al-Raghib al-Isfahani #73 – I’m Probably Guilty of This Too

Two other thoughts are all of us Rouhani has on knowledge. One of them is to prioritize, right? If you're going to be well rounded, you're not just going to over specialize in one particular field, you still need to have a sense of sequence and a sense of priority. Some things come first. And we have in our tradition, you know, we talked about the setup and how they approached knowledge. You know, first things came first, you have the famous story of the mimetic his mother's sort of wrapping his turban and sending him away. And she said, the first thing that you benefit from is the manners, right, the etiquette of your shape. And that's extremely important. Again, another

reminder, that knowledge for us is ethical knowledge, Islam, in the whole Islamic paradigm, you know, to have knowledge, that knowledge will only benefit if it's ethical, you can have all the information in the world, but if you are not going to be ethical with that knowledge, and you're not going to have ethics and morals baked into your pursuit of knowledge, then it's a waste, you're going to actually end up in the fire you're gonna have a really damning case against you in the afterlife, like the Hadith of the Prophet slice on him when he says Who are the you know, some of the people who are the first to be put into hellfire Who do you have, right you don't have the

criminal and the and the murderer and the you know, this you have the person who's the phony scholar, right, the person who accumulated a lot of information, but they did so unethically. So that's the first thing is to prioritize. So the first thing that comes you know, ethics, you know, making sure that we get this down important. The Koran obviously, if you don't know Arabic, that's there too many scholars after they memorize the Quran, they would go on to actually meet off they will go on to because the prophesy Some said that this would be the first knowledge to be taken away from the OMA, this is the knowledge of inheritance law and things like that. And then you have

certain fields of knowledge that are keys that unlock others, right. So when you study, you know, your your studies effect on your studies of of Tafseer. And your studies of Hadith will be never ending, right? Because it's inexhaustible, to go over the Koran and to meditate on it. And then, you know, is almost inexhaustible. There's there's a lot of stuff there. And these in the strict sense of the word, yes, they're finite, there's a finite amount of material, but it'll take a lifelong sort of relationship. But there's certain things that give you the tools to study other things, right, such as Zulu, and also Hadith and these types of things. And we can make that same

prioritization outside of Islamic fields. So I'm going to talk about should I go and study the deen first? Or should I, where should I be with my Koran versus this other type of thing that I want to do I want to get an MBA, I want to do this other sort of thing, read, prioritize, prioritize some things come before others. And if you don't have the right priorities, then the things that you study first might actually end up harming you rather than helping you. The second point that I thought was funny brings here and concludes with talking about knowledge is the importance of not letting our knowledge exceed our practice. And that is extremely difficult in today's world. And I

am probably extremely guilty of this, as well as that we have the quest for quantity, we live in the reign of quantity, and we've abandoned the quality we've abandoned the implementation we demand and the transformation, right? We gather up knowledge, we have comedy who follow the Quran do we have and how many understand the Quran, right? That's an indictment against us, even though it's a good thing that we've preserved the court and so well, Hamdulillah. But it is an indictment against us. It's not for us that we've produced this sort of thing where you have people who are basically just making sounds, and they don't understand what they're reciting. And that goes for everything else,

right? The Companions, they would learn the core and 10 verses at a time and they would not move on until they implemented those 10 verses because they were afraid that they had the ethical knowledge that they knew that if they knew something and didn't put it into practice that Allah is bound to Allah would hold them to account that would ask them about that in the afterlife. We're so far from that. We're so far from that. We like to hoard knowledge and Store up knowledge and actually it was so handy gives a powerful analogy for this. He said, It's like somebody who collects weapons, somebody who collects they have a huge store. Imagine these days you got these preppers you've got

ammo and supplies or whatever. And then their whole lives and other they never fire a bullet. Right? That's what we want to avoid when it comes to knowledge, storing up storing up storing up and never putting it into practice, right. The knowledge becomes knowable by it's being embodied, and it's being put into practice and we ask a law for success.