time of the Prophet
ﷺ, there was no division.
So that tawheed is critical for us, and
today we want to look at knowledge, the
broad sense of knowledge.
Because when people think of knowledge, sometimes they
think the ulama, they only think the knowledge
of revelation.
And the knowledge of revelation definitely is primary
knowledge.
That's the basic knowledge.
But the knowledge of the world, the signs
of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, is also
a form of revelation.
And in the Qur'an itself, Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala is speaking about the bees,
and it says, وَأَوْحَ اللَّهُ إِلَى النَّحَى That
Allah revealed to the bee certain types of
knowledge.
So the fact that the bees are able
to gather from flowers and the things that
they do, it's based on revelation.
Or you could say inspiration.
Then there is the formal revelation that comes
from Allah to the angel Jibreel, and then
to the prophets.
That is a special type of revelation.
But there are other forms of revelation.
Revelation is even used in the case of
Miriam.
May Allah be pleased with her, the mother
of Isa alayhis salaam, mother of Jesus.
It's also mentioned Wahi, that she received Wahi,
because she was inspired.
And you even had some scholars, because they're
a tiny minority, but they said because that
word Wahi is used for Miriam, that you
could include her in the prophets.
That is a minority position, because Wahi is
also used with the bees.
So you can't include bees with the prophets,
but it's inspiration.
So there's different types of inspiration where Allah
azawajal gives knowledge and guidance directly to a
creature.
So the Wahi that came to Miriam to
go outside the city, to shake the palm
tree, whatever, that is directly from Allah subhanahu
wa ta'ala.
The knowledge that came to the bees is
directly from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala.
And so with this concept in mind of
knowledge, we want to look at the relationship
of one of the rulers of Islam and
the ulama and the scholars.
And this khalifa or caliph, Abu al-Abbas
Abdullah al-Ma'mun, and we ran into him
before, looking at the Abbasid period.
And he was born in 786, and he
was one of the great khalifas, and he
was the son of Harun al-Rashid.
And Harun al-Rashid was known to be
one of the greatest of Abbasid rulers, and
maybe the richest man, some say he may
be the richest man who ever lived, in
terms of just materials.
His power is not like Nabi Suleiman alayhi
salam because he had more than just materials.
But al-Ma'mun, he had a strong education
from when he was young.
He learned the Qur'an, he learned fiqh,
and he was living at a time when
the books of the Europeans were being translated
because Muslims had been in contact with the
world and information was coming in.
And so some of the texts were being
translated, some of their scholars were either embracing
Islam or they were going to Baghdad, because
Baghdad was one of the leading cities in
the world at the time, especially for the
spread of knowledge.
And so he was very much into knowledge,
and he started reading the books of the
Europeans, especially the Greeks and the Romans, and
that is especially philosophy, felsafa.
And the philosophy is really where people start
projecting themselves into things, sometimes that are unknown.
And so he actually had a reputation as
not only just a leader, but he was
a debater.
He would debate, he was involved in a
lot of scholarly type of projects.
And it's interesting because even though he was
of the Abbasids, his mother was a Persian
slave or right-hand possession.
I didn't get a chance to change the
word concubine because I took this text from
out of some, but concubine is not a
good word actually to use.
It's more like a bonded servant.
But the fact is, when you think of
slave, you think of somebody who's in a
plantation being beaten by the Romans or by
the whites beating the blacks.
No, this is a person who lived in
luxury and who actually was eventually freed and
married the Khalifa, and she was the mother
of Ma'mun.
So in America, in the West, if you
were a slave, you could never make it
up to the upper class.
Impossible.
Okay, so this is a different concept.
So the word slavery is not even a
good word to use because it's so different.
It's just somebody controlled by somebody else.
But it's not how we know slavery today
when we use the term.
Anyhow, the key point is that in reading
these Greek, Roman, and other philosophical texts, he
started to question a lot of things.
And he became part of a movement which
is sort of a like rationalist movement.
They want to try to figure everything out
because the Greeks were trying to do that.
They were trying to figure everything out.
And so they went into Islamic theology.
And there are some aspects of theology which
is ilm al-ghayb.
