Tom Facchine – Knowledge is for The Sincere

			Yeah, it comes down to what your theory of knowledge is at the end of the day. So a raga with us for
honey in his book, that he either macadam and shut er, he talks about the obligation of teaching
sincere students, and the obligation of withholding knowledge from students of poor character. And
this shows us a, an idea that knowledge isn't an inherent good, it's not an unqualified good, right?
If you give
		

			your spouse, your location, your data, your your search history, maybe that's good. But if you give
it to Google, right, or they sell it, some third party or something like that, that might not be
good, right? So knowledge is good in good hands. And it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. So the
idea is just that, you know, as opposed to kind of in the West, where we're just concerned about
knowledge, we're just concerned about education. And we don't really care or pay attention to ethics
very much at all. If you have anything about ethics, it's like, you know, cordoned off, and maybe
one lesson at the end of the unit or whatever. But the real sort of thing that you're learning is
		

			the biology or the physics or the chemistry or, you know, computer programming, all this sort of
thing, right, but
		

			there is an understanding that ethics is something that doesn't belong. And that couldn't be further
from the truth. In Islam, it's the opposite is that you have to be sure that you're going to use
this knowledge for good. And the only people that are going to use the knowledge for good are people
who fear Allah, and people who believe that they're going to be held accountable in the afterlife,
believe in eternal punishment or eternal reward. Right? So the person has to have a base level of
righteousness
		

			in order to properly receive knowledge. If you give a person all the knowledge of the Arabic
language and the Quran and the Hadith, and they are just dripping with arrogance, what are they
going to do with it?
		

			They're going to use it for their own ends, they're going to argue using the Quran and the Sunnah
and everything else close from the scholars, in order to serve themselves in a material way, in a
way that has to do with the reputation or etc, etc. And we see it that we see it, to be honest with
you. We see certain people fall into this where, you know, Sheikh Abdullah used to tell us all the
time, there's two types of people, there's people who put themselves in service of the dean. And
then there's people who put the dean in the service of themselves.
		

			And the only way to get away that to avoid that problem is not through knowledge. It's through
character. It's through purifying yourself.