Reforming the Self #32

Rahim

Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa salatu salam ala shuffle MBI Elmo, Celine Medina, we're working on Muhammad Allah He of the Salah was good to Slean Allah, Allah, Allah marry me and fentanyl and fentanyl in that. And mtna was in Minneapolis datamine.

law, he would occur to everybody. Welcome Sunday night, reforming the self with arrival. So honey,

I apologize for being late. And I was having some technical difficulties.

This is a really important section that also Hansie our author is getting into again, we're in the section about knowledge, and everything that's related to it. The next thing that a lot of us for honey, the author is trying to communicate is the importance of being well rounded.

Right.

So what he's talking about here is trying to push back against the need to over emphasize emphasize specialization.

Why, and this is something that I think is timely, because in our

society, and even in the Muslim community, often we, we understand how the world works, right? And we monetize our skills fairly effectively, we kind of, you know, we focused in on, okay, STEM is where the jobs are, and, you know,

get your kid involved in STEM and focus on you know, these particular areas, and they're going to be employable, and have a comfortable life and be more, you know, marriageable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All of that's well and good. Right. But we need to be careful. And we live in a moment in the United States where

we see the effects of a populace. who is ill educated in general, right, right, the reading level of adults has just plummeted.

As the decades have gone by, most adults don't read books anymore, right? They get their news from social media. They're not reading articles, or books or things like that. We've become a much more entertainment based society.

And I think we're starting to see the results of that, when it comes to the status of the viability of our democracy, or at least the viability of its electorate. Right, and so a lot of us, so he has a message for us in our times, which is that, okay, you can leverage one particular field or something that is, you know,

monetizable, or something that is going to provide a good job, but that should not be the end of your education, because education is not simply in order to get paid. Right education is to develop yourself as a human being, and to prepare yourself to take on the responsibility of being a laws representative here on Earth. And so if that's true, you know, is calculus and biology and medicine kind of throw an engineering perhaps maybe law? Is that sufficient? Are those fields the fields that are kind of the most sought after fields in education? are they sufficient to be Allah's representative on earth? No, they're not. They're not. And so it is, for Hani, he talks about being

well rounded and how this is an important thing. He says, one of the one of the kinds of reasons why being well rounded is important is because it makes you relatable to people.

Right?

You know, if in certain circles, right, it's kind of a double edged sword. Society is the way it is, it's fairly obsessed with entertainment and sport, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't know anything about that, you know, you're not going to be able to connect with a certain group of people. Right? The prophesy, Saddam said, Speak to people at the level of the level where they're at. You know, if you're going to talk to a doctor, you might use a metaphor, or an analogy that's based in anatomy, or medicine. If you're talking to a farmer, you're going to need to use an entirely different set of analogies and metaphors. If you're talking to somebody who's into sports or into entertainment,

knowing a little bit about it, you know, enough to just be able to make small talk is actually a very, very useful thing.

And so we see that there's there can be two extremes, right? Let's take something like sports, where somebody we have a lot of

People in our society that the amount of knowledge that they have about sports is extreme

right?

To know so much about sports, that it detracts from things that are much more impactful on people's lives on the environment around you on uplifting society, et cetera, et cetera, is blameworthy, right, you don't need to know, you know, the personal history of every single star basketball player, or what team they were on before all these other sorts of things, right. But then on the other extreme, to not know absolutely anything about it. And this is something that

men, many people are connecting to, and emotionally attached to, in some sort of way kind of leaves you on the outside looking in. So being able to relate is one of the reasons to be well rounded.

Another thing that the author says being well rounded gives you the ability to analyze something from multiple angles. Right? So and that is something that we have seen in our society with specialization,

comes a type of myopia, right? Where you're, you're, you're kind of only able to isolate

a variable and imagine that this, this one variable is responsible for all these sorts of changes, when really, it's the lack of your education, or the lack of being well rounded in your education, that really prevents you from seeing all these sorts of different factors that are affecting things. Right.

