Reforming the Self #28

And the way that you

remember him

was JD key. Yeah, no,

sir, I have 100 I have a plan. I mean all sorts of stuff and almost been forgotten and Mohamed Salah was good to screen. Hola, hola, Elena, we found our found Island Tina was in the inland, they are abroad. I mean, it's Sunday night. So we are talking about reforming itself with Robert Tani and his book Vidya Sharia. And we're in the second section of the book where he talks about the Ockel the intellect. So the next section that we have, hello, so honey, actually over a couple of sections, he's going to go really in depth into a linguistic analysis, remember that Iraq, us for honey is

that's one of his areas of expertise, one of his famous books that has reached us as Suraj, which is a basically a vocab book for the Koran.

Very, very, very useful book.

And so he is an expert in the Koran and expert in the Arabic language. And so he's going to delve into basically all of the different terms that or I should say, by which the intellect, the Ockel, is referred to intelligence as referred to in Arabic, and talk about the root meanings and talk about various sorts of insights related to this. That's why this is not the most super useful or familiar

couple of chapters to go over. So I'm only going to distill a couple interesting points from it, and not go, you know, with every single thing that he pointed out. So, um,

and why are we doing this because, you know, we experience the world through language, right language shapes, how we experience the world. So the term that we use to refer to a certain phenomenon, right, it has a history, it has certain associations, it has certain shades of meaning. And those shades of meaning are not universal, they're actually particular to the language in which we're speaking, they can be completely different from language to language. And we're going to see that real soon, with how we talk about the intellect in English versus how we talk about the intellect in Arabic. And what are the kind of

associated qualities or actions that are that come with it. So the basis for the term in Arabic is often iron off, aka. And this, when we're talking about intellect, that's how I'm translating it as intellect. It refers to both the types of intelligence that arrived, so honey has been talking about both the potential to have intelligence and that which you gain, right, the actual kind of intelligence that you struggle for, and that you learn etc.

But the interesting thing, the interesting thing about acha is that it comes from a route that has to do with something that restrains an animal. Maybe you've seen people from Arabia, right, and they were kind of like the Sheepdog, they were this kind of

piece of cloth over their head, and they have a black

circle,

over kind of sitting on top of their head, like a little crown. Right? This is called the eight ball, a fall and it's from the same route as aka iron Coughlin. And this little

circle of black, it's actually used to hobble camels, right? So what they do is that they make the camel sit down, and then they use this, this black, you know, leather circle to tie it, basically bind up the camels leg so it can't move when you're sleeping or you know, when the the camel is resting. Right? And so, the a call and the aka, the root refers to something that restrains

somebody else. And this is extremely significant.

And it's not the only word that's used in Arabic That refers to intellect, that has this same sort of connotation. There's another one that he points out hedger

like last month, Allah says and so television

in how the Allah customer lady hedger, right, levy hedger,

what are we talking about here? The the hedger is this is for

intelligent people.

It also has to do with prevention and abstaining and refraining and

discipline and control.

Alright, you see where I'm going with that. So, in Arabic intelligence is bound up with all of these other connotations, intelligence and intellect is related to discipline and control,

restraint, abstention all these sorts of things. Now in English and English, we get the word intellect and intelligence from different root words entirely. It's derived from a Latin root.

Into lacked, okay? So int

referring to something that's internal, okay, as opposed to external. And Lex from lecture, right, which has to do with speech, so your intelligence or your intellect in English language, but things that are associated with our internal speech, right, which is kind of what we think about, or what we imagine is the process of thought, right? We're kind of like talking to ourselves in our heads, that's kind of like what intellectual intelligence is to us. Look at the differences in connotation between the two languages, right? When it comes to English, the term intellect or intelligence doesn't have any duty.

That's communicated with the word, right.

It's very, it's internalized. It's individualized. Right. Whereas in Arabic, aka something that is restraining something that's discipline, right, it begs the question, okay, first of all, it has a an action point. Okay, it's not just something that, you know, if there's an assumption that the knowledge is going to produce some sort of action, what's that action, that action is actually an action of discipline,

and restraint, you know, better, right.

