Suhaib Webb – The Masses Creed 6 Approaching the Sacred In An Age Drenched In Evil

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.