You know, I think that people have realized, and this is kind of behind the whole movement for interdisciplinary work, etc, various crossovers and panels that cut panels that cut across disciplines have realized that if you take things out of context, and only look at them from one angle, you actually end up missing

a large part of the picture. Right? We saw that with the pandemic, right? You have medical professionals, that you can get down all the medicine, you can understand the public health aspect of things. But we realize at the end of the day that we're hamstrung by politics, right? By the ability to convince people trust media, messaging,

PR, public relations, and God forbid someone politicizes the issue, then you have to now get into politics. How are we going to okay, we might be right. But how are we going to affect this change in the environment, or the social moment or the history, the historical moment in which we live? It takes someone who's well rounded to be able to look at things from all those sorts of different perspectives. You could make me make an analogy with biodiversity, right? The principle of Allah's creation is that strength is in diversity, you have one entire field of just corn. Okay, well, what have you done, you've eliminated the food for all the insects except for one insect.

That one insect that feeds off of corn, right, so all the other insects don't have enough food to live there, they either die or move somewhere else. Because they die or move somewhere else, the birds and other creatures that feed off of them die or go somewhere else. Right. And now you have a very imbalanced ecosphere, you have one crop, it provides this amazing, you know, food supply for this one particular type of insect, the population of that one insect explodes, you know, causing more harm to the crop, you know, it's too much for the its predator to be able to keep up with, you need to intervene with chemicals, all these sorts of things, right? It's a very, very weak

ecosystem. Whereas if you have crop rotation, and you have interplanting, or you have all these different types of organisms, you'll actually find that the insects that feed off of some organisms will consume the insects that eat off of other organisms. And so you actually achieve a balance. And so that ecosystem is much more resilient, and much more robust and much more sustainable. The same thing goes with the ecosphere of our knowledge, and our interests. If you're only interested in one or two things very narrowly, right, you're going to be very, very limited, you're only going to be able to look at things from a couple different angles, and you're not really going to be able to

connect with others or impact kind of the area around you. Whereas if you have a intellectual kind of milieu where you have a whole different set of experiences and a little bit of at least a little bit in various different fields, and you're going to have

a much more kind of robust intellectual take on things.

Another principle that he mentioned is about being well rounded is taking the good and leaving the evil or useless right so he says now, we can think about being well rounded in one way when we think about like a buffet

Of all these types of disciplines, and the importance of taking at least something from every station at the buffet, right, but now the author wants to draw our attention to what are we choosing from that buffet, when we get there, you know, there's everything that's within that station is not equal. There are some things that are just full of, you know, sugar and trans fats, and they're going to make you obese and give you diabetes. And then there's other things that are actually quite pure for you, and are going to build, you know, contribute to your health and contribute to your your nourishment, right. And so his analogy here is, when you're at every station on the buffet

don't just blindly take, like any sort of trivia, right, this is this is how we get to trivia. He's the author isn't saying, to know, little disconnected facts, from every little discipline, he say, No, take the most beneficial and useful thing from every field.

And whatever is not useful, or even worse than that, whatever is detrimental, then leave it right. And so there's things like, even like poetry, for example, like, or spoken word, or art, or all these sorts of different fields, where we might look at them sideways, like, Oh, how's that benefiting society? It's not like, you know, part of the hard sciences are not rigorous enough or something like that. But there are tremendous things to take from them. And there's useless things to and there's worse than that. Right? There's some poetry that is extremely lewd, or atheistic, or blasphemous. And then there's some poetry that can reach the human soul with a positive message in a

much more powerful way than you and I can do with this lecture or talking to people like this. Right? Art is the same way there's art that is blasphemous, there's art that is just vain and useless. And there's art that is purposeful and actually very, very profound. Right? So we can take the best from every subject and kind of add it to our

our arsenal of intellectual experiences. And that makes us a more well rounded person that makes us a beneficial person that makes us a person who has developed to the point where they can contribute to society, and they can be eligible and suitable to represent Allah subhanaw taala on earth. And the example that struck me from a Sierra was the example of Sandman a Pharisee, who, during the Battle of the Trench, which is named for a battle tactic that he suggested, right, the entire Arabian peninsula had united against the Muslims. It was the final showdown, right 10,000 soldiers against the 3000 inhabitants of Medina, and the inhabitants of Medina the believers could not

possibly resist.

