Hamza Yusuf – Sacred Text Messages S01 E04 – From the Cradle to the Grave

			Bismillah R Rahman Rahim or Salatu was Salam ala Sayyidina Muhammad wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa
sallam to snoo McCarthy era Alhamdulillah. We're here again with another session on sacred text
messages. And looking at a very important text that comes from our Prophet sallallahu sallam, in
which he told us that this Hadees was related by Mr. odo than Mr. tirmidhi Abu Dawood and emammal.
tirmidhi are two of the great collectors of Hadees from the six famous are what they call English
canonical collections. Go to the sit or the SAS. I will download it said that when he went to came
into Iraq to relate had it, there were 70,000 inkwells in the masjid 70,000 that's how extraordinary
		

			he was. He was like many of them. Why don't he was from persianate part of the Muslim world. But he
relates a hadith and he Mama tirmidhi from Abu Dhabi.
		

			And Dada for people that are interested in Arabic. Dada is the girl without teeth. So the ad read,
which is a nice, the dentals D is from the dentals You know, they're called it's a dental in the
linguistics so does the one without teeth. so far is similar to Rasulullah sallallahu wasallam Jaco
mencetak of Perea, WV here, Elma circolo will be here today open Elon Jenna, which means whoever
sets out on a path and sudo is a term that they used for a spiritual path also, but whoever sets out
on a path seeking knowledge and their inmon here is Nick era. It's not a lane. It's a enma who seeks
a knowledge because there are many types of knowledge and there are many knowledges that are formed
		

			key via like engineering or medicine. So this could include if there Nia was sound, then it would
include their intention being sound, it would include other knowledges and then the province of
isonem, was reported to have said sadhika lobi, he bought a personal agenda that Allah will
facilitate him a path to paradise. So seeking knowledge is a path to paradise. What a nail mela he
had, the tobacco engineer had to hurry up and the Apollo below him and even the angels lay down
their wings out of contentment for the seeker of knowledge audible in the seeker of knowledge we're
in an early Malaya style funeral home for summer Why do you remember Arthur had tell he turn off and
		

			Matt. And verily the scholar is one who the everything in the heavens and the earth, even the the
fish in the ocean, ask forgiveness for a scholar, which is an extraordinary the fact that they're
asking forgiveness because scholars are human, so they'll always have shortcomings and but because
they're so important, they're asking is still far for them so that Allah forgives them. It's really
extraordinary that he chose layer stuff futile. You know, they're asking forgiveness for him. So
imagine if the angels and even the whales in the ocean are asking forgiveness is a login or forgive
the scholar. It's quite stunning, really. And then the prophets Allah sent him said, well father,
		

			Allah, Allah May Allah Allah Abbe De Luca favela, Amartya Sen collected and the preference of the
scholar over the devotee and the abbot is is somebody who their practice is not so much knowledge
based as it is devotional. So these are people that very often they don't have a lot now they have
to have far behind, but they get enough knowledge to suffice them in their religion. And then their
focus is on devotion, which is really important and there are people that that's their path to Allah
subhanho wa Taala but the scholars preference over those in another Hadith the Prophet Li said, I'm
said that it's like the preference of me over the least of you. So is this is a huge difference. And
		

			the moon is very important in terms of the heavenly bodies because the moon, we have our calendrical
measurements by the moon, we have the moon to guide us and many, many other things, also the
relationship to the moon and the tides. These are all aspects of the importance of the moon. In
fact, arguably, scientists would say without the moon there wouldn't be life on Earth as we know it.
So the moon is a very important part of our solar system and particularly for us so the prophets
Allah said and then said in a llama what I thought will MBA the scholars are the inheritors of
profits in MBA alum your web repo dinar on what Dharma the scholars did not leave behind as a
		

			legacy. gold or silver dinars are gold and Durham is silver into my walrath. Who will him
		