It is the knowledge of the unseen.
So we don't know that.
And the great scholars, when they came to
points that they didn't know, they would say
Allahu alam.
Allah knows best.
Okay, but this group, the Mu'tazila, they started
to question everything.
They infected actually the Khalifa himself.
Not his whole life.
But he got involved in this.
And one of the controversial things that they
said was the Qur'an was created.
It was like a created being, like walking
and talking, you know, type of being.
And the scholars of Islam disagreed with this
because the Qur'an is kalamullah al-munazzil.
It is the words of Allah that was
revealed to the Prophet through the angel.
That's our definition.
Okay, but they tried to do it, you
know, they tried to figure it out.
And they couldn't handle something that they couldn't
put in material terms.
You see?
But the problem was because he had state
power and he was an influential person, he
wanted everybody to believe in this.
And the scholars refused to believe.
Some of course did accept it, but the
serious scholars refused.
And at the head of them was Imam
Ahmed ibn Hanbal, rahimahullah.
And he refused.
And Ma'mun, having state power, and sometimes power
gets to your head, he actually persecuted some
of the scholars.
He brought them to Baghdad, in some cases,
you know, like prisoners.
And many of them then changed their opinion,
but Imam Ahmed never did.
And he actually suffered.
And to the point where the mujahideen who
were fighting in the battle, they were calling
the name of Imam Ahmed.
So it reached the point where Ma'mun then,
who wasn't a totally unreasonable person, then, you
know, he lightened up.
And after his time, after he passed away,
everything changed.
Because it wasn't, it was really philosophy.
So philosophy is not the main part of
people's lives.
That's generally, you know, the knowledge of people
who are on that level of debating philosophical
things.
So that was one part of Ma'mun.
But the other part of Ma'mun was the
fact that he was heavily involved in scholarship.
And this was something where you have that
coming together.
Because he is the ruler of a vast
empire.
And it was probably the largest city on
earth.
They were the richest people on earth.
And here he is, having unlimited amount of
gold and silver, and power and authority.
He loves knowledge.
So he got involved in retrieving knowledge.
And it was known that he loved books
so much that if you came with a
new book of some significance, he'd give you
the weight in gold.
So people, it's like a revolution that happened.
Because sometimes people, scholars, historians, they can't believe
the achievements that Muslims made.
Because today we know, what do we know
Muslims as?
Just, they blow things up.
You know, they're extremists.
How could they have made these achievements?
I mean, the Romans, the Greeks, the Renaissance,
but in that period called the Dark Ages,
how could the Muslims have made achievements such
as this?
Okay?
This is not superstition.
It's not magic.
You can see how it came together.
And the basis of that was that the
ruler came together with the scholars.
And what he did was, he started this
revolution, and it was purchasing knowledge, hunting for
knowledge, and also translation.
So they were not restricted to Arabic or
Persian.
Persian was one of the main languages.
Of course, at the time, the Abbasids, coming
out of the Persian area, so Farsi was
a court language, and it was an important
written language.
They weren't stuck with this.
They actually would go to different languages and
get translators who would translate from the Greek
or the Latin, or even ancient Sanskrit, spoken
in India and into Arabic.
So this is something amazing now.
Because you're not destroying people, like when the
Mongols came, they just burnt all the books,
killed all the scholars.
They didn't care.
And sometimes they would use people, but they
would use that to build up their army
and to do certain things, but this was
different.
And so knowledge was critical.
And he developed, along with the scholars, he
developed what you call today, it's like a
think tank.
It's like a modern university think tank called
Beit al-Hikmah, the House of Wisdom.
And it was in this House of Wisdom,
which is like a university.
If you think of the universities today, you
think of Harvard, MIT, you think of McGill,
you know, Sorbonne, I mean, they get scholars
from all around the world.
They give you a scholarship.
So if you look at some of these
universities, you'll find an engineering department, you're going
to find Egyptians and other people like that.
If you look at medical departments, you'll find
Indian, Pakistanis, you know, other people, not Europeans,
but you're under their system, right?
They finance you, you see?
So they get the benefit from you, and
they use you, and they make achievements.
