Medina Stories #18 – Muslims Should Avoid This Mindset

You have to be mature, you have to be mature intellectually. And that means, among other things, being able to sift and decipher what is legitimate from somebody and what's not. And to be able to take and benefit from the knowledge that somebody has, and disregard the things that aren't accurate, or aren't right, or are problematic. And this happens all the time. And some people that go to extremes with us some people act like, We're so stupid, as human beings that we can't ever ascertain, right, the truth from falsehood. And so the logic goes, I need to make sure that I am going to like this one Sheikh who's got it all figured out. Right? And then I'll be then I can take

everything from him, right? That's kind of where the logic goes. That's not how it works, first of all, and second of all, Allah azza wa jal appeals to our aka in the Quran, Allah subhanaw taala appeals to our insights in the Quran. One of the regrets of the people that Hellfire as Allah says in surah, tumult, Pollo, loco, Nana smo nakida. If only we had either listened meaning obeyed or thought about it, if only we had used our reason, Allah subhanaw taala. In the Quran, when he asks us to believe his he just say believe because I said so. Because I'm God, and you gotta listen to me know he uses intellectual proofs. He says, look at your food, look at the rivers, look at the

mountains think, right? He gives all these sorts of examples. Think if you had, if you were in this situation, or if you were this or if you were that or if this was the situation, right, it gets us to think we can't be overly pessimistic about our intellectual faculties, we have enough intellectual faculties to be able to discern when someone is just pulling the fleece over our eyes, right? Or when they're giving us something that's worth it. Now, that's not to say that we go to the other extreme, right, where we put ourselves up as this big, you know, like, we're the judge. And we can decide everything no, like, the whole point of going to a chef or going to an authority is to

benefit from their experience. But if you're in that role, and if you're in that mode, you have to realize that everything you hear isn't going to be true. And we had a story when we were in Medina that really illustrates this nicely. We had one Tafseer professor, he was incredible. He had memorized so much poetry, Arabic, like classical poetry, that he would go down the attendance list, and he'd be able to pop out lines bars for every single one of us. And like the things that he had memorized, like the guy, Michelle, that's about a lot and his tough seasonals of tests yet tafsir. And he was one of these old school guys that was educated before they were universities and things

like this, like he did it the traditional way. But one day, he told us something that was just crazy. He's and I forget even how we got there. But he said that, you know, if a pregnant woman looks at a donkey, when she gives birth, the baby is going to be ugly. And in class, we were like, what? And so we we tried to be as respectful as possible raised their hands to shake.

Did you read something? Is there some sort of delete, like evidence, or Where'd you come across this sort of thing? And we thought maybe he had read something or whatever. And so his response was, haven't you seen how at least some people are? It's not natural. And we laughed, because it was ridiculous. But like, you can't take that seriously. Right? He's talking way outside of his field. He's bringing something that has no evidence that's just wherever you got it from. But am I going to at that point, say, this guy's worthless, he's got nothing I can benefit from. Right? Or that takes away from his ability to teach me tafsir has knowledge of poetry. Are these other things? No, of

course not. I can be intellectually mature enough to say, okay, that's clearly not right.

You know, and we had a good laugh about it, but, you know, I'm able to still benefit from the knowledge of the shaved head. So that's what we have to be we have to everybody needs to take responsibility. We want to outsource the responsibility, you know, you take responsibility, be mature enough and be an educate yourself enough so that you're able to discern that you're able to say it's like, well, now I can take from from this but you know, this, the Sheikh said and I'm not really sure about that, maybe that needs further investigation, right? Or maybe I need to ask for a second opinion. Or once in a while you're gonna come across something I'd say well, that's just

ridiculous.