Dogma Disrupted
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The Struggle for a United Community
Is disunity a significant threat in our communities? Where do we draw the line between excusable and inexcusable differences? Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy joins Imam Tom Facchine to discuss what unites us as Muslims, and how to work together despite our differences.
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. We are to unite as Allah commanded, in the way Allah commanded. There is variation the Prophet ﷺ taught. They're not a matter of conflict or like diametrically opposite. They're reconcilable differences. These are not right and wrong. They're right and right. So let's let's get down into these different... Yeah, sure. Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullah. Welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today we're going to talk about unity and differences in the ummah. A very, very important topic that has a lot of confusion surrounding it. Some people think that in order to be united, we can't disagree about anything. And then some people have the opposite opinion that basically it's a free-for-all and we can have any disagreement whatsoever. Which begs the question of what does truly unite us as Muslims? So today to help us navigate this topic, we've brought back our beloved Sheikh Muhammad al-Shanawi. Welcome back to the program. So let's get right into it. What is the status of disunity in Islam? Is disunity something that is a significant threat or not? Certainly. I mean, as the scholars put it, because the verses and hadith are so clear. Let me rewind and say, Bismillah, alhamdulillah, salatu wassalamu ala rasulullah wa ala alihi wa sahbihi ajma'in. There is nothing more emphatically enjoined in the Quran and Sunnah after Tawheed for the Muslims than uniting upon that Tawheed. You know, Allah Azza wa Jalla often speaks about brotherhood with the widest net, if you will. When he says, Innamal mu'minoona, all of the believers are upon a single brotherhood, fraternity, brotherhood and sisterhood, of course. We have the Prophet salallahu alayhi wasalam warning before his departure that there has crawled up on you the disease of the nations before you, which is envy.
And of course, that's what eats away at the brotherhood fabric, the social fabric. And then eventually you're envying the blessings that it transfers to the blessed himself, right? Then hatred. He said, envy, then it becomes hatred. He said, and that is the shaver. And he said, I don't mean that which shaves hair, but that which shaves off the entirety of the religion. So it's almost like the religion at its most fundamental level is about Tawheed. But without the brotherhood, you will not maintain it. And you may actually reverse your commitment to Tawheed. As our teachers used to say, if your brother, for the sake of Allah, you can't get past his differences or your differences with them, then your issue isn't even with your brother anymore. It's with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala himself. How could you not accept as your brother, someone whom Allah has accepted as worthy of being his servant? Give us an illustration of how that happens. It's really fascinating to think of the jealousy. Okay. Jealousy. And then it grows and it festers until someone becomes, yeah, displeased that somebody else obtained some sort of blessings or status or something. Make it very, very plain for us, like an example of how that then undermines the religion itself. Because some people will think, oh, well, that's just their individual problem. They're going to be sinful. But we're saying this is an existential threat, right? To the establishment of Islam or the longevity of Islam. So how do those two things relate? Right. Of course. I mean, believe it or not, these are all the muddy battlegrounds of the ego. Like we talk about the ego all the time, but all of the damage you may see on the world stage with Muslims or with non-Muslims. Look at how much damage the ego when left unchained, you know, can cause. What is racism? But it is my race. Like no one's actually defending someone else's race, maybe in the spirit of justice or something. But they don't actually, anyone who believes in a superiority,
dynamic doesn't believe in anything but their own superiority. Yeah. If you think of even like this blind patriotism or blind nationalism, tribalism, and then you just have sort of the groupisms even within the religious languaging. So this, we call it being identity centric. And identity centric religiosity is actually an egotistic religiosity. It's not God centered. And so Allah called us to Tawheed because every good is found there in this world before the next. If you reverse it, then you can expect anything from anyone, even in the name of the religion. They just tokenized it. It's a veneer, but it's really about, you know, identity centrism. It's about me and who's close to me and who agrees with me and who looks like me. And that's it. Yeah. SubhanAllah. No, that's exactly what I wanted to tease out. A couple of things occurred to me as you were describing that. One of them, how many disagreements and controversies at the base level, even sometimes, unfortunately, between the ulama, go back to hasid, go back to envy of one another. And I'm sure you've seen it. And I've definitely seen it in my studies that one of the, why is this so dangerous? Because people will start to conscript the dean in their effort to basically score points against somebody else, right? Or somebody else, whatever differences that they have now, they have them in their crosshairs. They're targeting that person. And any little piece of evidence, whether it comes from the dean or somewhere else or something that's like the other person slipping up, now the entire person's orientation is just grabbing whatever they can, right? It's like a bar fight, like grabbing whatever they can in order to punish the other person and to prove them wrong or to one-up them or to knock them off of a pedestal. And in the process... Hey, come on. Yeah. I'm so sorry.