These achievements that are here, flying in planes
and all of these things, go back and
see who were the ones that did it.
You'll be surprised to know that many of
the inventions, and you'll be shocked to see
inventions made by Afro-Americans.
Yeah, but even before that, yeah, the Microsoft,
even Apple, you know, the whole thing of
Apple and, you know, what not.
Abdul Fattah, I mean, he was basically a
Syrian Arab.
So you're going to see how many achievements.
So this is what happened.
They set the pace for this.
Nobody else had done anything like this before.
So it caused a major revolution in knowledge
that not only the Muslims benefited from, but
the whole world benefited from.
And from that, the whole scientific method that
you know now, the science, you know, where
you investigate something, and you prove, you know,
go to a higher level, or whatever, all
of that is during this period.
Okay?
They took the theories of the past, and
they made precise experiments.
They applied it.
You see, they didn't discover all that knowledge.
They just took the discoveries of the people
before, and they applied it to their times.
That was their achievement.
You see?
And Mahmoud, who was a very rational person,
very organized person, he now put the power
of the state behind this revolution in knowledge.
Okay?
So this is how some of the texts
would look at the time.
You know, Greek, Chinese, Sanskrit, Persian, Syriac, they
were going through all the different languages that
housed knowledge, and they were putting it into
Arabic.
So if you knew Arabic at the time,
you could be exposed to a lot of
things.
When Islam first came out, Arabic was basically
the Quran, the Hadith, the scholars of the
Wahi, the Revelation.
Now, Arabic was also the language of science.
Because for the Muslims, we didn't separate it.
So you'd have an Islamic scholar who would
finish his tafsir of the Quran, and then
he'd pick up his book on mathematics.
Then he studies fiqh, jurisprudence, and then he
does a little chemistry.
You see?
They didn't separate it like today.
Today you've got chemistry department, sciences, humanities, you
know, religious department.
The Europeans divided everything up.
Okay, that's the dilemma that society is in
today.
So this is the Betul Hikmah.
This is an artist's conception of Baghdad.
You know how it was, how it looked.
It was an achievement, even the city itself.
It was set up scientifically in terms of
everything was organized.
Betul Hikmah.
This, of course, is an artist's conception of
what it was like, but it was there
in the Tigris and Euphrates region and Betul
Hikmah was there.
So Ma'mun got involved in a lot of
things.
Now some of his achievements, right, working with
the scholars, he would commission groups to do
things, commission scholars.
Just like today, they'll give you a grant.
So they say, okay, you want to study
this certain virus or you want to study
these plants, whatever, we'll give you a grant
of, you know, $500,000 and you just
devote your life to study.
That's the reason why they can do so
much.
And that's why many of our scholars in
the Muslim world right now, they can't do
too much because they're trying to eat food.
They end up being the chancellor of the
university signing documents all day instead of research.
Whereas the people who have the money in
back of them, they can do the research.
So some of the things that he did
and some amazing things, just some examples.
He commissioned the mapping of the world.
Okay, because nobody had a full map of
the world.
Right, and there were some pieces that were
in some of the ancient texts, but he
wanted to put it all together.
And they actually had a basic concept of
the size of the earth.
So this whole thing about the earth is
flat and Columbus' time and all that, Muslims
already knew it was round, that that's not
something that came about with Europeans.
Okay, he also went into what is called
Egyptology.
And this is interesting for a lot of
people who study ancient Egypt.
Many African-Americans, you know, study ancient Egypt
as an African country.
He went deep into Egyptology, the pyramids, to
try to understand how they built the pyramids.
Because many people overlook ancient Egyptian society.
I had the chance to go underneath the
pyramids and to visit that area.
And history, because it's based on European thinking,
it denies what happened in Egypt.
But way back in 3200 BC, they had
united their society, and shortly after that, 2500,
they're building pyramids, which has millions of blocks
of granite.
It has right angles, it has all the
scientific things.
Where did they get that from?
So one European came along and he said,
it was aliens, and they flew down on
earth.
You see that on the internet all the
time.
And they built the pyramids, right?
Because black people couldn't do that, right?