So they were taking a shooter, they were asking each other what they should do. And Salman who was from who was from Persia, suggested, he said, In my land, what we do in such a scenario is we dig a large trench and the other army, it doesn't matter how many people they have, they can't, they can't cross the trench. And so then it's just about siege, and they eventually go away.

Right, and nobody kind of criticized southern man, nobody said, Oh, what a stupid idea, or this is an innovation or, you know, where's your evidence from the Quran and Sunnah for this thing. Now, it's it, this is about dunya. This is not an act of worship, at least not a specific legislative act of worship, like prayer. And so they took it, they said, This is a great idea. They took the best of, you know, warfare, or military tactics doesn't matter who came up with it.

They, they took the idea, they implemented it, with great success, it saved the day, right? And it kind of saved the Islamic movement. So that's the way that we should be, you know, we should be with all kinds of intellectual fields and disciplines, looking for those things that are beneficial. There's a weak Hadith, it's not authentic from the Prophet. So I said, um, but the meaning is true. That said that the statement of a wise person or the wise statement is the property of the believer, right? It's like Lost and Found. Right? If you find something that's that's a wise statement, no matter who says it, we don't say as Muslims, oh, this person is a blasphemer, this person's an

innovator, this person's a disbeliever. This person is an idolatry or they're an atheist or whatever. If the statement is true, we take it and we benefit from it.

Right and this is, we have a precedent for this in the Quran, because Allah subhanaw taala when he's telling the story of Shiva and Solomon, Saba, and so a man, right step

up, the Queen of Sheba is worshipping the sun. She is as idolatrous as someone can be. Right? And the letter of Solomon comes to her, inviting her to Islam. And she asks her legion of advisers, she asked them, Okay, what should we do with this? Should we fight them? Should we go to war? Or should we just kind of try to work this out in a diplomatic sense? And they say to her, Listen, if you want to go to war, we're ready. And if you want to do it diplomatically, we can do that too. It's up to you. She's comes back and says, Whenever two nations go to war,

the cost is that it wipes out the people of talent, like the talented people on both sides. And Allah's Fouta. Allah says, What could allocate your firemen? And he says, and that's exactly what happens. He didn't say, don't listen to this idolater.

Right, he didn't do an ad hominem. He didn't attack her for the positionality from which she was speaking. She didn't say well, you're

white, sis hetero. Right. And so you can't say anything of value? No, Allah subhanaw taala took the statement. Is the statement true? Yes, it is benefit from it. Allah subhanaw taala Bennett confirmed it and so we benefit from that statement with the

overall lesson that war is undesirable if we can avoid it

so this is part of the author's

reasoning for why being well rounded is extremely important. And how to be well rounded you take the good things from each discipline and you leave that which is that which is evil or useless and the reason why he's bringing this up is so that nobody can

make a false dilemma or make a straw man and try to say, well, we can't benefit from art because look at this and they're giving the worst examples of art right? Or well, we can't It's haram to get involved with with this because look at this worst example of of this, etc, etc. Right? This happened with with protests, right? Not too long ago, when at the end of Ramadan, and the issues were having, you know, the oppression and aggression in Palestine was happening. There was some people that were putting out videos saying protesting is haram demonstrations are haram etcetera, etcetera, which I disagree with entirely. And part of the reasoning was, well look at

the mob violence that takes place riots and et cetera, et cetera. Well, this is exactly what what the author is cautioning, cautioning us against, we can't dismiss the entire

idea of or the practice of protests and demonstrations just because the worst case scenario or the worst example, right, you know, you can't compare a riot to a candlelight vigil right there that you can't even recognize one for the other, they're completely different things. So we don't simply dismiss an entire category of experiences or,

or intellectual pursuits just because of some of the most egregious examples. No, we there's room to take the beneficial and to leave what isn't,

of course, realizing that the beneficial is in the service of this project, the service of establishing a lost power to others Dean, establishing justice, and be developing ourselves to become

worthy representatives of a lost pilotage on earth.

