Shadee Elmasry – Why KALAM is Still Relevant in 2024
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AI: Transcript ©
Here's a claim.
Young people today, Muslims in general, do not
need dialectical theology.
What is dialectical theology means?
It's the ping pong of ideas.
You serve me, I gotta respond to you,
right?
My response and the you're jamming me into
this question will produce for me an answer
I would never have come up with by
myself.
That's the meaning of dialectical theology.
The claim that people, youth, do not need
dialectical theology.
They need Iman, Ibadah, and Sohbah.
Well, I would view it as like this.
You cannot say a home doesn't need security,
doesn't need protection, doesn't need locks.
That's not what makes a home.
What makes a home is love, sharing, company,
eating together, hanging out together, forgiving one another.
That's totally a true statement.
But that will all be destroyed if a
thief can enter the house.
Now, here's where I find that to be
fallacious.
Because when you compare two things in that
manner and say, this is what we need,
this is what we don't need, the assumption
is you can only choose one.
And we're not obligated to do that.
There's no reason, nothing jamming us from obligating.
Do we engage in dialectical theology and answer
the questions that atheists, Christians, or misguided sects
inside of Islam are throwing at us?
Of course, we've got to answer these questions.
But the part of the claim that's correct
is that Iman is located in the heart.
And if the heart is clean and healthy,
Iman grows.
With worship, with the study of what Allah
Ta'ala brought us directly.
Forget the dialectical theology.
With study of the law and practice of
it, and the stories of prophets, and all
of the meat and the real protein of
religion.
That's what will grow Iman.
Such a person still can be fooled and
duped.
That's the problem.
Such a person can be misguided, no matter
how beautiful and pious his heart is.
Just like a wonderful home, mom cooks dinner,
dad goes to work, comes back, takes a
shower, sits down with the family, eats a
beautiful dinner.
Then they have dessert.
Then dad goes with one of the kids
to pray Isha in the mosque.
Yeah, that family could be destroyed if you
don't have locks on your doors.
So Kalam is viewed to us as the
locks on the doors.
If someone fires at us in some capacity,
we better change the siding of the house.
Well, that's not the original siding that it
came with.
Yes, we're going to add now, we have
to respond to guys firing back in the
old days.
You may come with a bat.
Today he's coming with a gun.
I got to be ready for that, right?
Not going to say, you know what?
Dad never dealt with guns.
He only dealt with his fist.
Well, grandpa only dealt with his fists.
Dad dealt with a bat.
Well, we're in a new generation now, right?
Next generation, shotgun.
What is the new generation?
Well, the Wi-Fi could get hacked in
this house.
Everything is by Wi-Fi now, right?
The lock, ring.
So now you're going to need a new
generation.
Now they're going to say a gun.
I don't, well, yeah, you can probably get
that a lock.
Yeah, you can probably get that, but less,
we need to make sure that actually some
person can't hack into our, our ring.
I'm talking ring is, you know, the Amazon
ring where you could literally open garage doors,
right?
You could do a lot of things.
If your house gets hacked, that's where we're
headed, right?
So great grandpa.
Yeah, he dealt with fists.
Next one dealt with a stick.
Next one dealt with a gun.
Next one is going to deal with cybersecurity.
All right.
So that you got to be updated.
Now what's good back in the old day,
grandpa and grandma used to sit around and
have dinner together and that's why the relationships
were good and they would sleep early.
Those aspects are good.
So in some aspects you want to go
backwards and that's what's good.
In another aspect you want to move forward.
So that's where dialectical theology and worship are
both necessary.
I want to note the difference between real
life and the internet.
Online to me, it's a place of debating.
It's a place of ideas.
It's a place where people research answers and
it's a place where people put out their
ideas and attack other ideas.
Funny thing is that the people that in
the masjid, it's just like two different worlds.
There are people that I know in the
masjid every day.
They are not on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube.
And there are people that are on those
things.
They're not in a local masjid.
It's like two different worlds.
The one world is all the latest masjid,
the latest questions, the latest debates, the theological
debates, names of groups.
It's just like mudslinging to a degree, but
it's also a lot of meaningful debates.
If you take the question and answer it
properly, people can learn something.
Inside the masjid, it's none of that, right?
It's literally in homes.
When we have gatherings, it's akhlaq, it's adab,
it's muhabba, it's support, it's love, it's sharia,
ibadah, dua, dhikr.
And once in a while, mas'al ilmiya.
Once in a while, a mas'ala of
a debate or something like that.
That's a big difference.
So that's the other thing.
There's probably I would say, one to 2
% of youth, as they come up, and
their mind starts to work, that ask and
demand, need answers to certain questions.
Otherwise, it's not going to work with them.
Those people need direct access to answers.
And that's why you have to literally flood
the internet with it.
Internet's like a huge pool, right?
Every day, there are more and more hoses
being put into the pool, right?
And you see the immediate release of the
hose, and then it gets diluted.
So what do you need?
You need to have a hose constantly running
with the same water.
You can't, it's not like the old days,
where a shaykh would have his books, and
you would buy the shaykh's books, and you're
going to read them.
So he doesn't need to repeat himself.
The internet's the opposite, you must repeat yourself.
You can't say something in a blog post
or a YouTube or Twitter one time, it's
going to be so diluted.
You need to constantly repackage it, repurpose it,
repost it.
So that boom, as soon as someone looks
it up, it's right there.
And that's what they do.
They take old clips, redo it into a
new clip, or just re-answer the same
question.
Just got to be constant.
So it looks like you're doing a lot
of that.
That's all you do.
It's not all you do.
It's just one sliver of life.
And lastly, I would say that dialectical theology
or kalam, it only exists because someone else
threw rocks.
Security on houses only exists after someone stole.
Same thing with dialectical theology, where you're asking
a question that has never been asked before.
Now it does have an answer.
We haven't left anything out of this book.
It does have an answer.
It may not come from the explicit text,
it may come from the lawazim of text.
Again, the lawazim is the necessary implication of
a text.
So that's where these new answers will have
a right and a wrong.
There will be right and wrong to these
questions.
Why are these questions coming up?
Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says, Shaitaan, what
did you say about Shaitaan?
Allah warned us, Shaitaan is constantly, non-stop,
whispering to his followers, those people who are
far from the mercy of God, are misguided,
and following the path of Shaitaan.
Shaitaan now has access to them.
He whispers to them, argue with this, say
that.
Did Shaitaan stop arguing with us?
Did he stop inspiring and whispering to his
followers to argue with you?
Did he stop after the third generation?
Such that we could say, okay, all theology
is done, three generations and that's it.
You're not going to answer half the questions
then.
And if something is harming the Muslims, it
becomes a fard kifaya to find a solution.