And so, I think we can see how the different sort of associations or colors of the words, they matter significantly. And when you get into this level of linguistic analysis, you actually understand why I lost power to Allah chose Arabic as the language through which to speak the Koran.

Because something that has

associated with it, Action Point discipline, right.

It's kind of getting you thinking about how this information should be applied to the world around you to others around you, it gets you thinking about the duty that you have, once you have this gift, or you develop it is far superior, then

a term that kind of is just talking about what's going on inside of you doesn't really have anything to do with what's going on outside of you doesn't really expect anything from you. Right? When it comes to

some sort of action or application of the things that you're learning, right.

Two other words, that are used in the Arabic language that are

worth pointing out here

and mowdy for

you, and the difference between the two are all good also, he says that

knowledge is what we usually translated as has to do with knowing the essence of something

and knowing it directly

with the possibility of exhaustive knowledge, right, the the possibility of actually your you can potentially master everything.

Whereas mount ephah, from the Artesia which is a very similar word, often translated the same as knowledge.

Might be better translated as familiarity.

Because it has to do with as ROG about finding points out,

not knowing something in its essence, but knowing something from the effects it has,

or its activity, right involves more inference, and it's not exhaustive. Right? There's no assumption that you can exhaust knowledge or familiarity of the thing and this is why actually, when we look at the look for n, and we look at the beef, never once

does a lost power to audit or the prophesy son, I'm referred to as Allah.

Right? Always it's Maddie for Tula. It has to do with Marisa familiarity with Allah.

We could say that there might be something with book knowledge versus experience there. Yeah. I think that it'd be a valid kind of prism or lens through which to look at this

Right.

But it also communicates the possibilities. Right? What are the possibilities? Or what are the expectations that you have about knowing this thing? If we're talking about and this is something that you can master, whether it's book knowledge, or experiential knowledge,

maybe I don't know, maybe, maybe you can't master experiential knowledge, maybe that's a really good kind of intersection between those two sorts of things. Whereas our knowledge of Allah subhanaw taala, obviously, is not direct. We're not looking at Allah Spano. Tata, we're not observing Allah with our senses, we're not, you know,

using our typical means that we would necessarily kind of analyze, like, if you have a radio or you have, you know, an organism, the sect and look at its parts and pull it apart and put it back together, right? With this kind of like encompassing knowledge.

Right.

That's why LM is never used, when it comes to knowing a loss to modify its familiarity. And it's not gained through that, necessarily, observing the essence of ALLAH, but

observe observing the signs of Allah's activity, right in the creation, this is going to come back around later in this lesson, in a big way, right? So we know about a lot in an indirect way, through inference through implication, through signs, not through a direct sort of way. And our knowledge of Allah subhanaw taala is not possibly exhaustible, right? There's always more to know. And we're always kind of hidden behind the veil as to what we can know. And so that's an interesting thing that also honey, our author points out.

We which also is significant, right, it also carries significance when we're translating and going across different languages. Because some people they might be, there's two extremes with everything, right? As a log also, Hani would probably agree with us.

People can imagine that they can know everything about a lot.

And this is one extreme, right, that has no humility, it's kind of an arrogant

disposition. This is kind of the position of or the disposition of Iran, right?

says to her man, build me a huge staircase, so I can ascend and look at this God of Moses. Right, assuming that this is something that he can directly observe. But then there's another extreme, which is kind of this obscurantism was like, well, we can't know anything. We can't say anything about a lawn. This is kind of popular and hip with kind of people who get into New Age, spirituality. Right. And there's various books out there, it's like, a lot is everything and nothing. Right, a lot is internal and external, right? They love these kinds of, seemingly, you know, these contradictions and these riddles and things like that, to the point where you're not

actually saying anything about a loss penalty at all. So if you're gonna, if that's if that's the limit to our knowledge of Allah,

Oh, yeah, with with three E's exactly the seemingly D, right.

100%. Right. You can put an end to that real quick is like, okay, so Allah exists and doesn't exist at the same time.

Right? No, you have to pick one he exists. Okay. And so we can say actual things about a lot. We can say tangible things about Allah. But it has to be grounded in knowledge, right? You've heard of evidence based medicine? Well, we have evidence based religion or evidence based spirituality.