			But they left behind knowledge from an aha aha to be held in Westfield. And there's a story that Abu
huraira told the people in the marketplace that the prophets, inheritance was being distributed in
the masjid and everybody ran from the marketplace. And when they got there, there were held up a
vicar. There was a circles of knowledge. And they were saying, where's the inheritance is that it's
in these circles. This is what the prophets leave behind. So that's a really important Hadith
because one, it focuses on the fact that the past agenda that Allah will facilitate for you is the
path of knowledge. And the prophets, Allah. He said, I'm said in them or Boris tomorrow alima, I was
		

			only sent as a teacher. So he is a teacher. And then he was taught I lemma, who should de la kuwa.
So the prophets Allah is him himself was a student of a teacher who is less than him. And very
often, teachers will have students that end up being greater than them, more brilliant, produce
more. So that's not unusual in the worldly realm, but in the other worldly realm. edumedia Ali said,
I'm taught the Prophet size and the Prophet was above him in stature. So this is our prophesies, and
he was a teacher. And he spent his life teaching what we have really, if you look at all the Heidi's
they're all teaching Hades, and his Sierra is all lessons. And then he brought the Quran, which is
		

			the greatest teacher for us, because it's the words of Allah subhana wa Tada. And so seeking
knowledge is really important. And this should be done for the sake of Allah subhanho wa Taala. The
prophets Allah sent him said that one of the signs of the latter days is that people would seek
knowledge for other than the sake of Allah. In other words, they would pursue for worldly reasons,
and not for other worldly reasons. And this is when you lose the Theo centricity of a culture. So
our civilization was very theocentric. It was centered around the divine and the sacred. And that's
why everything they did was infused with the sacred, they began all of their projects, Bismillah,
		

			and the amazing Hadith that many, many books of our scholars mentioned, the Hadees, that whatever
does not begin Bismillah is cut off from blessing. Now think about like, who started the internet,
think about who started all these things, who was the first person to work out rocket fuel, all
these things were started without Bismillah. Whereas the Islamic civilization was a civilization
where all of the sciences were done Bismillah all of their books started Bismillah. And so there was
so much Baraka when you look at this civilization, which undeniably has great achievements. But look
at the overall effects of it, we have to wonder, because so many things that come out of these
		

			inventions and these things, we see the downside, the negative side, so it's really important for
Muslims to remember that we are theocentric. And I would argue that the Christians before this
period, this very materialistic period, they also were people that did begin things In the name of
Allah. So they did say, you know, they would make prayers to God and things like that. And so I'm
sure they got a portion of that, in doing that, but people that are materialistic or atheistic,
which many of these modern scientists are, you have to wonder. And one of the things that really
struck me about the when I was a student studying about Vietnam and reading about the napalm, I just
		

			thought about what kind of a human being could develop, napalm, like a weapon that burnt the skin
off of people, I just, I really had a really hard time grappling with that just as a normal human
being, like, I could not imagine some, but then what really bothered me was the villagers, they
started putting these ponds in the villages, they would dig pits to put water because they found out
that if you jumped in, it would stop the effects of the napalm. So somebody here probably in like,
somewhere like New Jersey in some lab, worked out waterproof napalm. I mean, who would do that? It's
just very strange. And the prophets I sent him said only Allah can use fire to punish. So it's a
		

			horrible thing for human beings. You just wonder those scientists go home and have dinner and they
have their wives and their families. It's very strange, but I just wonder what's going to happen to
them in the afterlife. But all those things happen because people don't are no longer theocentric.
And I think a lot of the crisis in the Muslim world is being affected by this deep materiality, this
materialism that has overwhelmed the Muslims. So where do we begin? Well, we begin at the beginning,
and the beginning, is language. So this is where everything begins. And that's why the first thing
that a child does after it really learns to crawl and begin to walk. It learns to talk and it's very
		

			interesting that it begins to crawl and walk before it can really talk. All it does is it
		

