Reforming the Self #33

This will not apply to

the hungry that helped me. So I've

been

here for

a long time and maybe making

some money. Everybody.

Welcome, Sunday night, performing yourself.

Also honey book that er, LM Academy. Sure, yeah.

Last time we had talked about, or the author had talked about

essential characteristics for students, all of this learning, benefiting yourself with knowledge, then

you have to be prepared

in order to benefit from that knowledge.

And so today, we're gonna do a brief recap of that. And then we're also going to get into its complementary counterpart, which is essential characteristics. So teachers,

it's a two way street, both sides have to have the right ingredients

for a successful learning experience. So the author role was so handy. He had talked about, first and foremost, what every student has to do, student of this religion, and student of every other subject is to purify themselves, for adequate,

purify themselves from poor etiquette. And there are several different things that count here. As poor etiquette, one of the things is haste. Right?

It's poor etiquette for students that have haste in the thing that they're studying. Why? Because it's implied, if you act like you can work that it's even possible to learn something in a day or a month or a year, then you're kind of implying that it's, there's not that much to it. Right, and that might fly for certain

certain subjects. But certainly something like Islamic law, like the four n, like Arabic, like things like this, and even other subjects, such as this, medicine, and engineering and these sorts of things. Psychology dealing with people education, they're all very, very rich involved fields that require time and practice to master. Right, and so, paste is a is a is his bad manners, having haste. It also overstates one's ability, right. So anybody is only able to digest a certain amount of material in a certain amount of time, when compared to water, the human body can only process a liter of water,

in and out. So for example, if you want to fast the following day, and you think that the hour before sunrise, you're just going to drink three liters of water, your body isn't even going to be able to process that much water. Right? So knowledge is just the same. There's only so much that your mind and your soul is going to be able to process at once. And so you to to be hasty. And to imagine that you're able to process more than that

is overstating your own powers. And then third of all, what this does, being hasty, when you're seeking to learn something, is that it expresses a lack of trust in your instructor, and in your teacher, because your teacher is responsible not just for the information that they are presenting to you, but they are also responsible for the pace and the scope and the amount. Right.

And it's true that not all teachers are good at this, right. But the fact that not all teachers are good at this does not make it does not invalidate

the appropriateness of this particular aspect of the student teacher relationship and in the first place, right? Just because some teachers are poor, at

communicating to their students are pacing their students or breaking it down into the proper bite sized pieces and putting them on a good schedule. Just because a teacher is good at that does not mean that the student is any better. Right? And so that's just the case of both sides being at fault for the same thing.

When if the student is focusing on themselves, what else do they have to do? What else can they do except submit to their teachers sense of timing and how much they are?

able to learn in one setting. The second

thing that comes under purifying yourself, when it comes to the student and the etiquette the student has to have when they're about to learn anything, especially the religion is to free themselves from jealousy. Jealousy is a killer, when it comes to people studying anything, let alone the fate. And this is something I witnessed firsthand. And many of the I mean, I hope you're not following any sort of the drama on social media that always is ever present, you know, but many of the things that that people

can claim, our disagreements of Cook, or disagreements of theology, or disagreements that are rooted in academics are honestly if you go way, way back to the beginning, are actually just personal issues rooted in jealousy. Right. And this is a particular danger for people who study the Religious Sciences, because you know, a certain thing, and you know, things and you have this sort of authority to speak for the religion. And then if you have a personal

issue with somebody, it's very, very, very tempting. And the devil is going to attempt to get you to put a religious justification for your treatment of that other that adversary, or your mistreatment of that adversary by saying, well, this person is off the, you know, off the path, and this person is misguided, and this person is this, and this person has that, right? Regretfully, we live in a time where that is very, very, very common.

And these are things that I witnessed in Medina and I, in the last class, we talked about specifics.

So we don't need to revisit those.