We believe and this is the importance of Revelation. You know, Allah subhanaw. Taala didn't just leave us blundering about grasping at straws, trying to figure out, you know, what is this thing? No, he communicated with us. It's a two way conversation. Our prayer is our communication with him and his revelation is his communication towards us. And so, you find, you know, these sorts of things, anybody who has a little bit of knowledge about the revelation that Allah spawn with Allah sent, the surah sort of obscurantist

views are kind of a little bit frustrating, because you're trying to say that we can't say something about Allah that Allah just said himself in the Quran.

Right.

Oh, Samuel, I mean, he hears everything, He sees everything.

Right. And you're telling me I can't say that about Allah, even though he said it about himself. So, you know, we see how that position is equally arrogant to the first extreme. Except it's worse because it's arrogance hidden behind a facade of humility. Right? It seems humble on the outside to be able to say, Oh, we don't know we can't say anything. It's too complicated. It's, you know, hide behind all these

riddles, when in reality, you're basically

saying that you're more of an authority about Allah than himself because Allah has told us directly about himself. And now you're saying that that's not what he meant, or that, you know, better what he meant or that,

you know, you would have worded it differently perhaps. Right. So just as

the next and perhaps last term that Iran will also Hani brings up that I think is worth mentioning. And he mentioned probably about 2020 different terms.

And some of them are very, very familiar. They're pretty much one to one translated to what we say in English, and some of them are very foreign, but they don't have necessarily as much significance or import as the other ones that we were covering. The last one is hikma hikma. Okay, so Hekima is the Arabic word for wisdom

for called the OTO Chiron cathedra, right Allah says in surah lafora, whoever has been granted wisdom that he has indeed been granted. Great Good or abundance. Good. hikma, just like AKA, just like the word for intellect has connotations of restraint and discipline. So the hikma is the bit of a horse or a camel. So the thing that you put in its mouth, that you pull it aside, this, the reins are attached to it, and it pulls it side to side.

So the the hikma is supposed to steer, right, as opposed to steer somebody

to the right path for, you know, benevolent and excellent action.

And I forgot to look into the, the history of the word wisdom. So I'll have to get back on that one. But you see how with Arabic These terms are infused, it's like a tea, right? It's steeped in ideas of restraint and discipline, which is extremely, extremely important.

And action. Whereas typically, the words that we use in English, not so much.

What is wisdom, wisdom is simply knowledge, good knowledge, beneficial knowledge, matched with righteous action, everything put in its proper place. And Robert also Hani, he says that there's two ways to obtain wisdom. And it's worth mentioning. The first is the wisdom that you earn, you go out and you take it, yes, it's something that you can earn. And he lists several ways, very kind of in brief, how you can do that. One is to actively try to develop your understanding of things are going on around you.

Another one is to find sincere teachers. Remember, we talked about the importance of sincere teachers several lessons ago.

Because not all, not all teachers are sincere,

to be independent. Okay, that's an interesting one that we wouldn't necessarily think of right away. But above all else, Rouhani is trying to get at the fact that when we are under the thumb of somebody else, or we have a conflict of interest, it prevents us from matching our knowledge with our action. And we see this a lot today. People who know better, are institutionally involved, or they have conflicts of interest, they're tied to certain institutions where it makes it very hard for them to speak about certain issues. Okay, well, if the definition of wisdom is beneficial knowledge paired with righteous action, then they don't have it can't obtain wisdom, if they're not

acting righteously, according to the beneficial knowledge that they have. And finally, he says, taking care of your health.

This is something that people realize very readily, that the longer you live, the more likely you are to obtain wisdom. And so you should take care of your body and you should live a healthy life, to give yourself the best chance of obtaining wisdom. The second type of a second way to get wisdom is just simply those to whom Allah has just gifted it, right. And Allah does give some things just as divine gifts and we find that we say in English, we say, such and such a person is wise beyond their years, right? There are certain people who maybe they've been through a lot of experiences at a very young age. And then there's other people that just the way that Allah created them, they kind

of have this natural affinity for seeking out beneficial knowledge and acting on it

righteously.

So that's going to end our discussion of terms. Those are the most beneficial ones to kind of meditate on for our purposes.