There's no way Africans could do something like
that.
There's all kinds of documents.
Yeah, and some people get serious about this.
Because they say they couldn't have done this.
Because if you say that Africans did this,
because there was no Europeans, no Asians, at
that time in Egypt, Cleopatra was not a
Greek girl, right?
If you say that Africans did something like
this before the Greeks even started their society,
then your whole racist theory is out the
window.
You see?
So he was so open-minded that he
even wanted to understand the pyramids, and he
started to build astronomical observatories, and do some
amazing things were done in astronomy, in so
many different areas.
It's mind-boggling.
I just want to give you a taste
of some of this tonight.
And some of what he was doing, which
is another amazing thing that you see the
Europeans do, is that he would send out
expeditions of scholars to find knowledge.
So if they said, okay, in China there's
particular knowledge there, he would outfit the group,
and they would go to China.
And they would meet the people and try
to find out what it is, and then
bring it back.
And even Constantinople, the European lands, anywhere they
could find it.
So this is what they were doing.
They were bringing it all back into this
house of wisdom.
So it was amazing.
And so you could say that this was
really the first international university.
Okay, this set the pace for universities all
around the world.
Now, the scholar.
There were different scholars, but probably the most
important scholar who interfaced with Ma'mun.
Because remember, we're talking about rulers and scholars,
right?
So the most important was Muhammad ibn Musa
al-Khawarizmi.
And he was a Persian man who was
born in the area of Khawarizm, which is
now present-day Uzbekistan, and in this region,
Central Asian region.
And he was trained in traditional Persian scholarship,
of course learned Arabic and whatnot.
He focused heavily on mathematics and astronomy and
natural sciences.
And he was a brilliant person.
He was an achiever.
And they say that he was fluent in
Arabic, Persian, possibly Greek too.
They say he was reading Sanskrit.
And Sanskrit is the ancient Indian language.
And a lot of early things actually came
out of Sanskrit.
And you'll see some of the texts that
he actually wrote, coming out of this knowledge
that Khawarizmi had.
And Ma'mun really focused on him and gave
him a lot of his support.
And he was one of the primary people.
Probably the most famous thing that al-Khawarizmi
did was the fact that Ma'mun, in trying
to repair the city and organize and control
Baghdad, you need to break things down into
sections.
Half, quarter, eighth, sixteenth, whatever.
Inheritance.
How do you do inheritance?
Somebody's got a big family.
If you are organizing the city, how do
you divide it up?
So many things you need this way of
calculating things.
So he commissioned al-Khawarizmi.
And he studied it.
And he wrote a book where he dealt
with this.
It was called Kitab al-Muqtasa fi Hisab
al-Jaba wal-Muqabala.
So that means the abbreviated book on calculation
by completion and balancing.
But look at the Arabic there.
You can see the actual text on your
right.
That's how the Arabic texts were kind of
looking at those days.
But if you look at this, look at
the transliteration.
Kitab al-Muqtasa, right?
Abbreviated book.
Fi Hisab al-Jaba.
You see it?
You see the word?
Hisab al-Jaba.
Algebra.
That's where the word algebra comes from.
Ask the average Canadian, American, European, where does
algebra come from?
They would say Greece.
The Greeks.
It's an Arabic word.
They would be in shock if they knew
that algebra is an Arabic word.
It's literally taken from this work done by
al-Khawarizmi.
And they used that for the divisions, finances,
zakat, construction, agriculture, navigation, booty distribution, all kinds
of things they used this for.
It was an amazing achievement.
And algebra now has led to so much
in this world is based upon these calculations.
This is amazing work that he actually did.
Another interesting thing that he did, he was
one of the lead scholars in trying to
deal with the map of the world.
And so they gathered together the maps that
the Arab traders had, that the Greeks had,
that the Romans, different people who traveled, Phoenicians,
wherever they get the maps, they put them
all together and they did an actual map
of the world.
They mapped out the known world at that
time and some amazing things he did on
this map.
And I was surprised once.
I even was shocked.
I was in Australia.
And normally when I go to different countries,
I don't just go to a conference or
something.
I go to the library, to the museums
and other places like this.
