Suhaib Webb – AlRazi’s Foundations of The Sacred The Importance of Correct Interpretation
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AI: Transcript ©
Assalamu Alaikum Warahmatullah.
We're going to read insha Allah a few
harakas through this book, Assas and Takdis,
sections of this book, the foundations of the
sacred,
written by Al Imam al Mujadid Al Alamma
Fakhruddin Al Razi
Well, Imam al Razi dies at the beginning
of 7th century, 606 after hijri. He was
murdered by the karamiya. That's very important for
you to note, you should research who are
the and what did they believe, who
also called the
those who believe that God had a physical
form.
They actually poisoned him and they also slandered
him. So a lot of the things you
hear about Imam al Razi, they're untrue
and they come from, the origin comes from
Al Karamiya.
Imam Arazi Rahim MashaAllah
Alaihi.
Imam Asiyuti mentions him in his poem on
the revivers of Islam, which we're gonna teach
here Insha'Allah Ta'ala in the future and that's
Swiss.
Khallaz, Imam Masiyuti who dies 9:11 after hijri,
almost 300 years later,
he praised
Fafhuddin Arazi
Go and read what Imam Taji
Asuki
he wrote in Tabooqatash
Shafi'iha
about Imam Ar Razi
Maybe some people will say well Imam ibn
Taymiyyah
he wrote
a book,
it's a large book
attacking Ar Razi. So what?
People can write books about people all the
time, doesn't mean what they wrote is correct.
And it also doesn't equate to that one
person's opinion
being the final
judgment on the other person, especially when we
have the majority of Ahlus Sunnah,
Hata Al Azhar,
praising Imam al Razi
and also being critical of Imam al Razi,
like Imam al Nafi for example and his
Muqaddimah.
The point is, you want to be mature
and avoid sectarian differences
sectarian, excuse me, differences
as much as you can and be someone
that has an open heart, someone that is
mature,
is emotionally centered,
and that stuff hasn't done a lot for
us.
The second sort of criticism
directed towards the imam is that, and I
said this before years ago, may Allah forgive
me, that everything
is in his tafsir
except tafsir. And I said that out of
my ignorance over 20 years ago.
And the reason that people say that, as
I heard from one of our teachers
in Azhar
years ago,
is that
most of us don't have the skillset to
appreciate what is real tafsir.
It's like if you go to a really
nice restaurant and you eat really, really nice
food, you might not like the taste of
it, because you and I, we're used to
In N Out, or Chick Fil A, as
long as it's halal or whatever. We're used
to
that kind of street food.
So we may not be able to appreciate
fine dining, that's halal,
because we never had it before. Well, that's
on us. That's why the poet says, if
the eye is infected, don't blame the painter.
If the tongue is infected, don't blame the
Sheykh.
So nowadays what does tafsir mean? Tafsir has
been reduced in the English language
to gyms,
to numerical miracles of the Quran,
to how many times days appear
in the Quran.
These were never the purposes of tafsir, that
was salt on the food.
The purpose of tafsir was to bring the
guidance of Islam
into the different aspects of life so that
people will see the light of Sayyidina Muhammad
sallallahu alaihi wa sallam and follow that light
until they worship Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala. That's
why just a 100 years ago, a Sheikh
Mohammed Abu in Lebanon, he used to teach
in a church, excuse me, in a mosque.
And Christians would come to him
in his tafsir,
and people asked him, like, why are you
here? They said, Nastafid, we benefit from the
sheikh.
Now the reductivism
and the need to turn knowledge into entertainment
has reduced Islamic studies to the point that
we may not recognize
really what the ulama
and our teachers are teaching. And so then
we get frustrated. We are projecting our own
secular modern state, if you will,
on
Islamic studies.
That's dangerous, man.
And vice versa, we also have
to think critically in both ways, but you
get the idea, Imam
Ar Razi his tafsir, tafsir is really incredible.
I remember, you know, a few years ago,
there was a teacher who said,
if, a great Hanafi scholar from Azhar, if
I set,
I'm trying to remember what he said,
I could write 50 pages
on
one verse of Quran and not repeat myself.
And he used to say, I could sit
and teach that one verse for a month
every day, one lesson, and I would not
repeat myself.
SubhanAllah, so maybe the problem isn't
Arazi,
maybe the problem is me. So let me
start with myself.
Imam al Razi, he here on page 135,
he introduces us to something very important, he
says, fee bayani
anajami
afarq al islami
mukirunabi
anaahu
la buddaminatwidhi
Quran
walakhba'a.
He says that this section is going to
clarify the fact
that every sect of Islam
has to acknowledge that there are certain
texts in the Quran
and certain texts from the sunnah of Sayyid
Al Aqwal,
which if we were to accept their explicit
meaning will be a problem, meaning
there has to be interpretation, what we call.
We'll talk about tawil inshaAllah in the future.
Tawil bayid, tawil kharib
and so on and so forth.
We have examples of this though, for example
in the 5th chapter of the Quran
verse 6,
Allah Subhana Wa Ta'la says,
after
All you who believe,
if you stand to pray,
Farsilu
then wash
If you stand to pray, then wash.
If you interpret that verse literally, that's what
it means.
That's why mashallah some of the ulama of
Ulsuh they said taweeluhabhihi
aya
bi mountiqil aqal
right. That this verse you have to interpret
it because nobody goes Allahu
aqbar Falsilu and then starts to make wudu.