The next part of purifying yourself as a student, according to the author is focusing on your studies, not letting yourself get distracted by the world because this world is always going to be there. Right, you making your livelihood, it's never going to end, you being responsible for your children, it's never going to end. And that doesn't mean that we neglect those things. But which way is the typical way? Most people use those things as an excuse to prevent their learning. Right. And so the author wants to caution us and wants to tell us that

those things are not barriers for you to learn. You can't use them as excuses. You have to stay focused on your on your studies, you have to schedule your time. Well, if you organize yourself, so that you're giving everything as proper due, right, very, very few are the people who are neglecting their livelihood and their children at the expense of their studies. Very, very many are the people who are neglecting learning for the sake of their livelihood and children. Right. So you deal with the majority situation, and a majority situation calls for people to not be intimidated by their worldly responsibilities when they're going to be learning anything.

The next thing that the author had said was to avoid arrogance towards your instructor, and to avoid arrogance towards the subject that you're learning. And this is a huge one. Absolutely. Here's the previously said on said two types of people don't learn. I'm sorry, I'm not sure that this is a Hadith model for Elon of the solar system. But this is a statement of the setup. Two types of people don't learn the arrogant person. And the shy person, arrogant person doesn't think he has anything to learn. And so he's already a closed door, he's not going to be able to accept anything, he's going to always think that he knows better.

And the shy person isn't going to learn because that's, that's the opposite side of the same pride. Right? Somebody who's shy too shy to ask questions too shy to make a mistake, too shy to get it wrong, and be corrected. This person is just as prideful as the first type. But they reacting to it in the opposite. The opposite way by just kind of trying to fly low and fly under the radar. And we saw that we witnessed that when when we were abroad as students, and we saw people studying the Arabic language, the people who progressed the quickest, and the people who learn the most are the people that just, you know, let's do it, crash and burn. Just threw themselves out there. Let

themselves make mistakes, and allow themselves to be corrected. And that's the way to learn. So that's one type of arrogance. The other part of the arrogance is arrogance, the subject, you know,

it goes together this in the last point you need, you need help, right? If you want to learn anything, you need help, you're not going to just be able to sit in the comfort of your own home, in your living room in your bedroom, and figure it out on yourself. You know, there's been 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people that have done it before you right? It would be silly and counterproductive to not benefit from the work of those people. They will tell you the things to avoid the things that they are the happiest that they did, and so on and so forth. And with us in studying Islam, the most successful of us we tried to listen very carefully to what the guys who

went before us said, you know, like what did you regret? I always particularly ask people about

regrets. If you could do it all over again, what would you do different? Because people tend to be very, very honest when it comes to the things that they regret.

So you avoid, avoid arrogance to your instructor, right? Your instructor, you know, unless they're a phony, we're talking about a real deserving instructor knows more than you too. They've been around the block a few times, don't think, Oh, why does he only give me a little bit? Why doesn't he you know that do those? Why doesn't he do that? It would be more beneficial. If he taught this way, you don't know what you're talking about. Right? He knows the subject and you don't. So if he's making a decision, if he's a qualified teacher, a good teacher, he's making a decision for a reason, he's leaving something out for a reason, because he thinks you're not ready for it. Or because there's

prerequisites that you haven't covered yet, et cetera, et cetera.

And you can't be arrogant to your subject, you have to respect it, you have to understand that it's a serious thing, that it's going to take time, and that you're going to need to rely on other people to get it done. It's cooperation, not competition, you got to cooperate with the right people to get to the goal. And you have to stand on the shoulders of the people who come before you and the people in your life who want to help you get there. Right.

Okay, we talked about that, about that. And obviously, in the Quran, we have an example with Musa and Phillip in Sudan, right? Moses doesn't chill at home, waiting for him to come to him to teach him, right, he goes out and he tracks him down. And even then he promises I'm going to follow you. And he makes a promise to say that he says to him, If I contradict you, right, then be done with me. And Musa can't even help himself. He contradicts further as we know the story very well, three times. And then there says, Okay, listen, you can't, can't learn from me anymore.