So I wanted to know about the history
of Australia.
And what is the history of Muslims in
Australia?
And you'd be surprised to know they're not
just recent people who came here.
When the British first opened up, they took
over the land and stole it from the
Aboriginal people and they needed to go through
the center of the country.
They used Afghan, you know, not traders, but
caravanners.
So the Afghans opened up the middle of
Australia.
And the routes that the Afghans made are
now the major highways going through the country.
It's an interesting story.
There's even some traces, some of the Afghan
families are still there.
Some of them returned, the Afghans and Patans.
You know, so some of them returned, some
of them are there.
It's an interesting story.
So I was trying to find out the
history of Islam in Australia and I came
across this work done in the university.
And they said the oldest map of Australia
was in Arabic.
It was in the university in Australia.
It's in Arabic.
And I realized this is al-Khawarizmi.
And how he described Australia, they described it
at the time, they said our sailors reached
this island and they couldn't find the other
end of the island.
It was the biggest island they ever saw
before.
And they were describing Australia.
And it was mostly at that time the
north coast because you come from Indonesia like
you go right into Australia.
So his map with Australia is the oldest
map of that country.
And the average Australian does not know this.
They would never know that the oldest map
of Australia is in Arabic.
It's in Arabic.
Al-Khawarizmi who did it.
Hunayn also wrote a treatise, Optimology, right?
There were scholars who dealt with smallpox infections,
surgery.
Some amazing things were actually being done during
this time by the scholars in Beit al
-Hikmah.
Amazing things.
And these are some of the advancements that
were made.
It was mainly there, but it's also in
other places too because there were great scholars
in Andalus, in Toledo and Granada and also
North Africa.
Different parts of the Muslim world, there were
great scholars.
But the center of a lot of this,
especially in that part of the world, was
there in Baghdad.
In the western part of the world, the
center was in Andalus.
But these are some of the sciences now
that came out of, that were began by
Muslims.
Algebra, we know this.
Anesthesia, biology, botany, cardiology, chemistry, dermatology, embryology,
emergency medicine, geology, metallurgy, modern surgery, modern medicine,
modern arithmetic, optics, parasitology, pulmonary medicine, toxicology,
urology.
This is like a university.
These were began by Muslims.
In other words, there was a lot of
theories around before and they made it into
an applied science.
They didn't discover all the things from nowhere.
It's not hocus-pocus.
They're not flying on carpets.
That's the fairy tales.
They took knowledge and they put it together.
Some of the substances and devices that were
introduced into Europe by Muslims.
A lot of these came from Baghdad.
There's a famous story of Azariab who came
into, he was from Baghdad and he came
into Andalusia and he brought a lot of
scientific things there and a lot of things
from Baghdad he brought over.
But look at today now, what this explosion
of knowledge actually did.
And this was brought into Europe.
Europeans didn't have these things before.
Pendulums, the clocks, right?
Cotton, paper.
Chinese had paper.
Egyptians had papyrus and the Chinese had it.
But the Muslims now, in their contact with
the Chinese, they brought Chinese and they revolutionized
paper.
And glass mirrors.
They didn't have that before.
Crystal, street lamps, colored glass, satin, pepper, paper
money.
Think about this.
Postage stamps, book binding, clocks, soap.
Just imagine if we didn't give them soap,
right?
What would have happened?
Soap, man.
They didn't even have a way to bathe
themselves with soap until the Muslims in Andalusia
showed them how to bathe.
Astrolabes, compasses, slide rules, flasks, surgical instruments, windmill,
artificial teeth.
Imagine if they didn't have teeth, artificial teeth.
Spinning wheels for textiles, globes, citrus fruits, eyeglasses,
porcelain, gunpowder, cables, velvet, almanacs, encyclopedias.
That was the Google of those ages, right?
Before, many of us who were born before
computers, before the 90s, you got to have
an almanac, encyclopedia, right?
Before you could Google things.
The word almanac is almanach.
It's an Arabic word, literally.
Okay?
Saddles and also leather shoes.
Now, Walt Taylor, an American scholar, he recorded
a thousand English words of Arabic origin.
