Ali Ataie – Islam has a Normative Definition
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
In our last session,
I mentioned that nowadays
in our quote unquote,
progressive culture,
things are no longer defined by sacred text
or by intellect,
but by our feelings.
The prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam said
He said that there will come a time
upon the people
when nothing will remain of Islam except
its name.
So this hadith indicates that there is a
quote unquote normative
definition of Islam.
You see those core principles and supports the
usul and the arkhan that made Islam Islam
will be removed from the religion
until all that remains will be a name
without a reality,
like a hollow plastic apple.
If I held a hollow plastic apple in
my hand and showed it to you from
a distance and asked you, what is this?
You would say, well, that's an apple, but
is it?
Certainly not.
But why not?
Because apple has
a precise definition.
A round fruit of a tree of the
rose family, which typically has
thin red or green skin and crisp flesh.
That's that's an apple. That's the definition.
If you ask me for an apple and
I give you an orange, you would be
confused.
Islam has a normative
definition.
Postmodern
liberals and critical theorists, they hate the word
normative.
They hate that word. They hate the word
normal.
There's nothing normative. There's nothing normal, they say,
And we as Muslims, we have to disagree
with this. Islam has a normative
definition.
This definition includes
certain theological,
legal, and moral nonnegotiables.
Okay. This definition includes certain theological,
legal, and moral
nonnegotiables.
These are.
These are obviously known, clearly delineated,
axiomatically
true, totally agreed upon.
Imagine someone who said, I'm a Muslim who
believes that it's okay to drink alcohol in
any situation.
See, that's not Islam. Imagine someone who said,
I'm a Muslim, but I believe it's okay
to be an open and practicing
homosexual.
That's not Islam. Imagine somebody who said, I'm
a Muslim, but I believe that Jesus is
God.
That's the worst. That's shirk. That's not Islam.
Imagine a Catholic who said,
I'm a Catholic, but I don't believe that
in the divinity of Jesus. I don't believe
in the trinity. I don't believe in the
papal authority and the magisterium.
Is that really a Catholic?
So this is why things have definitions.
Al had in Arabic, al had means definition,
literally meaning limit.
A definition delimits,
demarcates,
specifies
a thing.
If definitions become endlessly subjective,
then words can have no real meanings.
Okay. Imagine a country without borders.
If a land mass lacks borders
that demarcate
its territories, then it's, it's not a country.
If the definition of Islam is whatever I
want it to be
and whatever you want it to be and
whatever he wants it to be and whatever
she wants it to be, whatever she wants
it to be, one of these made up
non binary pronoun, then Islam has no
no longer has a definition.
It's just a name.
Nothing will remain of this religion
except its name.
You see, Shaitan, he wants to take the
immutables,
the tawabit,
these non negotiable
foundations.
He wants to take these things and he
wants to make them mutable.
Mutagayarat,
which is going to change the entire face,
the entire essence of the religion.
If we lose our tawabitch,
then we lose it all.
If we lose our foundations, the entire edifice
will collapse.
Feelings are now defining religion.
Feelings are now defining men and women.
We live in an age of feelings, as
we said in previous sessions. Imagine this is
just a quick
thought experiment.
Imagine that there's a talking sea creature
who claims to be a shark with a
blowhole, a beacon, a flat tail.
Okay. To you, it looks like a dolphin.
So you say to this creature,
you can't be a shark because a shark
has a definition.
It has certain
necessary
attributes that make up its essence. For example,
a shark must have gills,
but then this dolphin tells you, no, no,
no. I, but I feel,
I feel like a shark with a blowhole.
Now somebody might say to this
dolphin, oh, you're so brave.
More power to you. But that should not
be our response
because that's not real. We're not living in
reality.
The response should be no. So what? Your
feelings are irrelevant.
You are a dolphin.
Stop being
delusional.
Another challenge we have to deal with
is this insidious
revolt against tradition,
traditional religion, traditional values.