So if you were to interpret that verse
as it is explicitly,
as it exists explicitly in the Quran,
then
you would be engaged in bidah.
What's called dalada to iktildah, you have to
interpret that.
The statement of Sayyidina Nabi
actions are by intentions, every single
action right now I'm rocking back and forth
because I'm old,
am I having an intention for that? No,
is the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam truthful?
Without any doubt. So that means
We have to interpret
the hadith here, we cannot go to the
explicit meaning of the hadith because that will
mean every
single thing we do, every single action that
exists and happens
is by niyyah,
halalayukin.
So here we
say we have to make taweeel.
So Imam al Razi is saying that there
are going to be times in the Quran
that every single group of Islam
acknowledges a taweel. And we know that Ahlus
Sunnah Alhamdulillah when it comes to this issue,
they fall in the middle, alhamdulillah, between the
extremes.
There's also an example of the hadith of
the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam in his hadith
Qudsi,
where Allah
will say to a person on the day
of judgment, I was sick,
right, and you didn't care for me.
And the person will respond recognizing
the transcendence of Allah, and say, how could
I have visited you? And now we see
if you would have visited
someone who was sick you would have visited
me.
So we learn this not only from the
principles of
our usool, usoolulufik,
but also in the text themselves,
like the 6th verse of the 5th chapter
of the Quran,
if you interpret it literally,
you'll become from Ahlul Bilah.
And the Hadith of the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi
Wasallam another example, forgivefulness has been removed from
my Umma,
Forgiveness has been removed from my Umma Wallahi,
I wish this was true, I'd tell my
family this.
I forget things all the time.
So we have to interpret this hadith because
of course we all forget, what does it
mean? The sin
of forgetfulness
has been removed,
is forgiven
of my ummah. Laatu akhidna
innasinah.
So we're gonna go through this and I
think it's very important because oftentimes English speaking
Muslims have only been exposed to one understanding,
lil Asaf Shadid. And they assumed that the
early Muslims never made tawil,
that the early Muslims never interpreted texts.
The wahir of the nusus,
the explicit text. So we're going to address
that InshaAllah
And again, I'm not here to argue and
fight with people, I don't have time for
that.
I'm just here to share information, feel free
to differ, that's no problem
but you're not gonna find me engaging it
back and forth and all that stuff,
la.
Qala al imam Ar Razi Rahimullah
Badam Qala after he said, feebayani
ana janmaa forakal islami mukrunabi
ana hulaabuddamina
taweel
So the reason I'm reading this Arabic is
for my students,
and some of, also my teachers to engage
me later on, we can continue these discussions,
and some of my colleagues.
But Imam Marazi says,
this introduction here, we have to recognize
that every group of Islam admits that there
are certain times that they have to make
interpret
the explicit meaning of text. Why? Think about
what the book is talking about, to preserve
the syncede.
If we were not going to interpret
every single action is based on an intention,
and forgetfulness has been removed from my ummah,
if we were to take those hadith literally,
that would imply
that we did not believe the prophet was
truthful because that's not the truth, we forget,
and everything we do is not based on
intention. So there is what called Dalada tu
Iqtida
we have to interpret.
So the whole purpose of this,
from the framework of Ahlus Sunnah, as learned
from the sahaba and the salif, as we'll
see soon,
was to preserve the transcendence of Allah
in our minds,
because Allah doesn't need preserving,
and the Prophet
and
other things, and
take this as a slow ride, this is
a process and I think it'll be more
than 2 halaqa insha Allah.
And it's important to note that the salaf
as the Imam Al Nawawi mentions and the
Imam Al Khattabi and the Imam Al Bayhafi
and others,
they had
two ways to do this when it came
to running into problematic
explicit
texts.
The first is
to suspend the meaning to Allah, Allah knows.
The second, taweel, to interpret it in a
way which preserves the majesty of Allah. Now
we're talking specifically about an Allah, not about
wudu and salah
or in regards to the Prophet sallallahu alaihi
wasallam
to interpret his words in a way that
preserves his isma,
his isma.
So with
Allah
the purpose here is to preserve his taqdis,
his transcendence, his
does distance him from idolatry or any comparisons.
With the Prophets,
specifically
saying the purpose of this is
to preserve their esma,
that they have been protected from doing anything
that would contradict their responsibilities
and roles as prophets.
And now the Sheikh, we're gonna move on
to the text
So now he's going to give examples where
interpretation of the explicit meaning has to happen
or it will contradict a major principle of
Al Islaam. So the interpretation
he says
So the Sheikh, he says first
is that in the Quran we find words
in the context of talking about Allah Subhana
Wa Ta'la like alwaj, face, an eye,
a cheek,
hands,
a shin, one shin.
He said,
If we were to take the literal meaning
of those words
We would have to then assume
that this we would be
affirming
a person
that
has one face,
and on that face are many eyes,
and one cheek, and many hands,
and one shin
and there is no
person on the face of the earth that
is ugly as that description.
There's no way I could accept or believe
or contend
that anyone with any semblance of intelligence
would be pleased to describe their Lord like
this. So he's giving now, this is of
course like a logical argument that if you
were to interpret
all of those texts in the Quran
literally
what type of
literal creation would you have
And the prophet said,
Allah is beautiful, he loves beauty.
So we'll stop here and then next time
we're going to start to move through the
different ayat that Sayyidna Imam al Razi uses
for examples to teach this important principle.