Then the author wants to say that okay, being well rounded is important, but we want to get to some things before we get to others. He said, There has to be some sort of prioritization. With these different subjects, you go to the buffet line, okay to bring back to our example. And you don't just load up on dessert.

Right? You have to build from the beginning to the middle to the end, certain things come first. Right? So, when it comes to benefiting from the dunya, and these sorts of

intellectual fields or disciplines, they always have to be secondary to our knowledge of Allah subhanaw taala the knowledge of the Sharia, which is what Allah expects of us, how Allah wants to be loved and obeyed and worshipped in this world. Right? These are the the priorities, especially knowing who Allah is.

Right, they have to come first. And then once we have enough, you know from from those respective fields, then we can pursue others and then keep on going down the list

until we get to the maybe the least significant ones. And the final thing that he says about the thing to look out

For when becoming well rounded is be careful to implement what you learn.

He compares somebody, he says, Don't let your knowledge exceed your practice of knowledge.

Right, you should be implementing and applying those things that you learn whether it is in order to connect with other people, whether it is to benefit the community in various types of ways. He says, Don't be like someone who's gathering or stockpiling weapons, and ends up never shooting a single round. Right? What a waste. If you're going to take the time to go down this path of developing your intellect, then make sure that it is being applied and it's benefiting other people.

The next section or the next chapter that the author gets into, he starts to talk about essential characteristics for students. And then he talks about after that the next the following chapter, essential characteristics of teachers. And this is a good reminder for me, and I really benefited, preparing for this class reading some of these reminders. So when it comes to students, what are the characteristics of a good student?

What must the good student have,

if they want to be able to benefit or develop themselves become well rounded, become a worthy representative of a loss found data? The first thing the author says is purifying oneself from poor etiquette.

And this is something that we say a lot in Islam, but we need to explain a little bit what we need, right? Poor etiquette is not just, oh, he extended his feet towards the fibula, or he put the Qur'an down on a carpet, right? Or he's not sitting in the right position or stuff like that. This is things that we've come to kind of micromanage and think of as etiquette. And I'm not saying that those things don't have any importance. But they are not nearly as important as the etiquette of the heart. Right? We're talking about

avoiding haste. Haste is poor etiquette for a student. Right? How many times do we see a student, usually the precocious ones, the ones that have talent, or potential, and they want to interrupt and finish the teacher sentence. Right? Or they want to get ahead of themselves, and jump to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing,

right, this is poor etiquette as a student, because you're not fully submitting to the teachers plan for you when it comes to how your education should unfold. And we're going to deal with more specific guidance for that in a second.

So haste is poor etiquette a good student should not be hasty.

They should realize they should trust that the educator, the instructor has a plan and that plan exists in time.

Right and part of the qualification of a teacher or an instructor is the timing of exposure.

Another thing that is poor etiquette from a student is jealousy of other students. This happens a lot, a lot a lot. Especially, you know, I traveled abroad, I studied in Medina, I saw this, I saw this happen.

Students get jealous of each other. This one is closer to the SHAEF. This one gets better grades who does better on the tests? Right. And at the very least, it stops people from cooperating. At the very worst, it ends up being the cause for

what people will claim to be

a religious conflict. So and so is an innovator so and so is not a real student of Islam, so and so is

a fake or phony. And really, if you go back to what the issue really is about, it's often about jealousy.

It's often about jealousy.