Then he goes on to talk about what's so important about the intellect and this is a little bit different than his kind of introduction where he's talking about why Allah gave us our

intellect right here. We're saying, Well, why? Because it's kind of the sticking or the landing place for the revelation. And it helps us submit to the truth and all these sorts of things. Right. But here, he's trying to say something a little bit different. He's talking about,

of all the qualities that people possess intellect, and knowledge is the most noble of all of them.

And that's really saying something because

we have so many noble qualities out there to be generous, right? To be selfless, to be,

you know, helpful.

All these sorts of things to be brave to be courageous, he kind of ran through several several

qualities in the previous section. But the best of all of them, he said, is knowledge is intellect. And his proof is something that there are that Matt mentioned a lot, which is that if you have, let's say you have an animal, a game animal, such as a deer, or something like that. Okay, if a if a wild dog,

if a wild dog

were to kill that animal,

are we allowed to eat it?

Yes or no?

We're right there. When it happens. We chased the dog away and we have a free dinner.

Can we do that? No, we can't do that. Right. This is something that is one of the types of meat this is now carrying, this is dead.

Carrying that we're not are impermissible. However, however,

what happens to that same game animal, that same meat, if you take that dog and train it and domesticate it, and train it to hunt?

Now it's allowed.

Right? So we see that the difference of knowledge, the only difference is knowledge and training. Right?

The difference between halal and haram, the difference between something that's nebulous, and something I stole here, something that's that's filth, when it comes to our religion, and something that's pure.

That's the transformational quality, that's the nobility, that is imparted by knowledge, that even a dog who has a saliva, you know, poses lots of problems for us.

And requires, you know, some strict protocol for washing.

Right? All of a sudden, you train that dog, and it's a totally different ballgame. You give that dog a little bit of knowledge. And

it's entirely treated in a different way. So then, what about human beings? If that's the case with animals, if that's the case with dogs, then even more so human beings?

He points out something that I thought was really funny and interesting, given the political climate today, you know, he says that intellect, and knowledge is something that is universally praised, except, except in a few situations.

Okay, so the situations that he says he says nobody mocks or nobody looks down or belittles people with knowledge, and people with understanding are people of intellect, except in a few select situations, one of them is somebody who's sinful, right? Somebody who has a guilty conscience.

Such a person will mark and will reject and will belittle intelligent people have intellect.

Why? Because misery loves company, they want other people to be like them.

So that they feel vindicated and affirmed in what they're doing. Right, we have certain things that are acceptable vices, by our society's standards today. And you see the

shrill fever pitch

with which any dissenter is met, anybody even raises their head to say this is wrong. There's now attempts to cancel them and ruin their career and get them booted off of social media and all these sorts of things. Right? You don't want to end there's no attempt to engage in the nuts and bolts of the issue or talk about epistemology and talk about morality and ethics, which is, you know, even in the Western tradition is a branch of philosophy. Right? There's a philosophical conversation to be had there. Nobody wants to do that. They want to simply silence this person in a very totalitarian way.

Right? Isn't there something there of guilt? Yes, there's something there of guilt, somebody who's living in sin

and feels guilty about it. They don't want anyone to remind them of their guilt. They don't want anybody out there. That would quote unquote

judged them.

And sometimes even just living in a different way is enough for that person to be feel bothered and feel upset

that there is no conformity. Right, I remember when I used to work in restaurants, there was one waitress who wanted to

play numbers by some sort of lottery ticket or something. And so she came in. I'm not familiar with these things. So I don't understand exactly how they work. But she came in, and she was asking all of us for like to pick a number, and she would put all those numbers together. And if she won the lottery, we would all split it. Okay. That was the situation. And when she asked me to give her a number, I said, No, thanks. And she's like, What are you talking about? I was like, I just, I don't want to give you a number. Because I don't believe in gambling, this is something that's against my faith, and so I don't participate in it. I didn't say anything about her about whether she should do

it or not about this is a bad idea, you should put your money elsewhere. I didn't say a thing. But she got very, very upset. She got very, very angry at me and felt attacked, right felt attacked,

which just goes to show you that not every time someone feels attacked means that they're actually attacked. And we live in a time Subhanallah where people like to use the word violence, they throw that around this term violence, anybody who

disagrees

with another person for the choices that they make the lifestyle that they choose, for

living in a life advice.

