Suhaib Webb – The Masses Creed 6 Approaching the Sacred In An Age Drenched In Evil
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You You know, the relationship between faith and
the intellect is a hot topic, especially coming
out of a post enlightenment world, modernity.
You couple all that with,
hyper puritanicalism
amongst many religions as well as within Islam,
and people see that sometimes people of faith
do extremely illogical things, and it hurts people's
faith.
What does mainstream Islam say about the marriage,
the relationship between faith and the intellect? This
fifth line that we've been discussing really is
going to help us
appreciate,
how classical Muslim scholars
navigated
the the the difficult
at times and powerful at times relationship,
between the mind
and the sacred, right, between the heavens and
the earth. And and we note that when
the sheikh he says in this line,
Right? We talked about this word. Right?
The obligation to learn. The first obligation upon
any Muslim
Right? The first obligation upon a person is
to think. Now our scholars,
contrary to kind of the dominant, message out
there, and and and this is why sometimes
you feel the trained, learned
people in the community are are
sometimes shocked
by prominent content providers because they say things
which are
counter to the nuance and temperament of mainstream
Islamic thought.
But
classical
scholarship, and I'm referring now specifically to the
Sunni world, that's what I'm trained in,
divided
rulings
into 3. And and the word for rulings,
as many of you know, is hokum.
Right? The word hokum actually means to stop
something.
It its real meaning,
is not ruling. Right? It's real meaning. Hakamtuk
means manatuk.
I stopped you from from from doing something.
And this is important for us to know
because, you know, you have anti Muslim bigots
that say, you know, Sharia is here to
dominate the world. Muslims, you know, the only
thing they're concerned about is the rulings of
their sacred texts, blah blah blah. And you
have people within the Muslim communities that are
saying, you know,
whoever doesn't rule by what Allah has ruled
is a kafir, so on and so forth.
Let's take some time in light of the
statement,
right, to look at the types of conclusions.
And this is extremely important because this is
going to lead into a discussion
about the belief in the existence
of god and the bravery of early scholars
to tackle that issue.
So what I've done is is put here
to the to the right,
the three conclusions or rulings that,
mainstream Islam has always recognized. Number 1, our
mental conclusions, like, half of a 100 is
50. You don't have to ask someone like,
what's the for that, man? Like, what's the
for, you know, 50 is half of a
100? Like, for real, dude?
Number 2 are habits. Like, what color of
clothes do you like to wear? What type
of food do you like to eat, of
course, within the halal?
Do you walk fast or slow? When it's
cold outside, you wear something. Right? You don't
have to go to the Quran and Sunnah,
right, to find specific guidance on those issues.
If you do, you got problems, right? You
need to use your mind, right? And then
the third type of conclusion or ruling is
a shara'i
ruling and that is in regards to, for
example, prayer,
certain ethics, right, morality,
certain issues of dress, food, and so on
and so forth.
So
I want us to take time to be
able to appreciate that because that's going to
inform us about the conversation that we're gonna
have soon about
god's existence.
But in order to to really to to
to support what I'm saying, I brought a
text here to the left.
You can see it of Imam ibn Asher.
This is really
the most widely accepted text within the Maliki
school,
within classical
Maliki schools, within Morocco,
Mauritania,
Senegal,
Central
Africa, Northern Africa, Azhar, you name it.
And the sheikh, he says
he says that you know the types of
rulings that we have
one of them is akli,
a mental ruling, a mental conclusion.
And it is an issue. When you see
the word that
means something that needs to be affirmed or
denied. It is an issue
that does
not
rest
upon
a habit.
And what he means by
is
sharia. Alright. Now this is really important because
the sheikh is is is coming at an
era where
Islamic thought is being codified, orthodoxy now has
really been established, and he's saying, listen, throughout
mainstream Islam, we've always recognized 3 type of
conclusions.
Right? Not everything is explicitly sharia.
Everything may be implicitly sharia. Of course, our
habits are going to be governed by our
religious way of life,
because habits are conditioned
to the fact that they don't violate the
sacred
as is the mental conclusions.
But in general, what he's trying to show
you here is that classical Muslim scholars
were able to marry
the sacred
with the nonsacred,
religious text
with the intellect. And and the reason that
this is important is throughout this discussion in
our other classes that we take together, you're
going to see the synthesis
of the marriage between the mind,
right, and the sacred, between the sacred and
the mind. But this is extremely important because
in the next slide, we're gonna talk about
the types of conclusions related to these three
and then how that leads into to a
discussion
about god's existence,
prophets,
books, you name it.
What I need you to know just from
this short, short discussion is that there are
really 3 type of rulings, conclusions
that Muslim theologians recognized,
mental,
habits,
and Sharia.