But people because they cannot admit that about themselves. They have not done this thing the author says they have not purified themselves spiritually before starting to learn.

They have poor etiquette. Now they're going to try to take down other people

who are seen as rivals to them

due to their jealousy.

There are some a couple of humorous stories that you know that happened to me and Medina to show kind of this because people you know they think they imagined what studying in Medina

was like and they imagine that you know, everybody's so pious and Masha Allah but

you know, every place and every person struggles with these issues. So one time I was in Masjid Koba in in Medina and mushiya koga, obviously one of the more famous massage in the Muslim world, and check Solihull 1000 Was there

or was visiting from Riyadh. And he's one of the biggest if not the biggest scholar in Saudi Arabia.

So he was coming to give a lesson, it was right after maghrib prayer. So it was packed, right? All the students or whatever, okay, and everyone was looking around, they're wondering is the sheikh going to lead the prayer like, whatever, whatever, okay, but he doesn't come at first. And so everybody, you know, they're praying, probably very distracted in their prayers, right. And then I kid you not, as soon as everybody said, a certain while, they come off a lot of sit down, when they going off to LA, everybody got up and ran to the front of masjid, it was like a stampede.

And I was not prepared for that. So like, I ended up you know, kind of bumbling and stumbling through the crowd. But um, they were all trying to get closest to the front, so they could be closest to the shake, right? But people are getting, you know, stepped on and, you know, all these sorts of things. So, you know, not necessarily the best advocate for students of this of this faith.

Another example, you know, I used to attend Sheikh Abdullah Xing feeties, tafsir lessons in the prophets machine, four days a week. And there was a class that was immediately after his,

okay. And the students for the class that were after his, they did not have the best behavior, they were they were not very, very well mannered, in my opinion. And so they would like stand around while we're listening to shake and shake is talking and they're standing up, and they're kind of just like waiting, waiting, waiting, which is a little bit rude in the first place. And then as soon as the then sounds, and we kind of are, you know, dismissing or whatever, they do the same thing rush in to try to get the spot. And I kid you not one time I was knocked over, I was knocked off my feet, sat down on involuntarily sat down by one of these students trying to get his spot,

adolescent, and not having decent etiquette,

when it came to his other fellow students, you know, everybody kind of feeling each other as rivals competitors, as opposed to helping each other and working together.

So I think back on those stories, and I laugh, sometimes, the author says, Well, another key characteristic for a student is to focus on your studies don't get distracted by the dunya. Right. And this would be the difference between the person who is lost in entertainment.

You know, they got the season, pass on their direct TV, or whatever. And they're watching all the soccer games, or all the basketball games, as opposed to reading ESPN once a week, to see who won what, just to be able to talk to normal people. Right?

It also has to do with being organized, being organized with your time and setting a schedule for yourself. Right? Not just floating through life. And this kind of catches catch can sort of mentality, know that you have to be focused, you have to be organized, don't get distracted, and you set a schedule for yourself, and you do the best you can. And you'll be shocked at how how much progress you can make.

The author then says avoid arrogance towards your your instructor and avoid arrogance toward the subject that you're studying.

And this hit me hard because this is a big, big problem. East and West, North America and the Muslim world. Big big problem, right?

There are people who will argue with the teacher,

not because they don't understand anything, like don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating for the Be quiet beta and just do what I say. There's a way to ask questions. There's an etiquette and a manner and a tone of voice and a way to approach a question or there's even a way to disagree or to to try to uncover a contradiction that you see there's a way for that. But a lot of people, they come at it in a very arrogant way. They think that they know more than the teacher. And so like how can you say this and how can you say that and how can you say that? And this is wrong and this is wrong and cetera. And I saw that like I said, east and west when they were in the west you know when I

was at Vassar. You know,

they teach you how to criticize Marx before you read Marx. They teach you how to criticize Foucault before you read Foucault, and so on and so forth. Right? So the pushing you to always be hyper hyper hyper critical, yes. But he didn't, you know, attend to feminist concerns, or yes, but his analysis of economy was whatever, and you haven't even read the person yet.