Right?

They say, Oh, if you say I can't do that this is violence for violence, how violence I didn't attack, you say, Oh, well, it enables people that want to do violence against this population of that population. Come on. This is far fetched, we're cheapening what violence means and we're cheapening.

The situation, and we're muddying the waters, when it comes to people who are actually subject to real violence, and it's not

a given, it's not a logical necessity, that someone disagrees with you. And therefore they hate you. Or someone disagrees with you, or your choice or what you're doing.

Some activity that you partake in. And, therefore, their disagreement is based off of hate, or their disagreement is violence, or their disagreement is enabling violence against you not sorry. That is not valid logic. And that's a really, really slippery slope. It's a political power grab. And it's extremely dangerous to think that way.

Raffles, right. Yeah. Raffles for a good cause. Yeah, everything's a good cause. Right.

And this is something that most people, yeah, hating the actions and not the person. This is something that most people intuitively grasp. But we live in a time where a small vocal minority is attempting to hold everybody else hostage with this kind of logic, right? And it has worked to a surprising degree. And we ask a lot of keep us safe and protect us. And we hope that people start speaking up to reverse this sort of trend.

Because it's not right.

Which is a personal anecdote, why I don't tend to like to use the word, Islamophobia, just to be completely. And people might disagree with me, even though there is

prejudice.

Definitely. And some people have hatred, and that hatred is political. And it's not based off of anything real towards Islam and towards Muslims. And we spend a lot we just saw what happened in Canada.

However,

the idea of making something into Islamophobia

and painting anybody who might disagree with Islam,

as potentially Islamophobic

is kind of taking this kind of dirty trick from other groups and applying it.

And myself, I think that's short sighted. I don't think that's the right way. I think there's other ways to address address prejudice and other ways to address terrorism against Muslims, and hate crimes against Muslims. Right? Without necessarily recreating this kind of whole category, Islamophobia, that threatens to do the same thing we don't want done to us, which is basically paint anybody who disagrees with us as hating hating us.

You know, it's tempting. It's tempting to take that trick out of other groups bag, but it's

In my personal opinion, I don't think that's the best way in the long run and Allah knows best.

So the only type of people that are going to

be little, or reject intelligent people or intelligence, the sinful, the guilty, And subhanAllah you see in the Quran, when the people have looked at a Salam try to kind of have this back and forth loot. And look tries to reason with them, what's their reaction every single time their reaction is get them out of here expel them. That's very telling. That's very telling. And that's the that's the scenario that we live in today as well. There's no dialogue, there's no intellectual engagement, there's just

a political power grab. That's kind of what the, what the technique is. So that's the first type of people the second type of people are the people who are greedy, and power hungry. Right, so demagogues, ah, yeah, we've had, we are at a time in the history of the United States of America, where we see this

in an alarming amount. demagogues by definition, people who

attempt to manipulate the emotions of people

for their own political gain,

and are not interested in principles, or positions or platforms or things like that. Right, this is the definition of a demagogue. And we see that a lot today. So this is the other type of person or all of us. So he says, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, this is the other type of person, second type of person that's going to reject intellect, intelligence, and the intellect and the people who are who are intelligent.

And the third example, he says, are people who have some sort of ulterior motive,

right?

Some sort of conflict of interest, right, so we have

two examples.

Or a category of examples, we could say that

somebody who wants to sell you something, right, a lot of youth culture

is kind of based off of this, you know, push back against the man, you know, being intelligent is not cool, being smart is not cool. Failing, dropping out of school is cool, is glorified. It's glamorous, especially in rap culture, hip hop industry,

right. And the people who are actually producing these albums, and these artists and things like that, they're, you know, they all went to school, and they all got a degree. And they're CEOs and live out in the suburbs and have huge houses and all these sorts of things, right. So they're not, they're not practicing what they preach. But all of the music that they're going for, and that they're producing,

it pushes this culture of rejecting intelligence rejecting kind of, you know, the intellect and stuff like that. And so you see, there's a conflict of interest here. Right? They're just trying to sell you something.