			These sounds that are we would call a type of gibberish, which comes from Jabba even hayyan. Because
the Europeans couldn't understand him. So they called everything that they couldn't understand
gibberish. In other words from Java, that's a true etymology. So the child learns to walk because
walking is a purposeful activity. And human beings are purposeful. And so somebody said, and I think
rightly so that God had children learn before walk before they could talk, because if it wasn't that
way, every time they tried to walk, people say, Oh, you give it up, you'll never get it, you know,
so but a child just keeps doing it keeps attempting to walk and get up. And it's amazing. It's
		

			purposeful. When you look at this thing about the body of being on the body, walking Allah subhana
wa tada when he describes the servants of the rock, man, a battle Rahmani ladina, yam Shona, an RD
honer. They walk, what is walking, walking is intentional. When you walk, you are exercising your
will, it's a pure act of the will. And that's why children is the first thing they do. So setting
out on a path is intentional, you are walking. And this is why one of the most amazing things about
Arabic because I was looking at you know, the prophet SAW, I said him, he said, a ride to Lake
level, the ride does not lie to his own people, his own family, the ride is the one who sent out to
		

			look for water. And this was very important in the Sahara, or the desert or Arabia to look for
water. So the riot was the one who set out to look for water, once he finds the water, he becomes a
delille. So setting out on the path you are setting out on shediac is a literally an Arabic shediac
means a road to water. And this is the life giving water that God has sent down from the heavens,
just like he sends water from the heavens, he sent revelation from heaven. So this is the life
giving water. So the Shetty is a path to water. Now look at this, I saw in one of the CD, Amazon
rocks book the word ltr. And I want to look up against the root of it urayasu radhiya root means to
		

			walk around, it's like looking for something. So the RA is the one who walks around looking for he's
looking for water and the Arabs are away then go deliberately. And also they say pull out a road,
you know he's walking deliberately. So road, I wonder if road in English is from road, you know,
because road is the path that you walk on. And so the raw ID is searching for something. And this is
what human beings are we are searchers, we're constantly search children are always looking around,
they're picking up rocks, they're looking under rocks, they're investigating constantly to hold it
in arises or a proof that a search for cause is fundamental to the human intellect is he said you
		

			can take a child before it is often when it's still in that just an infant that can't even talk. And
he said if you hide and throw like a rock over its head, and it lands in front of it, it will look
behind it to see where it came from. It doesn't just assume it appeared into existence, because this
is the filter of human beings. And so when we look at the universe, even a child knows that there
has to be an origin of something. So this is the road that we're on setting up for knowledge. So
where does it begin? It begins with language. And this is why we have to acquire language, our
profits allies, and it was the most eloquent of people. Where did he go? When abubaker said to him
		

			or the lion when he said to him, that he was the most eloquent of people that spoke with the
language of Bob and the Arabs called their tongue, the no huddle board. It was a difficult letter to
say and it was unique to the Arabs, the prophet said Bader and you're partially right to feed Ben is
sad because I am operation and I was raised amongst Banu sad, but no sad. We're from the house and
Arabs. They're one of the eloquent tribes of the Arabs. So he was sent to learn the eloquence of
that tribe. What's fascinating to me is he didn't say well, that's the way God made me know, he gave
the sociological explanations for his eloquence. He said I'm Qureshi and I grew up amidst the most
		

			eloquent of the desert Arabs because they had a pure Arabic And if you look at the hadith of Halima
Saudia, when you look at those Hadees of hers, they're very difficult Hadees because she's using all
these difficult words all her Hadees that she related, need a dictionary, and that's who the
province of Assam God His words from frost, the great American poet said that all of life begins
with discipline and the first discipline is the acquisition of words. montane, the French
philosopher said most of the world's problems are grammatical, that is not an insignificant
statement. Nietzsche, the German philosopher said that I'm afraid we haven't gotten
		

