Minute with a Muslim #257 – Don’t Seek Knowledge Without This Dua

We have a prayer that we make before starting something, especially if it has to do with learning. And this prayer comes from the Prophet alayhi salatu salam we say Allah Houma, Linda May and found no one found, have you met them. And it was either an element that translates as Oh Allah, we're asking the Creator to give us beneficial knowledge to teach us that which is beneficial. And the second part is to allow us to benefit from what we have learned. So this is really, really interesting if we take a second and appreciate and unpack this because a lot of times these these days, people have separated knowledge from ethics. People don't consider why they want to learn

something, why they ask certain certain questions, even why they go into a certain field, somebody wants to become I don't know, a surgeon or someone wants to become I don't know, it, they don't ask if if this is ethical, they do it for the money. I said, Well, this is a really nice paying job, and I get freedom. And you know, I kind of am interested in it. Okay, I have a passion for it. We talk about these things. Nobody asks Is this ethical, which is a huge mistake. And through this prayer that we have in our tradition, it teaches us that there is first of all knowledge that is beneficial, and there is knowledge that is not beneficial. And that knowledge that isn't beneficial,

it might even be harmful. And we ask the Creator, to only give us the knowledge that's beneficial. And if there's knowledge out there, that is not beneficial, or that is harmful than we don't want it. It's not an inherent good, it's not good. Just because it's knowledge. It's not good. Just because it's information, some information, it's either going to displace better, more useful, more ethical information that you should be learning or some information is actually harmful, right? What have we benefited from cert, for example, like nuclear technology, nuclear warheads, these sorts of things, either weapons or nuclear energy, like we look at, you know, Three Mile Island or Chernobyl

and these sorts of things, somebody could make the argument that, okay, it's the way the future, whatever, but most people, they've kind of realized that nuclear energy is has a lot of liabilities that we're not really prepared to face as a human race, and that whatever benefits could happen from nuclear energy have been offset by the destructive capacity of nuclear warheads and these sorts of things, right? We're be we've lived on the brink of mutually assured destruction for decades, right? So where's the beneficial knowledge? Okay, you had all these scientists that were, you know, paid very well, and that were very brilliant. And they were pursuing this knowledge did anybody stopped

to ask what knowledge were pursuing in the first place? So we learned in our tradition, and that's just an example you can agree with it or disagree with it. But the point stands, the point stands that there's beneficial knowledge. And there's other knowledge that is not beneficial. And in our tradition, we believe that we should ask first, we only want to learn the beneficial knowledge. We don't want to learn useless knowledge, celebrity gossip, and other stuff. And we also don't want to learn harmful knowledge, knowledge is going to harm other people or even harm ourselves. And then and then the second half, we ask Allah to enable us to benefit from what we've learned, which

implies what it implies that even if the knowledge is good, even if we learn it, that's not a guarantee that we're going to benefit from it. Somebody could use it for evil, somebody could use it for pride, somebody could use it to pad the resume, somebody could have memorized all the books in my library and the Quran and all the Hadith and everything. And if they are not pure of heart, they're going to use it and manipulate it for their own ends. So this is very, very important when it comes to how we conceive of knowledge and how we conceive of our, our place in the world, our duty to knowledge. It's not just, oh, he's curious. He just likes to read. He just like reads

everything he gets his hands on now. We want to make sure that we're only learning things that are going to benefit us and we want to make sure that we actually benefit from the things that we learn. By bringing along our ethics along with our knowledge, there is no good knowledge without ethics.