Right? Like every sort of discipline of knowledge is is a conversation. Right? If you're going for the, you know, I'm a Political Theory guy. So it's like, if you're going through, okay, Locke was in conversation with people who came before him. And then Marx is in conversation with those guys before him, and then and so on and so forth. It's a conversation, right? So to thrust yourself into this conversation at the very end and just be playing referee like this guy got it wrong, this guy got it right, this guy had no idea what he was talking about. That's a very AG, arrogant disposition to have. And this is something that regretfully is encouraged of us, especially in in the liberal

arts colleges, North America, etc, etc. And the prophets like Selim, he said, there's two types of people that don't learn one of them is the arrogant person he can't learn, because he already thinks he knows. And the other person is the shy person, the timid person that's too afraid to ask, which is honestly at its base, another version of arrogance, in that the person is afraid of exposing the fact that they don't know. Right, so think about learning a foreign language as an adult, right? The people who learn the language are people who throw themselves out there and make the mistakes like, Yep, I'm gonna make mistakes. Here I go, Bismillah, let's do it. Because they know that failing is

actually the path to correction and learning. Whereas some people, they're too proud. They don't want to be wrong, they don't want to show other people what they don't know. And so they actually, they refrain from speaking, they refrain from trying, and they end up learning at least much slower, if not less.

There's also a well known saying in Islamic disciplines, that knowledge of anything won't give itself to you until you give all of yourself to it. And that's not to say that you need to become you know, obsessive and just, you know, obsessing about studying and you know, you don't sleep and you don't, you know, eat. No, that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about

putting yourself in a literally docile position, right, willing to be molded.

And this is an extremely important characteristic to have, if you want to learn something, and something that people both east and west have recognized for centuries and centuries and centuries. Right. Some people sometimes they want me to come to their house, to teach their kids Islam.

Okay. And I understand I get it, it's like, it kind of follows like a tutor, kind of model, et cetera, et cetera. But it can also kind of send the message to your children that, you know,

you can do everything in the comfort of your own home.

Like, why don't you come to the machine where the Imam is? Right? Why don't you get in the class with everybody else that everybody else is doing? Right? There's kind of a

you have to give in order to get, right. Yeah, I mean, you could, we can spoon feed all you want. I mean, I can come to your house, and I can break it down. I can make a whole curriculum for you. And whatever, whatever, whatever. If your kid doesn't have the motivation.

They're playing FIFA. And they're like, oh, like, Hold on, I'm almost done. Right? This happens, you know, that, how are they going to really learn? What have they shown? What have they demonstrated about their commitment to learning or their motivation for learning in the first place? It's not, it's not there. So I'll just be talking to a wall. And that's not beneficial for anybody. It's like Musa, I think he said, If we're looking for a precedent from the Koran, Musa alayhis salam, what did he have to do if he wanted to learn from Canada, that he asked a lot to bring her to him to come to his house and so that he could ask her there his questions. And then when Musa was done his

questions, like, Okay, thank you very much. Salaam Alaikum.

Or here's your here's your wage. No, Musa had to track him down. And he didn't know where he was. And he had to find, you know, search and search and search, experience hardship, which proved his motivation and his desire. It proved his docility

and his willingness to learn. And then even then, when he comes to hit there, he has a problem because he's a little bit hasty, right, which we talked about a bit ago. So these are very important things. And that all comes back to being docile being willing to be molded,

being coachable.

is the most essential characteristic that a student can have. And that's the best compliment I've ever received in my life. When I was in high school, someone once said that I was coachable, and it till this day, that's the best compliment I've ever received in my life.

Because

there's, each person has like, the earth, some earth is soft and fertile and ready to accept the rain and other Earth is hard, and

they're not going to be able to absorb the rain at all.