And young people in particular are led to
believe that faith in God is somehow antiquated
or old fashioned, even opposed to reason.
And that faith equates to quote belief without
evidence. That's how Richard Dawkins
defines
faith, belief without evidence.
Faith. They say faith is for simpletons.
They say intelligent people use their brains,
Right? What is especially disturbing about this phenomenon
is that Islam is often portrayed
as being the one major religion that is
most fundamentally
antithetical
to reason.
And this is simply erroneous.
As Muslims, we have traditionally adhered to
a three-dimensional
epistemological
approach.
That is to say, we can know that
things are true
based on 3 sources working in conjunction.
Okay. The senses, the intellect,
and revelation. Al Hawas, Al Aqal, Al Wahi.
Okay? And with respect to the latter 2
specifically,
the intellect and revelation, or we can say
Aqal and Naqal, Since both of these came
from the very same source,
they cannot really be in conflict.
Okay. It's like chemistry and physics.
These are two ways to explain the physical
world that do not contradict, cannot contradict,
but have different foci.
Right? So what I'm trying to say is
that revelation does not task us to embrace
the irrational,
I. E. The falsifiable.
Somebody might say, well, what about belief in
the day of judgment?
That is totally rational.
It's not irrational.
First of all, it's not falsifiable.
No one can tell you that they know
that there is no such day.
Okay? No one can tell you that. Okay?
Secondly,
injustice
in the earth
is what all people find morally repugnant. We
intuitively
hate injustice.
This is across time and culture.
Are we really to think that murderers and
rapists and genocidal maniacs who are never brought
to justice
in this world, they just get away with
it? So this is related to the moral
argument for God.
The intuitive
human desire for justice is a function
of our theomorphic
human nature.
In other words,
we are made in the image of God.
This is a hadith in Sahih Muslim.
Somebody might say, why why am I quoting
the Bible? This yeah. It's mentioned in Genesis
chapter 2, but this is also a sound
hadith
of the prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. But
what does he mean? Meaning, we are a
created
and contingent reflection
of God's names. We seek adala. We seek
justice
because he
is ala'adin,
the just, the perfectly just. He created us
to be representatives, his representatives
on the earth.
But let me give you something maybe a
bit more concrete
As I heard from one of my teachers,
let's take the moon landing as an example.
Right? The moon landing. Now according to traditional
exegetes,
the qamar, the moon, was was believed to
be in the sama,
okay, and thus inaccessible to human beings.
That was the standard tafsir.
Okay. A leading scholar during that time, during
the time of the Apollo missions
was asked, what do you say about this?
And this was his response. He said either
the American government is lying,
which a case can be made, by the
way, not some crazy conspiracy theory. I mean,
in 2021,
NASA can't even figure out a way to
get humans
beyond low earth orbit.
I mean, that's just a maximum of 1200
miles above the surface of the earth.
Yet between 1969
and 1972,
they claim
that 7 manned missions made it to the
moon and back safely.
Each journey is a round trip of 478
1,000 miles.
That's a bit of a
mystery. So either they're lying. Okay. Or he
said the exegetes have made a mistake.
You see our understanding of the revelation is
sharpened by the intellect, is sharpened by evidence.
This is Nurun al Anur, according to Imam
al Razi. The meaning of Nurun al Anur.
In Ayatun Nur
is the intellect upon the revelation.
A, a constant joining of the intellect
with the revelation,
a reconciliation
of the intellect with the revelation.
Okay. So in this example, the Quran was
not falsified. The Quran cannot be falsified,
and interpretation
of the Quran
was sharpened, again, if we did in fact
go to the moon. So there's a big
difference. The Quran cannot be falsified, but interpretations
can be sharpened, can be refined.
So it is the revelation itself.
It is the revelation itself. This is an
important point that constantly bids us to exercise
reason. Okay? So we will continue with our
reflections in the next session.
Until then, assalamu alaykum.