So that is kind of

a archetype, right? That's like the the model for the student teacher relationship, then the author had said that the student has to be docile by the literal meaning of the word. And that means that they have to be coachable. They have to be willing to be molded, and to be changed, you can't expect. And this is a very similar thing to what we just mentioned, you can't go into it, just saying, Well, I'm just going to get this one thing that I think I need. And then the rest of the, you know, like whatever this got, no, you have to open be open to letting yourself be transformed and be changed. It's like, fertile ground upon which rainfall is the information or the knowledge

that you're seeking is like rain, and you are the soil. So if you're Rocky and barren, and you think that you've got to figure it all out, then you're not going to benefit, nothing's going to grow. Whereas if you make yourself available, you open yourself up to being amended and being changed, then the knowledge to bear fruit. And this is the difference between learning your religion from YouTube, and learning your religion from actual people who study, because when you go to YouTube, or any of the other social media platforms to teach yourself anything, especially the religion, it's similar to somebody who's sick going into a pharmacy and just raiding the shelves, right? You're

assuming that you know what's wrong with you, you're assuming that you've diagnosed yourself that you know what's wrong, that you know, what's the best thing to take, right, which is a mistake, because you don't know all the contrary indications, maybe you've got a history of this particular illness in your family that you need, that you can't take this type of medicine, maybe you've got an allergy that needs to be taken into account, maybe this type of medicine is nullified, or the effects of it is rendered nothing by this other thing that you're already taking, right. That's the whole reason that you need a pharmacist to be able to tell you which medicine is the best for you as

an individual to take. It's the same thing with a religion, you go on to YouTube, you click this link, you click that link, you're making the decision, you're putting yourself in the driver's seat of what you think you need to hear, right? And then YouTube, as the algorithm is just gonna throw back to you more confirmation is like, Oh, you'd like that, then you'll also like this, right? Whereas the teacher, the difference in a real living teacher is that the teacher is going to dictate the schedule, the pace, what comes next. Priorities, priorities, priorities? No, this thing is not a priority, you have to do this first, or this is much more important that you focus on this

particular thing now, then, rather than doing it later down the road.

And this is, you know, obviously, this gets into a perfect segue into the next chapter, which is when the author's talking about Okay, those are all the things that a student has to have to be successful. What about teachers? Because yes, there are phony teachers out there. And there are teachers that do more harm than good. And we talked a little bit a couple classes ago about those types of teachers and we're going to discuss it again today and show it

to the teacher. They have to

treat their own their students like their own children.

Right. So if parents are

are supposed to be the source of your material life,

your clothes, your food, your shelter, etc, then good teachers are supposed to be the source of your afterlife, at least we're talking about studying the religion, right? They're supposed to teach you the things that you that, that you need to know, to ease your salvation and your delivery and your passage into the next life and into Java and Java. They need to have compassion and mercy. Right? Sometimes you see some teachers that are way too hard and strict and everything's about I mean, this is mostly in the old country, where you people getting whooped, and people getting beat, and then the belt and the chains and all this crazy stuff. You know,

that's not the way that wasn't the way the prophesy son, um, that wasn't the way of the companions.

And people might say that, Oh, we have cultural issues and this etc, etc. But I don't know, consider me doubtful. Teachers have to be compassionate, they have to have mercy, yet, they have to be concerned and they have to be vigilant, right, they have to see three 510 steps ahead, they need to if their student has a certain doubt, or something that they're not understanding or something that is, is vexing them is causing them, you know, dis ease, then they need to be attentive to that. They can't just abandon the student on their own and let them to figure it out on their own, go to YouTube go to Facebook or something else. They need to be attentive to that that's the teachers

responsibility.

And a teacher needs to be caring and concerned about his students, because what is a teacher without his students, right? A teacher without a student is like a person without any lineage. Right? All that knowledge, all that stuff that you went, and you tried to learn, and at the end of the day, it died with you. Right, what's the point? The knowledge lives on?