So which of these two is the average Muslim, young Muslim, especially that goes on YouTube and tries to learn their religion from YouTube? Right? This is another version of bringing the Imam to your to your house, right? That's like, you see this list of videos, it's put at you like from an algorithm of what they think you're going to click on. And then you're like, Oh, that looks interesting. Let me do that one. like, Ooh, that looks interesting. Let me do that one. Or this guy looks legit. Let me try that.

Right. Which is not real learning. At the end of the day, if you're looking for YouTube videos for motivation, you want to hear like a motivational speech. Okay, that's fine. But if you're looking to actually study and learn your religion, that's not how it happens. Again, you're putting yourself in the driver's seat, you're the one who's dictating when you get exposed to what and in what order. It's like somebody walking into a pharmacy,

and just being able to pick whatever they want off the shelf.

Like, oh, my elbow hurts. Let me try this one.

Maybe give me two of those, right, and they don't have any training to be able to differentiate between what are the side effects, what are the contraindications, etc, etc.

And that goes back to the last point, and then I guess we'll have to end and we'll deal with the characteristics essential characteristics of teachers next class in sha Allah, that the teacher has to pace the student

and put them on a trajectory, expose them to things when they are ready for it. If you expose them to too much too early, it's either showing off from the teacher

and or it's going to create too many doubts in the student.

And this happens time and time and time again, especially with the age of social media and the Internet, we have what's called context collapse. Right? It used to be someone such as myself, if I go to have an academic discussion with other graduates of Islamic institutions, you know, PhDs, master's students, people who are in the field studying, I can talk about very controversial things. And know that there's a trust there that we're talking about things in an academic way, that we're trying to search for the truth, I'm not going to throw anybody's faith in doubt, by talking about these things.

Whereas if I get on YouTube, or I do a Facebook Live video, about the same issues, and you have anybody and everybody tuning in, then I'm going to cause people big problems. Right? There needs to be context, you know, and everybody there, there needs to be separation of audiences sometimes. And it's the teacher's job to make sure that they and this was bleeding over to next chapter, but the teacher has to make sure that they're putting their students on a reasonable trajectory to succeed. That's one extreme is exposing students too early, or students getting exposed too early to things they're not ready for. The other extreme is the gatekeeper. Right. And we have regretfully a fair

bit of those in our communities to where

somebody wants to come study the religion.

They want to learn.

And they're told, okay, well, you have to study this one book for 30 years, before you can really do anything and even then you're not really going to be anything, you're just a beginner, right.

We hear this sometimes this is discouraging. This is very, very discouraging. And it's gatekeeping. At the end of the day, we said last class that the sign of a sincere teacher is that they want their students to surpass them,

and that they were cheering on their students. And that's the sign of a sincere student is that they're cheering on their colleagues and classmates, and they are excited and celebrate their classmates surpassing them.

And this gets back to the last thing, which is pretty much something we already said that a beginning student should not listen to doubts. They shouldn't listen to those advanced sort of things where people are really getting into the nitty gritty. Right, the very fine details of some of the Koran Rewi at the very fine

details of you know, the man's the manuscript preservation of Sahaja. Bahati, average Muslim, pray five times a day, what you find that Sahaba Hadees? Correct. The Quran is 100% preserved, all you need to know.

And it's true. It's not like people aren't lying to you. Right. But when specialists are combating let's say like the doubts of the orientalist and things like that, that's a conversation for a different audience. You don't you don't belong in that conversation as a beginning student, you should just stay away from it.

And actually, the person who is advanced in the scholar, they're required to engage with that material, whereas the beginner student they're required to stay away from it. And Allah Subhana Allah knows best any questions anything at all, before we we wrap up, going to apologize for being late and also don't have the live live stream tonight had a little bit of a technical difficulty.

hamdulillah Thank you very much for attending. May Allah bless you and your families, and inshallah we'll see you soon inshallah. Samadhi Kumar