One of the Greek theologians, or one of the Greek philosophers, I believe, put it gave an example of a candy seller

debating a doctor, right?

A candy seller is going to come, he says, Look, I've got all these sweet things for you look at the sky, he's going to poke you with needles, and he's going to give you medicine that makes you feel bad, and all these sorts of things. Right? He's appealing to people, he has an ulterior motive. He's going to reject

intellect, intelligence, and the people, the scholarly class

that represents those sorts of things.

That being said, and this is my own addition to what it was for when he says this, it's very important that the scholarly class or the expert class, or whatever you want to call it the intelligencia.

lives up to the expectations that are placed on them,

and acts in a transparent and trustworthy manner. Because we experienced this now today in the United States, once people stopped trusting

the experts or the

intelligencia, then you can't do anything. You've damaged respect for knowledge itself.

You've damaged respect for knowledge itself.

If people who are studied and learned, do not uphold, they're not trustworthy.

I read something that was very alarming that I was unaware of, until very recently.

That in in Pakistan, rolling out some of the vaccines. I didn't realize that the CIA was involved in some of

that some of that work, they were actually using vaccine vaccination to collect information about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

And everybody was trying to tell the CIA don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. It's a horrible idea. Don't politicize medicine, don't politicize vaccines. And eventually they stopped but so much when people were so upset, and rightfully so.

And it created so much confusion that now even still today you have vaccine reluctance

over there because they're, they don't trust it. Right? We have the same thing, the United States of America, we have the Tuskegee experiment, we have, you know, traditionally, the medical, and the political kind of authorities have used African Americans as guinea pigs, for various medical treatments. And so,

trust is gone, then all of a sudden, you want to, then all of a sudden, you want to people to trust you and people to be able to listen to your directives if you're telling them to get vaccinated, and now nobody's going to listen to you. So society can't go on that way. That's why it's a two way street. You have to respect expertise, respect, intelligence, respect, knowledge, but you also have to the people who are in that position of authority have an enormous amount of responsibility to be trustworthy.

All of this boils down to it all of us for hunting. He says that the only people who belittle intellect are the people who have made their intellects a slave to their urges and impulses, and not the other way around, not made their impulses and urges a slave to their intellect.

And finally, and I guess we'll end here because yeah, we're coming up on the end of time.

The intellect is what separates human beings from the rest of creation.

And this isn't necessarily

as

drastic, as most people think, right? Like animals are intelligent, and animals communicate to each other animals have knowledge. But when it comes to the ability to restrain ourselves, which is why the linguistic kind of connotation that we talked about before is important. In Arabic, the intellect also is tied up with the ability to discipline and restrain ourselves, we have a degree of discipline and restraints,

or at least a potential for discipline and restraint that no other creature has. Right? There's a thing in cattle that's called bloat. Right, their cattle can eat grass too fast, to the point where they actually get this kind of gasp build up in their stomach and they die.

And similarly, there's, you know, the way that animals for example,

animals that are fed on corn, like sheep, if you feed sheep on corn, or grain or things like that, you can't just put them on pasture and have them eat grass, all of a sudden, you have to transition them slowly.

Or else they will kill themselves, right? They don't have the ability necessarily to restrain themselves like that.

And, interestingly enough, even animals recognize intelligence in human beings. That's what that's from Rob wells for honey. That's what he says. He says that because some human beings are able to train animals and other human beings aren't.

Right? Maybe you've known some people who have, you know, non Muslims or otherwise that have dogs in the home, or dogs in general. And some people their dogs are very well trained, the person is authoritative, the person has clear communication and instructions and the dog is very, very well behaved and other people it's like who's training who, like the dog is training the human

right. And so animals can even sense this sort of this sort of difference in intelligence and difference in discipline in between people and actually respected when it comes to what they find in people.

That takes us to the end of the section next section will be about products of the intellect. What do we use the intellect for specific getting a little bit into more specifics about that? Anybody have any questions before we wrap up for tonight?

Any questions

okay, if there's no questions, then I will see you all next time. Thank you very much. Everybody said I want to come up