The teacher and this is a huge thing that is neglected today neglected, is that the teacher, the author says has to facilitate cooperation and love between his students. Yes. How many times and we're talking Mecca, we're talking to Dina, we're talking every place in the Muslim world. Does the sheikh not have any relationship with his students to the point where there's rivalries, and there's feuds and there's jealousy, and there's all this other stuff that goes on in between the students. And this is a horrible, horrible thing. And I've seen it firsthand. And there's a concept in in the old country, or at least in the Arab lands, where they say, Hey, but Right, they put a lot of

emphasis on a teacher's Mystique, right? The teacher or the chef, he's supposed to be somebody who's so far above us, that he only interacts with us in a very curated way. Right? You only see him in very formal situations, he doesn't he might not know even like, he might even not know your first name. If he knows your first name. He doesn't know you know this about you or what you're going on, or where you're coming from, or how many kids you have, et cetera, et cetera.

That's a mistake. In my personal opinion, I understand. Letting teachers have the respect, I understand the creating of the mystique around a teacher to kind of make this sort of attractiveness, but it can have negative consequences. And one of the negative consequences is this is that the teacher doesn't know what the students are doing. And so the students are not putting his lessons into practice. If he's a good teacher, not

caring for each other, not cooperating with each other, the opposite, everything's drama, it's a distraction. It's filled with, you know, backbiting and sabotage, et cetera, et cetera. And that is a tragedy. And that happens everywhere. It certainly happens in Medina.

So the teacher, a good teacher, is responsible. The good teacher knows his students, knows the situation of his students,

and actively proactively tries to facilitate love and cooperation between those students, because the students together cooperating are going to benefit way more way more than any one of them individually, just doing whatever they can by themselves. Right? We had this idea back in Medina that we never put into practice, but we really liked the idea where most scholars, they would teach their classes between Mowgli than a shot, it's only an hour and a half. And so if you were a good student and a vigilant student, it wasn't possible to attend all of the lectures and all the things that you wanted to. So what we thought about doing and we never implemented, regrettably, was we

wanted to have make like a collective or a cooperative, where every individual student

goes to a certain scholar for a certain thing, takes notes and then shares the notes with the group. So then even if everybody's only attending one specific lesson, it's as if everybody's at least able to benefit from the Cliff's Notes, or the outlines from everybody else.

approaching things cooperatively, like that's the way. And that starts with the teacher, the teacher is the one who is responsible for trying to develop that ethos between the students and something that we are very much in need of today.

The teacher is also responsible for guiding the student gradually, from the worst to the best, right. And that's not a one step process that people don't understand. Right, especially as an Imam, I can tell you get people that come to you. And their lives are very real, you've got people engaged in all types of sin.

And you can't throw everything at them at once. They need to be given a path of progress, they need to be given a ladder to climb, and certain things take priority over other things. Right.

You know, there was one, one of the brothers that was talking with a convert, you know,

for a potential Congress, I should say someone who was interested in converting to Islam. And they had a girlfriend, right, and they were very, very, you know, like, it was one, it wasn't one of those casual dating things. It was like a serious, serious girlfriend. years they had been together, right? And someone had told this individual that there are no girlfriends and boyfriends. And it's not, there's no dating, you either marry, or you get out of there. Which is technically true. It's technically true. We don't do the dating thing as mainstream society does. Right? We believe that all sexual relationships, intimate romantic relationships needs to happen within the context of

marriage in order to protect both people's rights. Right, that is true in and of itself. However, is that something that somebody should make their decision to embrace Islam off of or not? Is that person ready for to hear that? This case, this individual was not ready to hear it. And so they asked the person that was speaking to them, they said, you know, like, I heard this thing like, what do you think about, and the brother, may Allah bless him, he hesitated, he sensed that this was a really, really tricky situation. And he kind of like, bought for time or whatever played for time. But eventually, he ended up saying to him, like, No, you can't really have girlfriends in Islam or

whatever. And so he never saw the guy again, the guy never ended up becoming a Muslim, he never converted, etc, etc. Right?