			Word of God because we still believe in grammar. And one of the fascinating things to me about the
Islamic civilization is they were obsessed with grammar, they were obsessed with our civilization
gave us the first real dictionaries, the Jewish tradition got dictionaries from us before the
Muslims, they did not have their dictionaries, the European dictionaries came very late. I mean, if
you look in English, we don't have dictionaries from the time of Shakespeare. So some of the words
we have to guess at them, Johnson's dictionary, which is 18th century, it's late. And that's the
first serious dictionary. And it's not anywhere near as scientific as our dictionaries. When you
		

			look at something like a line, which shows up very early on hollyland fahidi, which shows up very
early eight century they're already writing dictionaries. So this obsession with language was
because they understood that revelation is in language, and they wanted to understand language. So
the first thing that we have to acquire is language. And a lot of us use words elastically, we don't
really use words with a sound knowledge. And the way that you define things is by learning logic.
And so these were the two really, really foundational sciences in the Muslim oma, it was grammar and
then logic, you first learned grammar, and then you learn logic and logic is the grammar of thought.
		

			So just as grammar is the logic of language, it shows you how language works. That logic is the
grammar of thought it teaches you how to think one of the really foundational texts of the late
Islam. I mean, this is the last few 100 years is a book called The Salaam. He was only 21 years old
when he wrote it up the Ramayana Aha, but he is one of the great scholars on busca, which is now in
Algeria. But he wrote this little text, and it's basically a versification of a famous text by
periphery called the ISA goji, which was an introduction to logic. But he says in that, that when
holo feature was initially avadi be here at a third party. There's a difference of opinion about
		

			occupying yourself with logic. And there are three different opinions for even on Salahi when Noah
we heard a rumor about upon young Buffy and your mama, and even though Sara and Imam know what we he
says, No, are we for the beat? haram are they considered it prohibited will caught up Omen, young
Buffy angioedema, and another group said no, you have to know it. What outta 10 Matura Tosa. He has
Java who he cannot carry her. And the sound his opinion is the one who is capable of understanding
it should study it more Marisa suniti would kitabi the TDV era swaby the one who's practicing the
book and the sooner so that they can be guided to what sound and this is why he mama because it was
		

			the one who introduced logic into the methodology of the also the scholars he actually in his famous
book called staska. The first 40 pages are an introduction to logic. And this is also what he
introduced into the way of the motocaddy mean also. So these become very important tools. In our
tradition. This argument that logic is prohibited is as far as I'm concerned. It's really something
that's very dangerous. Because when you mom, no we said that it was haram he was talking about a
type of philosophy. Because at that time, logic was not separate from philosophy. It was actually
studied as part of the peripatetic tradition. And they were worried about people going astray. With
		

			this. That's why they prohibited it had nothing to do with the actual subject itself. It had to do
with the people that were teaching it and the methodology with which it was taught. But Mr. Rosati
who mastered, even seen his work on logic and then basically began to use it in his methodological
approach, it becomes very important, and this is why our scholars always said I'll tell you some in
what's currently called Saudi Arabia, in Medina, that there's a university there, which was started
in the 1960s to teach Islam to not just the Saudis, but internationally, but it focused on a certain
school within Islam, which is the Salafi school now, the Salafi school originally was a Humphrey
		

			School, and there's a long history of how they became they departed from the madhhab tradition,
because the early people they're called wahabis. They don't like to be called Wahhabi, but these
people traditionally were hand buddies, but they had a 30 Creed. And they did not like a speculative
qalam they didn't like any of the Ashanti or the metodi tradition, but they had a great Mauritanian
teacher there. Muhammad Amina Shem Kielty, who I was fortunate enough to actually have studied with
his son and heard many stories about him. I lived in his house or a time when I was in Medina. So my
mother munition fealty adopted he left the Mauritanian men hatch and adopted the men hatch there. He
		

			was a brilliant scholar and he wrote a famous Tafseer called Odwalla ban, but because he was a
master of all solar
		