It is so interesting how it knocks you off your otherwise very methodical, very sort of scholarly astute methodology. Yes. Like when I hate you, I will consider a suspicion about you, fact. Right. And then think of groupism as well. When I love you, I will consider facts about you, unfounded rumors. Yeah. And so in that case, we are no longer Abdul Haqq. We are not the servants of the truth. We are not... Allah's name is Al-Haqq, the ultimate truth. And so we are obligated to pivot with truth wherever it goes. We're no longer that person anymore. Yes, SubhanAllah. Yes, SubhanAllah. One of the things... This was a nice little litmus test that Sheikh Abdullah al-Shanqiti introduced to us. He said that one of the ways that you can tell if you're on the right path is if you're equally happy that someone is being guided by other than you. Right. So you put out a video, somebody else puts out a video, and someone comes to you and they say, yeah, I'm not really very... I'm not a big fan of your lectures. It's kind of boring, but Sheikh Al-Shanawi, his stuff is fire. You know, if you can say, like, take that with a smile and say, Alhamdulillah, I'm so glad that you found something that is speaking to you, that's holding you on to this deen, then that's sincerity, right? Whereas if you're being eaten away by hasad, by jealousy and envy, then the temptation is to be like, oh, well... We hear this all the time, right? It's like, well, I don't agree with everything he says. Yeah, no, duh, right? It's like, nobody agrees with everything that anybody says, but what I'm doing is I'm throwing shade. And now it's like, well, he's got this mistake over here. Oh, yeah, you know, make sure we... Or sometimes here's another one we hear, make sure we should be taking from the major scholars, right? Kibar al-ulamah, we shouldn't be taking from... And all of these sorts of, you know, little tactics. We're so sneaky.
We're so suave and sneaky when it comes to the ego and sort of this game that we play of throwing shade at other people out of envy, subhanAllah. Like the vast majority of time, it at least occurs to me that it's out of envy. Allah protect us, man. You're absolutely right. I mean, the second thing that it was getting me thinking about, you know, Surah al-Baqarah and Al-Imran, but especially Surah al-Baqarah, like one of these, one of the main, I think, points, and you just mentioned it, is about relating to truth versus identity, right? And this is something that, you know, we both teach for legacy. You know, I hammer into the kids like all the time, like look at how Bani Israel specifically, and the Nasara, right? But they basically, it was like they were one of the kids who the teacher gave them something, okay? And they imagined that their worth was because the teacher only gave it to them, right? And then if the teacher turns around and gives it to somebody else, now they're upset. Now it's not special anymore, right? That's basically what Bani Israel and the Nasara and the Christians did for Allah's guidance, His prophethood, His books, His revelations, right? They got it sent down to them, and they're misinterpreting that act as, well, this is because we're special. This is because we're God's chosen people. This is because we're the saved sect, or we're this or we're that. And so they construct this group identity. It's no longer about following the truth. They construct a group identity around it. And then now Allah's guidance and prophethood and book go to somebody else. And they're like, what? Wait a second. It's like, we'll never believe, we can't believe. And there's where that jealousy comes in. And Allah calls it jealousy. We're never gonna believe. We're gonna fault find. We're gonna make unrealistic demands on Him to prove, right, His... It's a stifle, yeah. Exactly. So, SubhanAllah. So all of this has taken us a little bit on a tangent, but it gets back to how important unity is in Islam, okay? That unity is something Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
commands and expects. And it's not just... It doesn't just have political ends, right? A lot of people, I think they hear the word unity and they're thinking, okay, yeah, well, we need to be united for politics. That's true. But we also need to be united for Islam to actually thrive and survive, even in your own heart as an individual. Because if you don't, then you're gonna get wrapped up in this other thing, envy, jealousy, et cetera. So maybe we can go through. I know that you've done some work on this already. What are the different causes of unity? Excuse me, disunity. Why does disunity happen? And then we'll transition, I think, to talking about our censors, right? When it comes to picking out disunity. Because some people have censors that are too sensitive. They think that everything is disunity. And then some people have censors that are dead and they're not working anymore. They think that everything's fine. But first, why does disunity happen in the first place? I mean, Ibn Taymiyyah, when he was speaking about al-furqah, speaking about disunity, he does this very clean job of consolidating it all into root causes. And those are al-jahlu wal-baghi, which is ignorance, just lack of education, and baghi, which is transgressiveness. We spoke a little bit about transgressiveness when you should know better or you do know better, but you're sort of justifying for yourself double standards to the end of it. But lack of education is a big part of it. Because we are to unite as Allah commanded in the way Allah commanded. So there are artificial conflicts that could happen sometimes, or there could be an over-laxity. Balance is good everywhere, right? So when artificial conflict being overly stringent, being too tight, there are some differences that aren't even disagreements, meaning they're a matter of variation. They're not a matter of conflict or like diametrically opposite. They're reconcilable differences.