This is a shame. It's a shame, because if a law can get someone, if a law can bring someone to the door, then a law can guide someone after that. Right? The person doesn't need to know about girlfriends boyfriends right away. They don't. And that doesn't have anything to do with lying. It doesn't have anything to do with misleading. It's just about taking into into account where people are at, and getting people,

giving people what's better for them, instead of holding them to this ideal of what's perfect, and what's and what's the best. Right? It's better, that that person became a Muslim and lived in sin, having a girlfriend, then he stayed not a Muslim, and still have his girlfriend anyway. Right? A lost count to Allah can forgive anything that he wants to do, when it comes to the Day of Judgment. Right. But if the person never, they leaned or inclined towards Islam, and they never embraced it in the first place, then we fear for that person in the afterlife. And Allah knows best. So the student, excuse me, the teacher is responsible for pacing for putting things one foot in front of

the other. And this is another thing that we find is a huge problem. You got people becoming Muslim every day in America, and not so much teachers. But the most the Muslim masses throw everything at once. On the new Congress, well, you got to, you got to change your name, and you got to quit your job, and you got to dump your girlfriend and you got to, you know, like, sell your dog or whatever, right? You throw all this stuff on somebody, the second they walk in the door, and you're not, you're not gonna see that person again. Except for the rare person, rare, rare, rare person. That's not how the prophesy centum dealt with people. That's not how the Companions dealt with people. And

that's not how teachers or the Muslim masses should deal with people. They need to take things one step at a time. They need to be willing to buy for time and exchange

something bad for something that's less bad, and then something that's less bad for something that's just a little bit bad. And then something that's a little bit bad for something that's okay, and etc, etc. We have someone in the community that, you know, they're from a culture where they have the sweet 16 Right? It's like a big deal. It's not a birthday party like you can't even translate it as a birthday.

Hey party, it's like a, a coming of age events, right for this particular ethnicity in this particular heritage. And so, you know, if, if she, you know, this person came to me, and they're like, you know, is can we do like an Islamic version of this? Right? And basically, my question was, well, what else are you going to do? If I say, if I say no? And then the answer is, well, we're probably going to have to go do it in church, because I can't imagine telling my parents that I'm not going to have it done. So if the alternative is to go to the church, and to do it with the cross, and to do it with the, you know, this and that, and all this sort of stuff, then I would

rather come to the MSG, right, I will read some core and I will make some speech about, you know, the importance of spam and treating your parents, right, and all this nice stuff. And it could be Dawa, et cetera, et cetera, then really die on this hill, we're talking about as an individual for this individual. It's not the battle to pick, right, this person is a dependent, this person's not an adult yet, this person's, you know, got all these other sort of circumstances. Sometimes you have to be willing to deal with something that's less bad, then fight for the ideal right away, you live to play another day.

And this is something that Sheikh Abdullah, my teacher in Medina, used to stress to us all the time, he used to give the example of Arma. The Allahu anhu, when he was the leader, after the prophesy, centum died, there was someone who was one of these local chiefs in Sham

who went, you know, like Syria, Iraq, Turkey area, and

the Companions when they got to him, he said, I'm thinking about becoming a muslim, but I want you to write a letter to Amman, and, and tell him that I'll become a Muslim if I can be the king after he dies.

Right. And the companions were shocked, because yeah, this is some really brazen stuff.

And so they write back they said, like, well, we can't just like, go ahead and say, Yeah, we gotta write back to Omar and like, see what he said. So they write back online and see what he says. And the letter comes. And in the meantime, when they were, they were waiting for the response, this individual passed away, right, and he passed away as anonymously.