These are some of the words.
Admiral comes from Amir al-Bahar.
Think about this.
You're Admiral of the Navy, right?
Alcohol, al-kuhl, al-kowf, al-qubba.
There's algebra.
A logarithm, the algorithms, right?
Which are so important today.
Al-khawarizm means name.
You know how important the algorithm is today?
Some people live with the algorithms.
Some people, artificial intelligence is like their new
god.
The name is from Arabic.
How many people know this?
Almanach.
Almanach.
Amber is Anba.
Arsenal.
Dar al-Sinai.
Assassin.
Hashashin.
Now, that sounds like you Muslims.
Right?
Assassin, right?
Hashashin.
Right?
Because of Hassan al-Sabah and the group,
the Ismailis, right?
Calaba from Qalib.
Kamfa is Kafur.
Check, the Bank of Montreal.
Sec, chemistry from alchemia.
Cotton is Qutin.
Lemon is from Limun.
Magazine.
Right?
Time Magazine, McLean's.
Makhazan.
Mattress is Matrah.
Monsoon is Mosim.
Sugar is Sukar.
Syrup is Sharaab.
Typhoon is Tufan.
And zero is Sifah.
I was in this program one time in
Detroit.
This is before September 11th and, you know,
Muslims were nice guys at that time and
whatnot.
And so we, and then the police chief
was there and the mayor of the town
was there.
It was a big program for the Muslims,
right?
So I was one of the speakers.
No, it was in Detroit.
The apolitic.
So then, I said at the beginning, wanted
to lighten up the atmosphere.
And I said I wanted to welcome all
the people there.
I said, you know, I wanted to welcome,
you know, the Amir of Detroit and also
the Sharif of Detroit.
And everybody's looking at me like, what is
this, man?
And then I showed them that the word
mayor comes from Amir.
That's what the word mayor comes from.
And the Sharif was the one who had
the gun.
And that becomes sheriff.
So the sheriff of Detroit was there.
Sheriff is an Arabic word.
Sharif.
Shocking.
Shocking.
This explosion came about, you know, when the
scholars came about with, came together with the
rulers and Ma'moun and Khawarizmi.
They were probably the best example of this
coming together.
Of the two important leadership peoples.
Okay, so I want to open up the
floor for any discussions, any questions that anybody
may have, you know, concerning these texts and
concerning what happened during this time.
Floor is open.
Yeah, I mean, it really begins with the
Crusades.
It starts from there.
Because the Crusades, and that's going back to
the 11th century when they burst out of
Europe, right?
And they said that the Muslims are devil
worshipers and we have to save the true
cross of Christ.
And so they went into the Muslim world,
brought back information and they start changing everything.
They wouldn't tell the common people where they
got it from.
So from back then it started.
But really in the modern form now, it's
the colonial period.
You know, it's really from the 1800s.
You know, when they conquered Muslim lands.
And they took over educational systems.
And, you know, then they start changing things.
Okay, but in their renaissance period actually, yeah,
step back a little bit, because the rebirth
of knowledge is 15th century, 16th century, it's
the renaissance of Europe.
And so what they did was, instead of
saying that the major book in medicine in
the renaissance was a book called Al-Qanun
Fit-Tib, The Law of Medicine, which was
done by Ibn Sina, right, a Muslim.
They say Avin Sina.
You'll see it written, Avin Sina.
Okay.
One of the great ulema and philosophers, he
even preserved a lot of the Greek philosophy,
was Ibn Rushd.
Ibn Rushd, great scholar, but also went to
philosophy.
They call Averroes.
Averroes.
So you're going to see when you go
back to the renaissance, a lot of the
names that are actually there, they changed the
Muslim name.
Because they didn't want people to think that
it was actually a Muslim.
They Latinized it.
You see?
So they did this in order to cover
up the knowledge.
Right.
So you'll see this happening because all the
different, look at the areas that we started
the sciences.
You know, Isaac Newton, they say the gravity,
you know, the apple hit him in his
head.
And they say the apple hit him in
his head and then he said, oh no,
there's some force.
Muslims already knew about gravity, man.