So there's variation, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught in the wordings of the adhan or approved of. There's variation in the qiraat of the Quran. These are all variational differences. These are not right and wrong. They're right and right. And in that stuff, it becomes absolutely wrong to disregard, to sort of object to any of this. Because you, in fact, are objecting to something taught by the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. It's not even like an interpretation of what the Prophet may have done. This is stuff he taught, Alayhi Salaatu Wasallam. And so unless you identify that first, you just need to hold off. Like, which one is this? And even in Islamic work, everyone's got a niche. Like even the sahaba, some of them were educating others more than anything else. That was their strength, Tabarakallah. Others were very, very invested in justice, social justice, the justice between people like Abu Dharr radiallahu ta'ala an. Some of them were known for their, SubhanAllah, their very delicate natures and spirits and akhlaaq and ibadah. It was phenomenal. And very few of them, actually none of them, except Abu Bakr, was Abu Bakr radiallahu ta'ala an. And it's an important point because with variational differences, you gotta give room for people. Yaqeen, we have that spiritual personality assessment, which is useful to let you know you can be 100% Muslim when you're covering your bases, but really excelling after that in whatever Allah has blessed you, enough strengths. But with Abu Bakr radiallahu ta'ala an, when the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said, whomever doubles their contribution, spends a pair in the path of Allah, he will be called from the gates of paradise and it will be said, this was a great decision you made. And then whomever is of the people of salah, meaning they excelled in salah, they will be called from the gate of salah. And whomever was from the people of,
meaning distinguished in zakah, they're gonna be called from the gate of charity. And whoever was distinguished in jihad will be called from the gate of jihad. And whoever was distinguished in fasting will be called from the gate of Rayan. And then Abu Bakr radiallahu an, he said, Ya Rasulullah, will anyone get to choose from all eight? The variety, right? He's saying, can someone sort of subsume or could have all of this? He said, yes. And I hope that you will be that person or of those people, Abu Bakr. It's beautiful about Abu Bakr, but it's also sort of a reminder for everyone else that don't expect of anyone to be Abu Bakr. Let them, you know. It's like an exceptional well-roundedness. Like most people aren't going to be the, you know, four season athlete and on the Dean's list. And also, you know, like all the other sort of, you know, doing everything. But that was Abu Bakr, right? Even more so. You know, I remember Abdullah al-Mas'uli, just a quick anecdote that came to mind. Ibn Mas'ud used to not fast almost at all. The voluntary fasts, because it would weaken his body. He was a very frail build. For being able to recite and teach the Quran. And he was, you know, the utmost authority in the beauty of his recitation. And I took 70 surahs straight from the mouth of the messenger of Allah salallahu alayhi wasalam to the end of his accolades. So even in Mas'ud, right? Yeah. No, mashallah. No, that's important, right? People need to be given room to breathe, right? And room to be fully Muslim. And it's an important, you know, a really, really important way of thinking about it. As you mentioned, this is the whole sunnah, right? So I think we fall into that problem a lot where we pick one thing and say, this is the sunnah. And then we assume that anything else displaces it and is not the sunnah. No, it's like we're talking about embracing the whole sunnah, right? Whether it's the qiraat or the different sort of ways of worshiping
and being and things like that. No, so that's tremendously significant. So let's get down into these different- Yeah, sure. Yeah. Okay. Of course, conflicts, we don't mean hostility. We mean that these are views that can't simultaneously all be correct. But there's something that has to be kept in mind. Some of these we have to excuse. Some of them we won't excuse. So when there's conflictual conflicts, like halal, haram, lawful, unlawful, some of this is excusable because we can't know in the life of this world which one is actually the stronger view. So it's an epistemic problem. It's a problem that we- Yeah. It's not that objectively or what we would say ontologically, yes, there's one truth, but epistemically, we're limited in knowledge and we can't know for certain which one is completely right. And that's the view of the majority, at least. The majority of usul fiqh scholars believe in the concept of, they're called al-mukhatia, meaning they sort of consider wrong one of the two opposing views. And for rational reasons, they can't both be right at the same time in the same way, logically speaking. So with those conflictual views, there's right and wrong, but we don't know it. It's speculative. That's why they're called dhanni issues. Dhanni means speculative, unclear. And Allah was not forgetful. And Allah Azza wa Jal was not limited. If he wanted to make every last ruling in Islam, as Al-Khiraqi Rahimahullah says and others, so definitive that no two people would ever disagree on his intended, the intended meaning there, it would not be hard for him to do that. But rather since life is a test, not just a test of conduct, but a test of humility, a test of intelligence. He wanted to test who's going to be more objective than others. Who's going to be more committed to learning than others. Who is going to be more self-restrained to concede once they get convinced
that not their view turns out to be kind of stronger, at least for me. And so the stronger view in the excusable issues, that is never an absolute. We have to keep this in mind. And many students of knowledge, when they finally get to that level of legal theory, and there's like, wait a minute. So the stronger view thing was a lie. Say, no, no, no, not a lie. It's subjective. You know? Right, exactly. That's important. Subjective. And individualistic often, right? It's not necessarily... And circumstantial, like context, different areas. So that is the excusable. You're obligated to excuse those. No way around it. Call me back up just for one second so we get the big picture. So we're talking about a typology of differences. Okay, so the first category we said, they're not really even differences. They're variety. And they're actually the entire Sunnah, right? Things that Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam taught, things Allah Azawajal revealed, that if you're actually shaving them off, you're actually shaving off Islam. You're actually like abandoning... You're creating disunity. Yes, you're creating disunity through your quixotic, I know you're an English major, quixotic sort of quest for false unity. Okay, and the second category are things that are actually disagreements. But we're talking about, there are valid disagreements. Within that, we said that there are qawatih, right? There are certain things that Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la made so obviously clear that there's no room for interpretation. There's no room for differences of opinion. That's not what we're talking about, right? But there's a whole lot of things. And actually more than I think the average person would like to admit, the average practicing Muslim would like to admit, that are dhanni issues, meaning that they're not qawatih. They're not absolutely completely settled and set issues. That now we are in the realm of, yes, there are multiple interpretations and those multiple interpretations are valid. That's where we're at, right? Fantastic, yeah. So, you know, there's a few things here that I've come across in dealing with people that number one,