And then they got the letter from Omar. And Omar apparently had said, tell him, he can have it,

tell him he can have it, because I hope that if a law brings him into faith, like the very, very lower rungs of faith, that Allah will continue to guide him after that. And that's really, you know, this needs to be distinguished. This is distinguished from what the Christians have done historically, which is manipulate and change their religion in order to satisfy what people want. That's different, right? So the Christian Christians had to, they had this this test very, very early on, when it came to dealing with the Greeks. And the Greeks had no idea what circumcision was very, very foreign to them. And that they wrote back and there was this big debate between the early

church fathers and the early apostles of the church, some of whom were actual companions and disciples of Jesus, that He said, and they debated what to do, whether to, you know, have the people circumcised, or to not have the people circumstance. And essentially, what they decided was to not have them circumcised tell them that it was just fine, what they were doing. And the whole religion changed. And that was actually one of the key moments in the history of Christianity that set the precedent for that type of thing further down the road. So that's when you find that the Christians, they incorporated pagan holidays and Christianize them and they did all these sorts of things, to

just appease the idolaters and the pagans that they came across, and in the process, they lost their own religion, which is not the same thing. This is not the same thing. We are leaving Islam as it is. We're saying that no, this is Islam Islam says no intimate relationships outside of marriage. Islam says no, this no that where it says to be this has to do that. But we are willing to tolerate a certain individual

persisting in that pre Islamic practice, until we believe that they are ready to receive the truth about that sort of thing. Write two very, very different things. So hopefully, everyone's able to distinguish between those two things.

The other thing Okay, so next is my connection. Okay. Shake family. See, you know, I see I'm freezing up once in a while, Mike, my good. Just tell me in the chat.

The next thing that the author says, Okay, how does the teacher interact with his students? How does he get them, bring them along? Okay, thank you.

The author now says that it's best that the teacher teaches his students through implicit

instruction, as opposed to x

elicit

instruction. Okay, so instead of spelling everything out, in fine, fine detail, he said that it's preferable

if the teacher can be subtle enough and gentle enough and implicit enough to get the students to, to think for themselves, right. And so he lists now a bunch of benefits to this sort of method, right? We could maybe call it the Socratic method, right? The Socratic method of instruction, you assume that the student has the answer in them somehow, they just have to, they have not yet just connected the dots, right? And so you kind of work from what they already agreed to and understand you ask questions that are very, very probing questions that get them to think and then get them to connect the dots themselves.

Yes, exactly.

So one of the benefits of this says the author is that it facilitates true understanding, as opposed to just memorization. Right? What do we do when we bring the kids in for Sunday school? The five pillars of Islam, the testimony of faith, and prayer, and right, and they memorize it, and okay, it's okay. It's good. They know it. Okay. But do they really understand it? Do they really understand the significance of it? Right? Because if you ask, you know, if you ask

a child, you know, it's like, why is it important? That there's no God, but Allah? How can we tell? How many gods are there? And what would be the consequences? If there were only got only one God? Versus if there were multiple gods?

Then you not just tell someone? What's the right answer? You get them to come to the conclusion themselves. And to understand why like it, and you can use things from the Quran, Allah subhanaw taala. He says that if there were multiple gods, you would see chaos in the creation, because the definition of multiple gods would imply that there would be multiple wills and multiple wills would argue and dispute and come into contradiction with each other. And so you would find that there would be chaos in the creation. And we do not find that at all. We find unity, we find harmony, we find peace, we find laws and order and organization. Right? And so you can use this rationale and

reasoning to guide someone to come to the conclusion on their own, that there can only be one guy.

And why is it necessary that we have revelation? Why is it necessary that we have prophecy, etc, etc? What's the scope of human reasoning? How much stuff can we really figure out on our own? Can we really figure out what happens after the human soul is removed from the body? Can we really figure out what happens when we die? Can we really figure out what happens on the Day of Judgment? Or if there's a day of judgment? Or, you know, all those sorts of things? No, of course we can't. Which is why we depend upon revelation. So if you teach implicitly, you get somebody to affirm those things themselves. It not only is better than memorization, and that it's going to stick longer and

stronger in the mind. But the person knows why. And they understand why. And they're able now to accommodate and deal with and account for every other way of understanding the universe. Someone comes to them and tries to tell them that, oh, no, this god stuff. And this religion is just ancient fables. And it's got it's just stories that people have made up and then sort of that person has gone through the intellectual process of understanding why this stuff makes sense. And they will be less susceptible to that sort of doubt, than somebody who simply quote unquote, knows the right answer. Right, was able to get the right answer on the Sunday School tests by saying, Oh, the five

pillars of Islam are XYZ, et cetera, et cetera.

