Tom Facchine – Minute with a Muslim #100 – Should Muslims Read Philosophy

			A lot of people want to know, Can I read philosophy? Can I read this? Can I read that? And the
answer is who are you? Right? Because it's not something that everybody should be reading. Okay.
Many of the great alumna even say me, probably Foremost among them, studied philosophy. Anybody who
reads his works can tell that he really knew philosophy very, very well. But that wasn't his
paradigm. His paradigm was not a philosophical paradigm, he had a paradigm that was indigenous. Now,
the actual Islam that Allah is found to have revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was set up with the
understanding of the companions in the in the righteous, sort of early generations of Muslims, okay,
		

			but he saw what was happening with the influence of external paradigms, traditions of reason,
traditions of logic, that were outside of our tradition that were not indigenous to our tradition,
or were not divine and source. And so he read those books in order to break it down, and to
problematize it and to show sort of the weaknesses and the contradictions and where it fits and
where it doesn't fit. Okay, so everybody who is has a strong foundation in Islam, you're going to
have to read things you don't agree with, right? I mean, I'm somebody Hamdulillah, I've studied a
bit. And so I have to read things that I don't agree with. And I have to read about this ideology,
		

			and that ideology, and the third ideology, why it's not that I'm studying in the sense of learning
from it, it's that I need to be able to account for it, I need to be able to deal with it, I need to
be able to explain to people who find it appealing, why it is appealing, but why it also isn't
adequate. Okay, so if you're in that, if you're a scholar, and I use that term loosely here, like if
you're an academic, if you're somebody who is already you know, with a strong foundation in Islam,
then yes, yeah, you have to find your your niche and you have to study things that you don't agree
with, and you have to break it down for other people and try not to be influenced by it. That's
		

			normal. Okay, but should every single average person just pick up a book on philosophy or Greek
logic or this and that? No, no, of course not. Right? If you're not, if you don't have a strong
foundation, you know, you have to consider, you know, you only get sort of you can think of it as an
empty vessel. Like imagine you have like a cup or a glass, okay? You start with a glass empty, and
then you pour something into it. Okay? What happens if you pour something into the glass after it's
already full, it spills over the top, it doesn't stay in the glass. Okay? So if you're an empty
glass, you don't want to go pouring in just anything under that glass, because that's going to be
		

			your foundation and it's going to stay but if your glass is already full, as full with Islam, then
it doesn't matter what else you pour into it, you know, it's going to overflow and it's not gonna
stick