people could be a little bit uncomfortable with this. And that's why I said it's part of it. You should expect life to be confusing a little bit. The test of life. This is the examination room. You shouldn't expect to have the answers. You said it beautifully. And I'm just going to interrupt for one second because it actually demonstrates your sincerity, right? If there's that little bit of wiggle room where something is not like painfully obvious, it will say a lot about an individual, what they're going to do with that wiggle room, whether they're going to take a conservative opinion or a stronger opinion or how they're going to relate to that sort of ambiguity, I think says a lot about our moral character. So that's a very important point. God's not trying to win an argument with you. He can win if you want to win, right? You know, some, Dr. Hatem actually, he pointed out very beautifully a long time ago. It's always stuck with me. If God wanted, he could have sent Moses without a speech impediment. Yeah. If God wanted, he could have sent Jesus without the social impediment of not having a father in a patriarchal society, right? But he's not trying to win an argument. He gave you enough reasons to believe in Jesus, enough reasons to believe in Moses, peace be upon him. So if you want to now look for an excuse to be dismissive of their ministry, here it is, right? If Allah wanted, there could have been a bigger difference between... between the genetic makeup of the chimpanzee and the human being. Right, yeah. But God's not trying to win an argument. Yeah. The person who's looking for the excuse to reject will find that excuse. And the person who's looking for an excuse to believe will find that excuse. Yeah. So that's the first thing I wanted to say about, you know, why wasn't it clearer? It's God's wisdom. And here are some examples of that, even in sort of the endorsement of prophets. It could have been more quote-unquote waterproof, right? But no, that's not the point. The next thing I wanted to say is that the matters of agreement, as you put it, are far less than the matters of disagreement in terms of the practice,
the applied law, the day-to-day. But that does not mean that the matters of agreement in Islam are like nil or insignificant. The books of Ijma'ah, scholarly consensus, unanimous agreement, those of Ibn Hazm, those of Ibn al-Mundir, those are significantly bigger, significantly bigger than the constitution of any modern-day country. And even the constitutions being shorter are still being interpreted and reinterpreted. These matters of Ijma'ah are decisive and conclusive and clear. And it's actually of the reasons why the Muslims are united, relatively, compared to every other civilization 1,400 years later. Allah created and protected this set. Allah is one. No disagreement on what that means. The Quran is his book. No disagreement that it's his book. Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is the final prophet. No disagreement there. Being good to your parents is mandatory. Murder is haram. Fornication and interest are intolerable. We have a lot. Alhamdulillah. Backbiting is haram. You know, pork is not. So all of this is actually a very substantial framework to huddle around as Muslims, historically even. So it's great. So don't be like, oh man, what can we actually agree on? No, we have more to agree on than anyone else. And that's of the reasons, by the way, that we just had an open house here in the Masjid yesterday, the day before. And he told me like, how do you deal with other mosques? I was like, I know what you're saying. You probably Google the denomination when you're going somewhere when you're on vacation in the summer to worship. I Google mosque near me. People don't appreciate that. Converts appreciate that. And people who understand a little bit more. But that is extremely significant that if you're a Presbyterian, okay, when you're traveling, yeah, you're only looking for a Presbyterian church. And it's not like this is not, it's not even analogous to like Sunni Shia, like the degree of denominational, I don't want to say bigotry is too strong of a word,
but exclusivity, maybe, let's say, within Christian practice is very significant. Like especially, you know, Catholics, you're not even going to be able to get the Eucharist if you show up for Mass and you're not an actual Catholic, or maybe you're reformed, or maybe you're even within, yeah, even within the denomination. And there's the membership issue and the tithes, right? Yeah, yeah. So it's like very, very exclusive. Whereas, yes, upon a lot, you just pop in Google mosque near me and you go and once in a while, we have a laugh because you stumble into something that's beyond the beyond the pale. But normally, normally, nine times out of 10, you're going to be safe and you're going to have a, you know, a normal sort of Sunni experience. So Shaykh, the last thing that needed to be said on this issue is how do we know? How do we know what is excusable? What is inexcusable? Yes. So al-Imam al-Ghazali, rahimahullah, you know, he's a great Shafi'i scholar and he's beyond needing an intro, but he was especially known for his acumen in legal theory. And all the discussions today are discussions of legal theory, for the most part, even though it does sort of touch creed and we should also put a disclaimer out there in a minute about this. But he said, look, when the scholars of Islam, they're respected and they know each other, right? Mainstream Sunni scholars disagree on an issue and they don't, the scholars, forget us messy laymen, and they don't excommunicate one another, right? Like they don't blacklist one another. Then this is, he offers two very nice sort of markers for what that defines or the boundaries of disagreement. He said, number one, that is their agreement, actually. Yes. That disagreeing here is permissible. Yes. Right? So... What's it called in the books of Abu Suwa, it's called huduth qawl thalith, right? Yeah. Exactly. It's like... It must be in those views. Yes. And therefore we're going to agree to accept those views. Conversely, it also means the truth cannot be outside those views because the ummah would not be left in the dark for a minute.
There would never be an era upon which there wasn't the correct opinion. So if they're disagreeing and they're not excommunicating each other, they're not sort of like canceling each other, that means they're agreeing on the fact that you can disagree within these views. Yes. He said the second thing this proves when they disagree and accept that disagreement from one another, is that the matter is vanni, it is excusable. And that's powerful because many times we come forth with the evidence of our madhab or for non-madhab, whatever it may be, but the evidence is clear. Like respectfully, respectfully. If it were clear, would these people who are far more intellectually enlightened and gave it far more thought and were far more spiritually refined, which means like entitled to the correct understandings, were they all in the dark? Why did they disagree if it was that clear, right? You got to sort of like turn the gun on yourself for a second, say, wait a minute, maybe it's me. Maybe I just, I'm not able to see it outside of this very limited scope. And that's my problem. You know, the scholars used to say that suit of van is from a lack of intelligence, not just a lack of adab. Yes, I know. You know, to suspect the other party, a lot of times it's not just because you have poor manners. It's also because you have very limited intellectual vantage point. It's almost like your imagination. Any other way. Lack of imagination, right? SubhanAllah. I have to interject with, I've been thinking a lot about books that we don't have in English, right? And it seems to me that both theoretically and a rundown of what is like truly agreed upon, that would be a tremendously useful thing to have in the English language. Because there's a lot of sloppiness when it comes to, you know, you and I know, if you go into an Asul fiqh book, you know, there are different, even differences of opinion about Ijma' in theory, right? You know, but these are things that Ijma' is kind of thrown around, right?