And that's just basic education, pedagogy. Everybody who studies anything with education knows that it's better to facilitate the own students conclusion, than to just spoon feed them, the conclusion yourself.

The author says that this process is more honorable, it's more honorable for the student. And for the teacher, it respects the students intelligence. Right? It respects the student's identity, or reality as a thinking person with all who already comes to the table with information and skills and abilities. Right? And it respects the teacher more. Because the teacher, it's beneath the teacher to have to just spoon feed and you know, these sorts of things and just say this is this and just memorize it, and then you're done. That's a waste of time. Right? And as a teacher myself, I can tell you that it's much much more engaging, to be involved in a conversation with somebody who's cut

and trying to come to these conclusions themselves than to just try to, you know, be telling someone the right answers that they have to memorize.

explicitness or spoon feeding, that one of the ways

weaknesses of it the author points out is that it only has one dimension. Right? If I tell you that the first pillar of Islam is the testimony of faith,

it's Yoona dimensional, it's cut and dry, it stops there.

Whereas if I asked the question I tried to teach implicitly, I say,

how can we tell if there's a God or not? How can we tell that if there is a God, there's only one versus multiple, it opens up all of these threads of inquiry, all of these questions, all of a sudden, there's all there's a whole network of thought thoughts, questions, you know, examples that come up, and it's a much more enriching experience for the student.

And the last thing that the author mentions, and this is true for anybody who's a parent says, explicit instruction invites contradiction, and conflict and opposition from the student, whereas implicit instruction does not. And this comes back to the honor. So you tell your son, or you tell your daughter, this is this, what's your son going to say? No, it's not.

It's not always how they respond. That's how I responded when I was a teenager. No, it's not, I would argue with you until I was blue in the face that the sky was purple, I did not care. I just like wanted to argue that, especially for I don't, I can't speak for women. But for men, it's about proving yourself, it's about proving your abilities. It's about, you know, carving your own identity, et cetera, et cetera. So if you are going to go with the spoon feeding

methodology of instruction, you're going to find that at a certain point, you're going to be up against a lot of opposition, there are going to be some students who they want to prove you wrong, and they will do anything to prove you wrong. Because they're trying to carve out that kind of identity for themselves, the solution is not to crush them, and crush their will. No, you've got to take that. And you've got to apply that in an arena where it's actually beneficial. And what could be better for them is trying to teach implicitly through questions. Like, okay, I get it, you're smart. Well, then, why is this? What do you think about this? Right? Why? Why do it somebody says

that we don't need revelation? Like, why are somebody claims that? You know, there's reincarnation, right, or that God became a human being?

On Earth? Right? What would we say to that person? Or why does that make sense or not make sense? Right? This is something that's going to it's, it's, there's no, there's nothing to push back against, there's no opposition to be had. Right? Now. It's collaboration. Now, it's you're working together with the students to come to a conclusion, as opposed to you trying to give something to the student like medicine, and then the kid shutting his mouth and turning away and running and saying, Nope, tastes doesn't taste good, I don't want it.

And the last thing, and I guess we'll end with this, because the time's running out is that the teacher has to do it for the right reasons. And this should be put up in lights put up on the wall, this is the first thing, a teacher, if they're going to be a good teacher has to do it for the right reasons. They have to want what's good for the student, they have to want to build independent thinkers, people who are going to be able to not be dependent on the sheikh not have to ring them up every five seconds. And we're not talking about you know, we're talking about like, eventually, eventually, eventually, somebody who's serious, and we're not talking about a one off, you know,

question, somebody who wants to learn the religion from this shape, right? The idea the shapes gotta be able to put make that person put that person on a track on a path where they're going to be developing their own skills, so that one day they spread their wings and fly. And yes, they're going to, if they come across something that confuses them, refer back and ask, but it's not. And some people a lot of people have abused this these days in the time that we live in, where they make it seem like people who are studying the religion are never meant to think independently? Or what are the scholars say, we have to bring everything back to the scholars. And while the scholars say this,

