Ammar Alshukry – Allahs Beautiful Names #17 How to Master Any Subject – Al Aleem
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The speakers discuss the differences between Islam and creation, including the use of the "will" label for actions and mistakes made by individuals. They stress the importance of learning and resources for achieving knowledge and success in life, and suggest asking Allah for knowledge and resources to find the best programs and teachers. The speaker emphasizes the importance of learning from the name Al Arab and the resources available to them, as it is a gift given by Allah to give people knowledge. The speaker also emphasizes the importance of being humble with the knowledge given to them and increasing their knowledge to benefit them.
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When Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala told the angels
that he was gonna create a Khalifa on
earth, the angels asked, are you gonna create
on the earth those who will create mischief
and spill blood while we exalt you and
sanctify you? What you may not have noticed
is that what the angels are actually posing
is what would be called the problem of
evil.
Why do bad things happen? Why is there
murder, war, all sorts of violent crimes, theft,
abuse? Why is there disease pain? These are
questions that are asked on university campuses and
debates all over the world and have been
asked for 1000 of years.
What people don't realize though is that this
was a question that the angels preceded them
in. And Allah
answered them and answered everyone who had come
and asked after them. He said,
I know what you do not know. A
sheikh of mine was once talking to a
Christian pastor who had read the translation of
the Quran from cover to cover. And he
asked him and he said, what stood out
to you the most about the Quran? And
he said, how much God knows. So it
should be no surprise then that this is
the name after Allah
that appears the most in the Quran.
Al-'Alim appears some
157 times. Think of some of the other
names and how frequently they appear. Alatif 7
times, Al Hayy 5 times, Al Razaq and
all once. So when a name appears a
157
times, this is an overwhelming mention throughout the
Quran. So when we look at the knowledge
of Allah versus the knowledge of creation, there's
a lot of differences. Right? The first is
the knowledge of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is
not preceded by ignorance, and ours is Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala says,
Allah says Allah is the one who brought
you out of the wombs of your mothers
not knowing anything. We all started
with no information.
And he made for you the instruments of
knowledge. Right? He made for you your hearing
and your vision and your intellect that perhaps
you would be grateful.
Number 2, the knowledge of Allah is complete
and nothing is hidden from him. Allah
Allah says, Allah says to him belongs the
knowledge, the keys of the unseen. No one
knows them except for him.
And he knows what is in the land
and he knows what is in the sea.
And there's no leaf that falls except that
he knows
it. And no grain moves within the darkness
of the earth.
And there's nothing moist or dry, except that
it's all recorded with Allah
So Allah nothing is hidden from him. Also,
Allah
knowledge is not followed by forgetfulness.
Our knowledge,
after we learn something, we forget it afterwards.
If you were to take an exam that
you took in middle school right now, the
same exact exam, you might have gotten a
100 back in the day, but right now
you might only get a 75 because that
information you've forgotten over the years. Allah
My lord is never in error nor does
my lord ever forget. Allah
doesn't forget. And then in between the knowledge
and the forgetfulness that we have, we also
make mistakes. Our knowledge is incorrect. And Allah
says
my lord is never ever wrong. He's never
mistaken. He's never misguided. So what are some
of the ways that we can interact with
this name Al Arab? Number 1 is to
ask Allah
for knowledge.
Allah says, and say, my lord, increase me
in knowledge. And as you might have heard
before, there's nothing in the Quran that Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala tells you to ask him
for more of except for knowledge. You know,
there's this question that I've heard many times
over the years presented by budding students of
knowledge all over, which is where is the
best place to go study? Where is the
best program? What's the best methodology? Who are
the best scholars to study under? I think
everyone who's been in the realm of studying
Islam has either asked this question or witnessed
it being asked again and again and again.
And I've heard many different answers over the
years, but I'll tell you the best answer
that I've ever heard
is the one that was given by Sheikh
Mohammed Mukhtar Shankiti,
May Allah preserve him. He said, take all
of the programs,
all of the books, all of the teachers,
and put them all to the side.
And make your concern that you ask Allah
for
knowledge.
And if Allah decrees for you to have
knowledge, he will guide you to the best
programs, the best books, the best teachers.