He was probably sitting under the tree and
the apple hit him in his head and
he turned to the page on gravity in
the Arabic text.
Right.
And then translated it into English.
Because one of the big things that happened
in Spain, because that's where a lot of
the knowledge went directly to Europe, especially the
city called Toledo.
Toledo was the center of translation.
They translated a lot of the texts there.
Oxford University, the person who began Oxford University,
he literally came with Arabic books and they
translated it and that was the beginning of
Oxford University.
And you can even go in some of
the old libraries there and you'll still see
some Arabic things being used in these universities.
Okay.
So it's been a process.
The whole rebirth of European civilization is a
hoax.
It wasn't the Dark Ages and then they
suddenly came to light.
Muslims kept the knowledge alive and then put
it in a practical form and then the
Europeans benefited from it, translated it, and then
they made their progress, no doubt about it.
But their problem is they lie.
They won't tell the people where it came
from.
Right.
And this is an injustice that they have
done and it's coming to the surface.
Any questions online?
It definitely has value because one of the
texts, I'll give you an example, one of
the texts written by al-Khawarizmi, because he
was into Sanskrit and all that and they
had this big think tank meeting and they
wanted to revolutionize their number system.
Okay.
So they went into the Sanskrit because in
ancient Hindi in India they had zero.
The Egyptians had zero too but that wasn't
available.
But in the Hindi, in this system they
had zero and so he wrote a text
on this and you'll see from the Hindi
letters it now, one, two, three, four, five,
they put from the Hindi into Arabic.
Right.
And then from the Arabic that's where you
get your numbers from.
Right.
So there was value.
It wasn't hocus-pocus.
No jinni taught them zero.
It was known by people in India and
in Egypt.
So they just took it and they made
it practical and everybody started multiplying by, you
know, in a different way instead of the
Roman numerals you've got to start stringing, you
know, numbers across the room.
So this is revolutionized math you know, by
doing that.
Question.
Online.
Any other general questions?
Yeah.
Also studying FIF and you're doing this and
you're doing that and you put three in
Hindi and you're raising your family like all
of these things.
Like, it seems like nowadays it's impossible to
do that and I'm trying to like think
of like why is it right?
Like, is it that we're just not like
we don't use our time wisely that could
be a part of it like we spend
more time kind of like wasting the day.
It could be that just like the systems
that we have like how we go to
work how much time we spend at work
like that we're forced So
the question is, how could they achieve so
much in using their time when today we
have difficulties?
I mean, one, we have a lot of
distractions.
So these distractions, especially now with social media,
we have a lot of distractions.
And then also the so-called modern society,
you know, the pressure that they put on
people just to survive and the taxes and
all the things.
Life was more simple in those days.
Didn't mean they couldn't make progress, but they
could focus on things because they had less
distractions, right?
And then as you say, they used their
time wisely.
That's right.
And they have created that problem in that
society.
It's actually less economical.
I just want to put it in your
eyes.
I saw it on YouTube.
Yeah.
Now we do it.
See what's going on with that program.
There's this freedom in it.
I see it.
I've been watching that document and that.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So this is, that's right, this is an
eye-opener for us, you know, and the
key to this, one of the keys to
this after Allah's intervention is that relationship between
the rulers and the scholars.
So without that support that was given by
the Muslim government, that scholars could not have
done what they did.
The batil hikmah and the things that they
did, and that's what Muslims, you know, need
today is for our governments and those in
authority to stop wasting money on big yachts
and palaces and things like this, and use
the money properly to defend other Muslims for
the advancement of scholarship, you know, for taking
care of the poor.
You know, there's so much that we can
do, okay, once we get in line the
relationship of rulers to the scholars.
So we're going to close the class here,
and inshallah our next week will be our
last class, and it's going to be a
very important one, you know, for me because
I want to bring to you a scholar,
another fusion scholar, who actually had both, and
you'll see the coming together of scholarship and
leadership not too long ago, okay, so we're
only going to go a couple hundred years,
not way, way back, and you'll see this
amazing fusion next week, inshallah.
So I leave you in peace.
Wa akhira da'awana alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen, wassalamu
alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.