and scholars say that and everything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The scholars are in the business of trying to make independent thinkers and their own scholars. Right. At some point, the young generation is going to have to take over write and that should come at a

a process. That's right, exactly. A good teacher, a good instructor or parent

prepares that student or that that young person for situations so that they can handle them on them by themselves on their own. The idea is never and was never to have that person constantly dependent upon you. Oh, the shake. I heard this and what do you think about this and every single

A little issue, whoever wants to perpetuate that type of dynamic, they have an ego problem. They have an ego problem. And we talked about this before, that there's two, there's two extremes here is that there are some people who want to keep the Muslim community, dumb and uneducated, so that they can just control them. You know, it's like, give them little bits of, you know, disconnected information that doesn't really build anything, doesn't build independent thinkers doesn't build people who can interact with a Koran or the Hadith and do things, you know,

independently.

That's right. They're not always going to be there for you, right? And there's this kind of hypocrisy, you know, where people imagine where do you think these scholars come from in the first place? You think that they were their teachers taught them to always, always, always ask them, and there's a romanticism, I get it. Like, even if I mean for example, he studied with he was a student of shapeless lab even say me until Shaco, Sam died, right? And even on time was a very, very advanced student at that point, he was a scholar in his own right, but he wouldn't answer questions until shapeless time, even Taymiyah passed away. That's romantic. That's very nice. That's very

beautiful. But not every single situation has to be that way. We can't impose this, this water, right? This going above and beyond, as every single student teacher relationship has to mimic this sort of thing. And that if anybody starts teaching, or if anybody starts expressing their own opinions, before they're 60 years old, or before, they're 80 years old, or before they're, you know, decrepit, and you know, being pushed around in a wheelchair, then all of a sudden, this person is, you know, disrespectful to the scholars. No, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what it is. That's not the way it goes. So

people have to, people have to have the right intentions, the teacher has to have the right intention. He can't keep his students in a perpetual state of dependency.

Right. And he simultaneously can't keep his students can't make his students discouraged. You know, you have some, some people they want to learn. And they say, Well, you you know, you can't, whatever, you have to study this one book for 30 years, and every single explanation of it before you can even like whatever, that's discouraging, it's unnecessary. And it's gatekeeping. Right, a lot can put blessing, whatever he wants to put, and whoever wants to come to you to learn, you have to teach them. And you have to teach them with a sincere heart. And the the marker and the measure of who's sincere and who's not sincere is that a sincere teacher is going to cheer on their student

and hope that that student surpasses them one day. And a sincere student is going to cheer on their other students and take and be happy from their other students success, and hope that their other fellow students are going to surpass them one day, right. Whereas the sick heart, the sick soul, the jealous soul

wants to always keep everybody else down, wants to keep everybody else in their place, is always kind of looking out to make sure that they're the headshot, or they're the, they're the top shake, or the top most knowledgeable person around or they're the most knowledgeable student or the best student, etc, etc, non anonymous, it doesn't work like that.

And this is why we'll just the last point here, and we're already over time, this is why the machines have to figure it out. When it comes to financial structures and incentive structures, right? You can't have an imam or a teacher in a place where there's a conflict of interest, right?

You have to pay the Imam pay the teachers well enough as a base salary, and not sort of these kinds of fee based things where you can't create what I mean to say is you can't create a situation where the Imam has a financial incentive to keep people uneducated, or to keep people at a basic level of knowledge. You have to take care of the Imam. So he's free to teach people as much as he wants and he can take people to the top and he has to not look over his shoulder and worry that he's gonna get the boot one day because he taught people everything he knew. Right? And that's something that machines are starting to figure out and have to continue to figure out. So that reaches the end of

what we have time for Are there any questions? Anybody before we conclude?

Okay, um, the last thoughts on the last round