The resources themselves
are not what grant a person success in
their endeavors of seeking knowledge.
But if Allah
wills for you to have knowledge and about
the resources,
Alwaleed ibn Abdi Mirik is the son of
the Umayyad Khalifa, Abdi Mirikir bin Marwan. And
his father loved him very much, but he
was very severely attached to him. And so
he didn't send him out when he was
a young boy, when he was very small.
He didn't send him out into the desert
to absorb the Arabic language natively from the
Bedouins. And that was the custom of the
Arabs that they would send their kids into
the desert so that they could absorb
and become native speakers of the Arabic language
by learning directly from the Bedouins so that
their language wasn't broken by learning amongst the
city folk. And
his father loved him very much, so his
father didn't actually send him to do that.
And so he he learned or he grew
up speaking actually broken Arabic.
And his father, Ibn Asakir mentions the
he comes to the Khalifa.
Abdel Mehtic says to him,
who should I make the Khalifa after me?
And he says, what do you mean? Amirul
Mumineen? Al Walid?
Your son Alwirid, of course. And Abdul Malik
says Alwirid.
Alwirid doesn't speak Arabic correctly. Like, he doesn't
speak Arabic well. His grammar is all over
the place.
And so Abdul Malik tells Rorih and he
says to him, come back later in the
evening when I have my when I have
my court, when everybody's here, and ask me
that same question. And so he does. And
Al Waleed is there, and he hears his
father say,
I can't make Al Waleed the emir after
me. Like, I can't make him the khalif
after me. He doesn't speak Arabic well. So
what do you think Al Waleed is gonna
do when he finds out that his lack
of command over Arabic is going to be
a reason for him to not become the
khalifa? Of course, he's gonna learn Arabic. He's
gonna learn Arabic in a weekend. Right? So
what he does is he gathers
all of the scholars of grammar, rhetoric, literature,
poetry. He gathers them all. And he does
a 6 month intensive summit. Him, the prince,
and all of these scholars.
And after 6 months, he finally emerges, and
they said he was even worse than before.
After 6 months, he ended up being even
worse than before. After all of that,
all of this to show you what?
That it's not about the resources. There are
people I'm sure who you know who graduated
from the same university that you graduated, the
same program that you graduated from, and you
wouldn't trust the knowledge that they had. Knowledge
is a gift that Allah
gives people, and so you have to ask
Allah
for knowledge. The second way that we interact
with his name is to be humble. So
Fianna Thodi said, knowledge is 3 handspans.
The first handspans
inspires arrogance.
The second
breeds humility.
And in the 3rd, you realize you know
nothing. When a person first studies a topic,
it's very easy for them to be convinced
that that one argument that they learned is
the truth, and then they become arrogant. They
think that everybody else is upon innovation or
everybody else is wrong or everybody else is
this is the correct position because I studied
it. But then over time, you learn that
you know what? The people hold another position,
it's not like they got it from the
from Mars.
They are following great scholars too. They have
evidences as well. So then you become humbled.
And then by the 3rd hand span, you
realize that even if you were to spend
your entire life in learning,
as the saying goes, if you give all
of yourself to knowledge,
it will only give you a part of
itself. So the more you learn, the more
humble you actually become. When Musa and Al
Khidr were on the boat that Allah
tells us the story of in Surat Al
Kahf, the prophet
tells us a detail that's reported by Al
Bukhari and others. And that is that while
they were on the boat,
a sparrow came
and it just took from the sea that
they were on. Just dipped its beak into
the water, and then it flew off. And
then Al Khidr looked at Musa, and he
said, oh Musa,
my knowledge and your knowledge
have not decreased Allah's
knowledge
except as much as the sparrow has decreased
the water of the sea with its beak.
This is a very, very humbling statement
made by a person whom Allah
had given unique knowledge to, to one of
the people who knew the most about Allah
and one of the greatest messengers.
Should we not then be humble with the
little that Allah
has taught us?
And so this name, Al Aleem,
inspires us to ask Allah
for knowledge and to be humble with the
knowledge that Allah
has given us, and we ask Allah in
conclusion
to always increase us in knowledge that is
beneficial for us.