Within the English speaking space, whether there is agreement or not agreement. I just feel like it's very poorly understood. Because when you were talking, I was thinking about, well, that subtle point, which I believe is the majority opinion about the agreement upon the disagreement and the scope of disagreement. You have another sort of party that would say, well, there was a disagreement, but then everybody sort of united on one opinion. And that's Ijma'. And then it's pushing out. And there are layers of Ijma' that scholars traditionally have spoken about, that Ijma' al-Sukuti, right? And it was sort of tacit approval. But then there's also a discussion of, wait a minute, you guys just didn't have the communication channel to know that at the same time, someone across the globe was opining elsewhere and understanding otherwise. And so these things do need some fleshing out in Arabic and in English, actually, believe it or not. Yeah, it feels like we could benefit that there's a lot of gray area, even just the gap between what exists in Arabic and English, which is always massive. But it feels like this could be a quick hit and a low hanging fruit to just up the level of discourse when it comes to Ijma'. But until then, let us say that on the individual level, no one should feel like they are authorized to state a view without there being precedent. Yes. You got to check first. You can't just assume. And on the flip side, no one is allowed to disregard a view without first confirming that there's no precedent. Yes. If there is precedent, then you're going to have to establish a bona fide Ijma' after that precedent that that was walked away from or something. Okay. But that filter, otherwise you have no deen in a thousand years. Yes. No, let's talk about that a little bit because you and I can geek out about usul and stuff like that. But we have a very, very low level, though it is something of knowledge
that gives us access to certain conversations that other people don't have. Okay. So there is a difference between a layman or somebody who's not studied, like going about these things and relating to other people's differences, right, versus somebody who has at least the tools, even if they're compromised severely, etc., etc. So maybe we can talk a little bit about those differences. Because when I was watching, and you have, mashallah, on your Meshi channel, you have a wonderful series that goes through these issues. And one of the terms that you use, and I know that you're translating, obviously, from Arabic, and you said, like, an independent researcher. And I was just thinking about how many people are self-styled independent researchers, right, that imagine that because they can look up something on Islam Q&A in English, that they're, mashallah, that they're an independent researcher. And that's not what you mean, right? So let's talk about, it's right, right? So let's talk about how one's level of knowledge affects how they should be coming at these differences of opinions and ijma' in the first place. You know, you guys know, sort of, how close I am, the love of my life, Dr. Haji Malhaj. One time I was sitting in his living room, and we were talking about some issue. And then he turned to me, and he was, like, reminiscing on his, like, you know, childhood. And it's normal, everyone's sort of, we humble, inshallah, we humble up or humble down, should I say, as age grows, and, you know, your ego tones down a few notches. He said to me, can you believe it, Muhammad? Can you actually believe how deluded we were? There was a time when we were saying stronger view and weaker view before we knew, let alone mastered, knew that certain sciences existed that these scholars were using to arrive at their conclusions. He's, like, can you believe how crazy we were, Muhammad? And we're, like, and this is exactly it. Yeah.
You know, al-ashbah wal-naza'ir, and all these instrumental sciences, and how to correctly analogize, and what are the categories of, like, qiyas, and which one of them do you accept and don't you accept as a matter of principle before you even get to the evidences. Right. And then you look at everyone else, and it's just, like, it's pure taste. Yes. Sorry, guys, it's taste. You know, I was learning this first, or I'm reacting to something I really hate in society of deviation, and so Islam must be the opposite of this. Pure taste, subjectivity at its finest. But when we say independent researcher, we're using the word mujtahid. Yeah, we are. We're mujtahid. Mujtahid comes from the word jihad. Jihad, like, exerting an effort, you know, putting in the nitty-gritty. And so those who can exhaust themselves weeding through the evidences, that is a qualification. Like, the problem nowadays is premature jihad. In Arabic. Weeding through the evidences in Arabic, right? Yeah. And so, you know, like, some people say, oh, I've discovered the hadith. Well, Ibn Taymiyyah, rahimahullah, when he has his famous book, Rafa' al-Malam, Removing Blame from the Great Scholars of Islam, he says that there's ten reasons why scholars disagree, and he says the least common reason is that the hadith never reached them. Yes. That's one of the most impactful sort of revelations I had when I was studying in the jamia, because, you know, in the Qudda Shari'ah, we studied Bidayat al-Mujtahid, right, by Ibn Rushd. And so coming in, I heard this line, right? It's like maybe the hadith didn't reach him. Maybe he didn't hear the hadith. You know, this is why scholars disagreed. So I said, okay, let's count, right? And in every semester in the Faculty of Shari'ah, right, that you have to know for the exam. Out of 125 for semester one, Ibn Rushd mentions one single masada where he says perhaps so-and-so didn't hear the hadith.