			And especially of the authority tradition, which is based on him America's daddy's work, because
even though Kodama who wrote wrote the novel, which is the soli textbook of the Hanbury school, it's
basically an abridgment of Mr. Marquez and is also so to learn it without logic, which made it much
more difficult. So he actually wrote because they considered at that time, it was prohibited to
teach logic. He wrote a logic book for Medina University, but changed all the he called it a double
bath, one manava. So he put all the logic in it, which is another science, double bathroom and other
which is related to logic. But he actually taught them logic without calling it logic, because he
		

			knew how beneficial it was. So this idea that some Muslims have that they shouldn't use logic, it's
just really, it's just not, it's not healthy. Because part of the crisis that we're in is people
aren't thinking clearly, thinking and feeling are two ways in which human beings experience we think
things through and we feel things and feelings are very important. But feelings should never
override thinking, when you're dealing with momentous matters. Feelings are much more important in
things like love, like you don't have an intellectual relationship with the one you love. I mean,
you could that could be part of the relationship. But that relationship that's founded in more than
		

			muhabba, that's not intellectual, that's something related to the emotions, it's, and it's very
different. So thinking and feeling can become confused, and people and one of the things that logic
teaches you is to check your feelings, and to become more objective and approaching things. And also
because in what's known as material logic, which looks at, you know, what, in here's inside,
thought, in material logic, you're actually taught the fallacies. So there's things for instance,
there's fallacies like collectivizing, it's, it's very common for people to make hasty
generalizations. So if you have a bad experience that say, you go to New York, and you have three
		

			cab drivers, all from the same country, they're immigrants, and they cheat you all three of them.
And then you just assume all people from that country are thieves, that's crazy to do that, because
you're going to buy stereotyping people, you're going to wrong people from that country that aren't
cheaters or thieves. And then the other thing is to look at it that maybe they didn't cheat you. I
mean, you might be wrong about that. That's David Foster Wallace, his approach in this is water,
that sometimes what we think is going on is out not actually going on, it's in our minds. So these
are aspects of our tradition that have been neglected for too long. And we really need to revive
		

			them, we need to revive the centrality of grammar. And we also need to revive again, logic. And I
will say in conclusion that my own my great grandmother, which I inherited her logic book from my
father, she studied logic as a high school student in black falls, Wisconsin. So it wasn't that long
ago that that just high school students were being taught this. And I think part of the problem that
we're suffering from in the United States is just a lack of reasoning skills, to think things
through and to think deeply about things. And we need these tools. And they are tools, their
instruments, and we live in what was traditionally termed a republic, which is representational
		

			government. And Montesquieu, the great French political scientist and philosopher. He said that
different governments have fundamental virtues. And he said that the virtue of a monarchy is honor.
Like that's the virtue of them a monarchy like that. They're meant to be honorable noblesse oblige.
You know, it's nobility obliges you to be honorable and noble. And then he said, at democracy, like
when you have a dictatorship, the fundamental component in a dictatorship is fear. You can't have a
dictatorship without fear. You can't have a friendly tyrant, he has to scare people, or it doesn't
work. But he said that virtue are the hallmark of a Republic was education, you could not have a
		

			republic without an education. And they say that Ben Franklin, when he came out of the Continental
Congress, they asked him what kind of government do you have, he said, a republic if you can keep
it, meaning that it's a tough government to hold on to, because it needs educated people. And the
more educated people are, the more self governing they are, the less self governing people are, the
more necessary it is to bring in force to control them. And this is how tyrants end up, taking over.
They take over when things begin to break down. And in fact, in Aristotle's what follows a Republic
is what he called a democracy, which was the rule of the mob, the demos, and then the next thing
		

			that follows is a tyranny, because the mob gets out of hand and rebels
		

			Constantly and tears down things and, and then the tyrant comes in to set order straight. That's
quite tragic. And then it begins to repeat itself these patterns. So this is the human condition.
But for us as Muslims, the human condition
		

			doesn't change the more it changes, the more it stays the same. There are cycles, these are cycles
in history and even while doing identified them, and they really do. They don't repeat themselves
exactly, but they're patterns that are discernible, and that's what's important to note. But always
in the midst of this no matter where you are, no matter who you are, no matter what your conditions
are, you can always turn to Allah subhanho wa Taala and the best way to turn to him is to set out to
know Him through knowledge