al-Raghib al-Isfahani #75 – Playing Video Games in Medina

All of us for Hani advises us, if you're going to tread this path of seeking knowledge, then you need to focus, you have to focus on your studies, and you can't get distracted by the world. And that Illa Allah, I mean, we live in an era that is defined by distractions. I mean, we have just think of it, you have people whose job it is they get paid millions of dollars to compete for your attention, or they call it the attention economy, right, you're scrolling through Facebook, you're scrolling through Instagram. And their job is to keep your eyes on that newsfeed. Their job is to keep your attention, how many minutes can we squeeze out of you, that's literally what they're paid

to do, okay, and you've got devices, such as a smartphone that are literally designed to keep your eyes glued on that device. And so we've never lived in a time with more distraction. So anybody who wants to study anything, especially if they want to study a snap needs to be extremely wary of this and needs to not waste their time. And they need to be organized and have a schedule and not get distracted. You know, in Medina, there were some students who would play video games. And I never really liked that, because I felt like it was not appropriate. I felt like it was a distraction, and not the fitting sort of the purpose for which we were there. Now, it's true that everybody needs to

sort of take their mind off of things and reset and say, Okay, I can see an argument for that somebody wants to play a video game once in a while in order to kind of like take their mind off of things and reset. But I definitely saw some students that it became a problem for them. It was a habit, it was something that was something that they they did regularly, and it actually detracted from their studies. So you need to take it seriously, you need to find that sweet spot, you're not going to burn yourself out. Okay, yeah. But you also need to not get distracted. You also need to make sure that you focus on what you're there to do, and that you apply yourself that makes sure

that at the end of the day, that you can walk away and say, You know what, I didn't do everything right. And I made some mistakes. But I sure did apply myself. The next thing that we absolutely have to avoid as students on the path is arrogance towards our teachers, arrogance towards our teachers, and arrogance towards the subject. And that can look like a lot of different things. I remember one of my favorite professors in Medina, and with another Fatah, I feed the whole lot, who taught us tafsir, that he will get very upset at some of the more immature behavior that happened in class, you know, students talking these sorts of things, looking at their phones, but I really liked how he

put it one day, you know, when he kind of didn't lose his temper, but he got quite upset at some of the behaviors, some of the students and he said, It's not about me, it's about the subject. You're not respecting this. You're not respecting the subject. We're talking about Tafseer we're talking about a logbook, and you're here in class and you're whispering to each other and you're, you know, like checking your phone or whatever. Like I'm really not appropriate, completely inappropriate. And there is a type of arrogance that's there. It's a type of arrogance towards that subject, just like we see from the orientalist, come and say, you know, it's like, oh, the Hadith aren't reliable, or,

you know, oh, maybe the Koran was taken from some Syriac thing or whatever. This is the epitome of arrogance towards a topic, the epitome of Arabic arrogance towards a topic not having any humility, while HELOC talks about epistemic humility, Islam is about epistemic humility is that you need to be humble, when you approach this, there's a saying that the subject won't give itself won't give even part of itself to you, if you don't give all of yourself to it. And so you need to be humble towards the things that you're studying. And also humble to your instructor. You know, young men are very, very famous for this, right? It's like the, the chef says something and you say, I know, right, or

you try to finish the sentence, right? These sorts of things, or you mentioned that you knew it before, right. And there's a lot of subtle ways that the neffs have the neffs has to kind of cloak these things that are really just virtue signaling at the end of the day, but we tell ourselves that we're making conversation or we're trying to show you know, whatever, you know, very, very dangerous, very, very dangerous to be arrogant towards your instructor. There's two types of people we say in our tradition that don't learn one of them is the arrogant person, you know, you can't teach somebody who thinks they already have it all figured out and already knows anything, or knows

everything rather. And then the other type of person that won't learn is the person who is too afraid to shy. And it's interesting, because I think being too afraid and too shy to put yourself out there and make mistakes. And we see this with language acquisition a lot and language learning. That's actually a different type of arrogance. It's actually a more subtle type of arrogance. Because what's behind not wanting to speak a language, for example, make mistakes is that you don't want to be corrected, you don't want to be seen as wrong, what's embarrassing to you. And there might be a sense of self or a sense of arrogance that underlies that or lies underneath that. So

yeah, I mean, you need to be respectful. There's a saying right, people talk to about Musa and Hubbard right, most of traveled to hell, but not the other way around. You have these days people watch the shift in your home, that we want convenience, we want ease. And so you know, we imagine that this person is going to be coming around going here. And there are that why don't you do this, you know, email, or why don't you do this shake, it will be easier for the students and easier for that. But who's who's considering what's easy for the sheikh who's considering what's easy for the mmm, and we want you to do this and that and the third we want you to do you know, okay, suggestions

are fine, but also pay attention and learn the suggestions of the sake and the suggestions of the email. Maybe there's a reason why he's not answering your question. If it's a fifth question in a public forum, maybe there's a reason why he chose to deliver something in a certain format

As opposed to a format, maybe that you would like there's lessons there. And any good shape that's worth his salt is actually going to be subtly teaching these things to you. He won't say it out loud. He won't say it explicitly, but he's actually showing you something important through those decisions as well. So now I'm gonna come on off to La our fundraiser has been an amazing success. May Allah reward every single person who has contributed to the walk fund for you to commit sheet so with the last 10 nights coming up, we really encourage everybody to strive and donate generously. And if you've donated what you can already then to just spread the message and share it with people

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