Tom Facchine – al-Raghib al-Isfahani #65 – This Will Save Your Afterlife

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Raghava Hani, he said that the most important knowledge true knowledge is knowledge that's going to save you in the afterlife. So we're talking about knowledge of Deen. That's the real knowledge and the knowledge of Deen starts with the knowledge of Allah's power data. And so Rob was honey then he goes on to kind of divide knowledge into things that you can sort of figure out yourself and things that you can't, things that you need help with. And the help is Revelation. So for example, when it comes to things such as recognizing your creativeness and therefore, the implication of that recognizing that there is a Creator, that's something that, you know, you don't need revelation to

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establish, that's something that the human being any human being can figure out on their own. And the same with their sustenance, just to realize that you're something you're a creature that needs to be sustained. You know, if you stopped breathing for three minutes, if you stopped eating, for three weeks, you stopped drinking water for three days, you're gonna be in a really, really tight spot. And so where does that come from? Right, like how contingent and how sort of shaky Your existence is, you're kind of dangling by a thread, always needing to be sustained always needs to be sustained, and realizing that any second can see all that sort of sustenance, dry up and just go

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away. So implying from that, or figuring out from that, that you have a sustainer, who's keeping you going, who is providing that air, providing that water, providing that food, everything that you need, these are things that the intellect can grasp on their own. And this is why Allah spawns on the Koran, especially in the Meccan verses and so on, he appeals to that side of your intellect, it's innate, he appeals to it to get you to the point of submission, because you're not going to be able to figure out some of the details by yourself, you need revelation for that. This is the limit of the intellect, the intellect is not a perfect tool. It's not a complete tool. It's not just meant

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to take you to the finish line, it's meant to take you to the door, but then you have to decide to walk into the door. So what's the door we're talking about knowing the last panel data in the specifics, because the human mind is a really, really powerful thing. And so if you think about it hard enough, you can think about things in multiple different ways and from multiple different vantage points and perspectives. Well, maybe Allah does do this, or maybe Allah can't do that you're not really sure. So when it comes to the specifics of who alas pound Allah is and what he does and what he doesn't do, what he what he is not, right. That's something that you need revelation to help

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you with. So you have this sort of a priori intellect, this sort of intellect this fitrah that's, that's given to you. And that brings you to the point of assessing, you know, is this a real prophet? Is this a real Deen? Is this a real source of communication from my Sustainer? And then you have to submit and once you submit, then you find the details. Okay, Allah does this. Okay, a lot doesn't do that. So the specifics of who Allah's found Allah is and what he does and does not do, but also what Allah subhanaw taala does and does not want. And that brings us to the Shediac. Right? What is what is obedience? What is worship, we throw this this thing around worship this word, the

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same with devotion, we throw it around, people talk about, oh, well, that's my worship. That's my prayer. Well, how do you know that your worship and your prayer is recognized as worship or as prayer or as devotion, you need special information for that you need revelation for that you can't figure that out on your own. If I wanted to, I could say, well, I'm going to worship my Creator by standing out in the sun all day. And that might seem like a really good idea. But I don't have any evidence for that. I don't have any way of verifying that, you know, is that something that is going to be read by my Creator, or understood or registered by my Creator as worship? You know, because

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there's two aspects to every action? There's the intention? Yeah. Okay. A lot could say, well, he had a good intention, even though he had no idea what he was doing. Or, or, you know, there's the second part, which is the actual form of the thing. You've got certain people these days that have taken this to the extreme, they say, Well, you know, they they will call acts of immorality and acts of disobedience. They'll call that their worship and their devotion. And so you need some sort of audit, you need some sort of third party outside of yourself that's going to tell you this is what obedience is, this is what disobedience is, this is what Allah wants. This is what Allah doesn't

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want. This is what Allah loves. This is what Allah hates these sorts of things. So that's where revelation comes in. And we absolutely depend upon revelation to fill in the granular level of those details. And one last point is that, you know, when, when Ragosa Hani is talking about belief, and he's talking about, you know, knowing Allah, he talks about doubt, and I found this really, really relevant to today's sort of audience and especially converts because everybody has doubts and sometimes converts have doubts and things like that. And I've always been kind of dissatisfied with the word doubt in English because it really seems to describe a lot of things. It describes somebody

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who is so fundamentally skeptical, right? Doubting Thomas, right? Somebody who's who's doubtful about something to the very core, and then it also describes like a fleeting sort of doubt or a hypothetical or something that you just kind of that occurs to you out of nowhere, and maybe it doesn't make up sort of like a primary way that you think about things and arugula. So he actually talks about this, and he says that the first type of doubt is like is this sort of doubt that is understandable. Okay, so it's like

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He compares it to somebody seeing something from a distance, okay, you look off way in the distance and you see something and you can't see the details of it. So you're pretty sure that it's this thing, right? We're using kind of maybe probabilistic reasoning, like it's like beyond reasonable doubt, we could say, you look at it, and you see, yeah, you're pretty sure once in a while, the thought creeps in like, what if it's not, what if it's actually something else? But then you kind of reasoned yourself through is like, well, then it would be this other thing. And I would see that and if that were true, then this would happen. And so you're able to kind of bring yourself back to

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certainty and say, no, no, that is what I thought it was. Right? That's something that happens to everybody. And that even as something that we could perhaps say that this was sort of a thing that some of the prophets engaged in the Koran when they asked last found to Allah to show them how does does Allah resurrect the dead or asked to see Allah directly? Right or see Allah sign directly? Right. But then the second type of doubt, that's the that's the thing that is much more chronic, it's much more fundamental and Ragosa Hani compares it to not only seeing something from far off, but in addition to that, it's hidden behind a screen, you only see like the shadow. And so you are

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in fundamental doubt, constantly, like is it really, you know, I would like it to be this thing, but maybe it's not, maybe it's something else entirely. And this is something that's a problem. And this is something that you have to work through in order to make sure that you verify for yourself what's real and what's not and what is true and what's not.