Almost every single issue, the difference was about they're all using the same evidence. They're all using the Qur'an, the sunnah, the lughah, right? It's just about how to interpret. And so after that, I stopped counting. I was like, this is ridiculous. You can't possibly—anybody who studied even an iota, and you and I, you know, we know our level. You know, like we're very much nothing. But studied like a shred of study, right, knows that that is not why. So yeah, let's explain to people what exactly happens, right? Yes. Like if you talk about Imam Ahmed, someone's going to tell me maybe Imam Ahmed didn't know the hadith. That hadith is like one of 200 hadith that are the cream of the crop of the summary of his madhhab, right? And so that can't be it. And so what happens is that they have a hadith, for example, right? And then you get to stage two of what does it actually mean, right? That's if it's authentic, right? And so you have different methodologies on how to confirm whether it's authentic or not. Okay, so hadith, does it mean anything? No, it's not even authentic. Okay, it's authentic, but it was abrogated. Oh, it's authentic, but it was specific or qualified or unqualified or absolute. But how do you reconcile it with this one? And I mean, if we had time, we'd give actually like demonstrations. But there's a hadith. Okay, it's authentic. Okay, what does it mean? Okay, that's another station of sort of splitting the hair. Then wait, you have other hadith that seem to say the opposite or something related. And so how do we reconcile those? That's how it all happens. What is it saying? Doesn't it also say this? How do we put all that together? Okay, so we've talked extensively. And I'm sure you and I can go on all day talking about the different acceptable differences between the Medaheb, etc., between the scholars. And why we have a passion for that is because sometimes people are overly strict, right?
Or they have an overly narrow conception of what is acceptable. And so they're trying to actually cut out part of legitimate Islam. They're trying to sideline or marginalize legitimate interpretations of Islam, classical interpretations of Islam. And that actually reduces the Islam that we have that's available to us, the legitimate stuff, which is why it's a problem. But let's now get into the inexcusable differences. Where do we draw that red line? Okay, bismillah. I would like maybe at the end of the program to give like a roadmap for the average person on what to do in navigating all these differences. Let's do that. But we do want to speak from a high level about the free-for-all, anything-goes approach as well, right? The opposite of being stringent, which is being too lax. Because at the end of the day, Islam does mean submission, right? Submitting to the will of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And if there can't be certain non-negotiables about what we're submitting to, if we're just submitting, any of us are submitting to whatever we may so desire, then we actually have not submitted our desire for the desire of the divine. We're actually just pandering. We're not even thinking. We're just rearranging our thoughts to defend our biases, our whims, our desires, our vanities. And then in that sense also, our God is not God. Our God is our mind, our sensibility, our egos, our fancies. And so if the scholars have not understood the text to mean as such, and this is not like a plea to authority. This is a plea for humility. Like if all of the scholars of Islam, and if you were to familiarize yourself with the scholastic tradition, it is amazing how impartial, how neutral, how fair, principled, sincere they were across time and space. For sure, they're human.
But did Islam produce or not, right? Produce amazing human beings that were sincerely devout to God and not tokenizing the sacred revelation? It did. It did. I mean, even some of the things that we disagree with scholars having said in the past, it was their non-negotiable objectivity that caused them to say what they said. For instance, I'll give you one example. It's just very profound that the four madhab in pre-modern times, the four schools of Islamic law, they believed that a woman could be pregnant for two years or three years or four years. And you may think, oh my God, this is sort of like so archaic. It's a shame to even mention these things. No, it's something we take great pride in. Do you know why they said this? They said this because they had to be data-driven. And Islamically speaking, if a person is an upright witness, we have to accept their testimony. And they had birthing assistants tell them, this woman has not had her menstrual cycle in two years, and I just delivered her baby. So again, this is like female testimony, number one. Number two, they made it admissible and made a law about it, because they're trying to figure out how long after the divorce can we still attribute the baby to the dad. That's why they're sort of doing this. It's not just fun facts. And so it was amazing. The scholarly tradition continues to be the safeguard, the inheritors who inherited the baton from the Prophet to safeguard the deen. If we downplay that mechanism, then the deen is lost. It's totally gone. It's left to everyone's desires. أَفَرَيْتَ مَنَ اتَّخَذَ إِلَهَا الْهَوَاءُ And to be honest, it is not just, yes, a part of it is the stringent approach of people that are causing unnecessary conflict by being so too close-minded about other views that we just spoke about that causes the equal and opposite reaction, the pendulum to swing. So you know what, man? Islam is wider than that. Islam is more merciful than that.
Islam is more open than that. But more often than not, the biggest factor in everyone's life is society. It is social engineering. It is conditioning. And so in the age of, you know, liberality, you know, the liberal healer worldview, is that I own my freedom, which is of course counter, fundamentally counter to Allah owns my life. سُبْحَانَهُ وَ تَعَالَى And I am indebted to Him. And so I'm going to say no, therefore I'm indebted to Islam. Yes, I was just going to say there couldn't be literally anything more opposite of Islam than autonomy. Autonomy is literally the opposite of submission. Right. And Islam values freedom. And we value freedom very much. But he gets to determine how much freedom he gave us. سُبْحَانَهُ وَ تَعَالَى Right? It is not that we're sort of anti-freedom. It is that, you know, my freedom is a gift given to me by Allah within these bounds for my own good. I need those guardrails. And so those legitimate views can be seen as one of those guardrails. Like if a person were to say, you don't know what you're doing to me by telling me that hijab has to fall into one of these two views. Right? Okay, that may seem like at face value for a moment an encroachment upon your freedom. But you may also have no idea what happens to generations later when sort of immodesty bleeds. Right? And also if we're going to say it could mean anything to anyone, if hijab could just mean, you know, like In the heart. Just behavior or a longer skirt or whatever it's going to be. Right? I got to pick a male example quickly. You're going to have to help me, Imam Tom. Save my neck. But if you open the door to this as a matter of principle, then you also forego the right to say that the people who claim Islam equals terrorism are categorically wrong. Right. We got to be fair now. It can mean anything to anyone. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And that's why it has to mean something. Right?
