Tom Facchine – Medina Stories #07 – Biggest Influences From Medina

			Some of my most
		

			influential teachers or instructors, when I was in Medina, I mean, the most influential person on my
life, there was definitely shift our village and PT, he was my teacher outside of my formal classes
at the university. So I studied with his tafsir class for four years, we covered about half of the
Koran, and Chef Abdullah was different, and Hamdulillah. He's still alive, but he's fairly advanced
in in age, in that he was all about this, the soul and the spirit, you know, he was always trying to
bring people back to what really mattered, the priorities, the afterlife, fixing ourselves. And he'd
be really, really repetitive. And some people didn't like that, but we needed it. You know, like, he
		

			would always bring up the example of, you know, when people who are maybe more practicing than
others would sit around and they talk about other people who are less practicing. I say, May Allah
guide them? Yeah, he would. He didn't like that. He would always say, like, the guns, he said, and
May Allah guide you. Like, why are you talking about this other people, you focus on yourself. So he
had reminders like that a lot. And sometimes people it was a Tafseer class, but sometimes people
would walk by, and they'd sit down for five minutes, and they wouldn't be able to tell what the
class was about. Because he would go over here and over there and different on different tangents
		

			and things like that.
		

			So it was different than your normal kind of, we're going to study this book from beginning to end,
etc, etc. And it was also different, because, you know, usually classes, especially at the profit,
Smith, G, they attract a certain following, like, there's just certain classes where it's like, only
like the young guys, the students, the hardcore students are like there. And then you've got other
classes that are for nonspecialists, you know, people who are there on pilgrimage or whatever, you
know, you're gonna get a mix of people or adults or older folks, and Sheikh Abdullah is lesson was
different than that everybody, all different walks of life, different types of people, people who
		

			were just there, temporary laborers, students of knowledge, old men, like, you name it, they were
there. So it was a very, very different sort of thing.
		

			As far as the actual university classes that I had probably
		

			probably the most impactful professor I had, it was shaking with Edna Abdel Fatah, he was one of my
tafsir also tafsir. But these guys all gave me kind of my love for tafsir. I had him for two
different semesters, and he was absolutely brilliant. He was absolutely amazing.
		

			He synthesized everything on his own, like he was giving us his notes from 567 different works. And
he was just very serious and very intense. And the sort of connections that he was making this a
large part of, where I got kind of my, I guess, flavor of tafseer from or what interests me the most
of tafsir. Why did Allah use this word instead of that word? Why did the law say it in this order
here, but then a couple pages later, or a couple chapters later, he says it in a slightly different
order, right, trying to get us to make the connections between the different pieces of a chapter or
the different chapters themselves, right? Why does a law describes himself with these particular
		

			names right here in this exact chapter. So he got us to think about why, why this why that and I
really, really appreciated that that approach.