It has to be distinguishable from that which it isn't. Right? And that's just any single concept. And so, you know, these things are unfortunately platitudes today where we say, well, this is what this means to me, or this is what this is my truth. That's right. Okay, well, this is about something that's outside of you. Like it's a fundamentally, I think, the two different sort of orientations towards life. Like you said, are we assuming that the self is always right and then everything else we're manipulating and we're bending it to the will of the self and the tastes of the self? Or are we engaging in a practice where we're trying to comport and shape ourselves, right, to a higher standard, right, to an aspirational standard? And that might be like a literal definition of Kufr versus Iman. And so, yeah, this is extremely important. Right? So it also balances those two things. Like everybody needs affirmation, but everyone also needs to be challenged. And I give the example to youth all the time. You know, imagine you had a personal trainer, right? You went to the gym and they told you, you know, everything you do, everything you do is fine. You can do one push up. That's great. You know, you can't do a chin up. All right, you're good. You know, you're good just the way you are. Okay. That would be humorous, but it would be a waste of money, a waste of time. And no one would accept that. But somehow we're willing to accept that when it comes to spiritual matters, when it comes to our afterlife, when it comes to deen, it really shows how poorly we value these things. That's what it is. Yeah, SubhanAllah. Imam Zaid Shaikh, it has a beautiful line. I'm not sure if it's his or he read it somewhere. Come to Islam as it is. Come as you are to Islam as it is. Yeah. Very well put. That's extremely. Everyone's got their journey. Everyone's got their sort of pace. Yeah. And we pray for ourselves and everyone else to accelerate in time. Yes. But at the end of the day, we have to set the ideal. We got to let people know where the top of the mountain is.
And so those fundamental matters, at least like Muhammad, the final prophet or not. Right. Is Salah mandatory or not? Yes. The way he taught, peace be upon him, these sorts of things. And that's also a very important distinction between what Islam is versus what you're doing about it. Right. I think that's such a key distinction. It's like if you're not wearing hijab, OK, again, to go back to the female example, we still need to struggle to find a male. If you're not praying, right. OK, if you're not taking care of your family, like Nafiqah, right. If you're not being financially responsible for your family, you're sinful. OK, full stop. OK. However, it's another level to say, I don't have to do that in the first place. That's not what Allah said. That's not what Allah wants for me. That's not what he meant. Right. That is a level of arrogance. That is mukhif. That is a very, very scary level of arrogance. You can be, you know, a person who is, I see every single person sins. Every single person has things. If you go across all the doors of fiqh from the beginning to the end, there's things where it's like, oh, I do this and I don't do that. And I do this and I don't do that. I need to get better at this. I'm really kind of falling off with that. That's fine. That's life. But to say that I'm going to do this and I reject that, that is something that is the quintessential difference between Adam and Shaitaan. And we can never forget that Adam messed up and said, yeah, Allah, I messed up. I had no right to do that. And that's it. He became better than he was before. By virtue of that repentance, he got to know new names of Allah, like the forgiving, the merciful. Had he not needed forgiveness, he would never have learned it. So it is, you know, frequent attempts in learning, as they call it, right? The fail is the frequent attempts in learning. Shaitaan said, I don't have to listen. That's actually not a very smart rule. That doesn't even make sense because I'm superior in the substance from which I was created. So why did Shaitaan leave Islam and why did Adam not leave Islam, grow in Islam?
Actually, it was because this was weakness and recognized it, admitted. And this was rebellion. Yeah, there's a very important difference. Yeah. So if you're somebody who, you know, let's say you're a guy and you don't pray, OK, it's like, yeah, OK, own it. You don't pray. But ask Allah to give you the success that one day that you're going to pray. You know, if you're a woman, you don't wear hijab, OK, that you are where you are, OK, no problem. But ask Allah to give you the success that one day wants to, you know, to do that thing. I think that's kind of the difference that we're talking about here. So, OK, we have about we have, you know, 10 minutes, there's there's two things that we need. What you already mentioned, you said about a strategy for people going forward. But also, I think we need to run down what to what degree can we work together with people who, OK, we're not even talking about excusable differences. We're talking about inexcusable differences. Somebody who thinks that the Koran was not complete or somebody who thinks that there's a prophet after the Prophet Muhammad, or somebody who thinks that hijab is not an obligation or thinks that the prayer is not an obligation or whatever. What degree of collaboration can we have with people who openly contradict our deen like that? So collaboration comes in many forms. Let me share with you one principle that that the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America crafted when they were presented with a lot of these questions in the activism from the activism circles. They said you are not responsible in principle. Of course, application is where sort of things could vary in perspective, in analyses. But you are not responsible for who endorses you or who supports you. You are responsible for who you support, who you endorse. That's one sort of side of collaboration.
But an even earlier point is where does this come from? Like who said I can, you know, let bygones be bygones and still work with people outside of this notion? Is this just sort of like a political maneuvering or is this fundamentally Islamic? No, it's fundamentally Islamic. The Quran says, وَتَعَوَنُوا عَلْ بِرِّ وَتَقْوَىٰ And aid one another in righteousness and in piety. So you can work sort of in principle, shoulder to shoulder with someone. So long as what we're working on, the banner under which we are sort of advocating, if you will, is a mutually shared banner. You know, it is the common good. It is the collective good. So if someone believes that, you know, Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, is God incarnate, and I categorically consider that an inexcusable difference, that doesn't mean I can't, you know, give out food to those with food insecurity in my local community with them. Absolutely not. So what about people within the fold as well? You know, Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, they used to protest in his masjid against him. They'd get up after every salah and say, إِنِ الْحُكْمُ إِلَّا لِلَّهِ Basically is, you know, you sold out, you sold out. You know, governance is only for God. And he said to them, listen, I will promise you that three things. I will promise you, number one, I will not stop you from praying with us in the masjid. Because salah is a great thing, right? And number two, I will not stop you from joining the battle campaigns with us against sort of the oppressive regimes we're fighting outside. We're side shoulder to shoulder, we're brothers fighting for the same cause. They're calling him a disbeliever. And he's saying this. And number three, لَن نَبْدَأْكُمْ بِالْقِتَالِ We will never initiate fighting with you. Okay. That was sort of his approach. Application is another issue.
But the idea that he felt that he had enough room from the Qur'an and Sunnah, from the revealed text to actually offer that olive branch was absolutely correct. There's no, there should be no difference there. And even before him, you know, it's crazy to think that Ali, may Allah be pleased with him, did that crazy in a beautiful way, not crazy in a derogatory way. That the khalifa just before him, Uthman رضي الله عنه was called kafir as well and assassinated by these guys, right? And that's why he said, I will not initiate. So long as you guys don't take arms and you may do that blunder again. So Uthman رضي الله عنه, people are saying like he's dishonest and he's materialistic and the ills of prosperity and sort of his favoritism and nepotism. And they were accusing him of all this. So they surrounded his house, laid siege to his house. As they're laying siege to his house, giving him a final chance to give up the reins of the ummah. One of the local Muslims walks past the siege, enters his house and says to him, Oh imam, you're the big imam, you're Mr. President and I pray behind an imam of fitna. One of the guy who leads my salah in the local masjid, my neighborhood masjid, is one of the people who considers you a disbeliever. When we're hesitating, we don't know what to do. Like, should we just like, should we throw him out the window? Should we go open our own mosque? Like, what do we do? He said to them, صلاة خير ما يفعله الناس فإن أحسن الناس فأحسنوا معهم وإن أساؤوا فوطنوا أنفسكم ألا تظلموا Salah is one of the greatest deeds. It's about what you're getting together for, right? If people are doing good, do good with them. And if they're doing evil, then prepare yourself to perform conscientious abstention. No, I'm not going to Vietnam, right? Like, we are part of this country. We're not sort of here as just like, you know, playing it. We're not a Trojan horse in the United States of America. There's so much خير that we want to offer and that we do benefit from for being here. And there's so much that we will collaborate on.
But if someone asked me to do something that's unethical for me, then hopefully I can pull a Muhammad Ali and say, I'm not down. I'm not going to do that. Yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, so it's not even about excusable and inexcusable. It's about pros and cons. Yes, that's really what it's about. Yes. And weighing that and having, you know, and it's another discussion. You know, it's going to take, I think, a separate discussion to talk about that calculus of pros and cons, because it occurs to me that the only thing that would need to be sort of added to temper that calculus is also how sometimes Muslims are conscripted, right? In these collaborative efforts in a way that tokenizes us or tries to use us for certain causes. And we're not even aware of it happening. Right. So, you know, that's happened a couple of times. You know, in recent memory, but that's a separate issue. I think we should have an independent video on sort of the complexity of today's world is the very reason why the scholars of Islam understood the need for what they call collective Ijtihad. Yeah, collective Ijtihad is when you bring sort of the experts on context and the experts on revealed text. Right. The text and the context and the interface. And they are actually able to have the best shot at identifying what's really happening here and what's most likely going to come out of this. Yes, because there's a lot of bleed over that goes on now. And this has been observed by a lot of people involved in activism across the past 10, 15 years. You know, you used to get together for a particular, maybe you show up to, you know, a rally or something, and it's for environmental justice. And now you've got people flying rainbow flags and trying to make the gathering about that. Right. So now there's a lot of sort of new things that are introduced in there. And so, you know, the general principle that we were saying is that, yes, OK, there's the basic sort of thing. What's our objective? What are we trying to accomplish here?
If it's good, then, yeah, it doesn't matter necessarily who we collaborate with. Like, it's about the issue. But then there's this added layer which needs to be unpacked at a future date, which is how are now even our presence and participation being rerouted or taken advantage of in some sort of bad faith ways? It's it's sticky. It's not a it's not a straightforward, straightforward thing. But it's it I think it just the complexities of it demonstrate the need for some sober and some sober consideration from a lot of different people. What and when and who? All of those have to sort of interplay. I mean, even the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, I know it's for another discussion, but I think of Abu Dhar. Abu Dhar, may Allah be pleased with him, was was deeply moved by the cause of the people and human suffering. And, you know, that's why that's why the socialists actually, when they tried to like the revisionist socialists, they would invoke Abu Dhar because he would be telling the hadith about these issues more than anyone. So it became iconic that these are the Abu Dhar hadith. Of course, he didn't make them up. It's just these are the ones he was speaking about most. So they sort of trace back to him more than anybody else. But the point is, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam actually said to Abu Dhar in Sahih Muslim, Oh, Abu Dhar, I love you. And I see that you have a weakness. And so do not accept to be a leader over any two people. Don't accept to assume the responsibility over the wealth of any orphan. Some scholars have said what that was referring to was that he was so emotionally invested that it would sometimes compromise his discretion, long term planning, so on and so forth. Like he believed, for instance, that saving money was not allowed. Those things, savings, whatever is extra each day, you got to let go of a type thing. So these sorts of things were seen beforehand by the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam.
And so we, too, have to see things beforehand, try our best, of course, to say, what could this lead to? Fantastic. OK, that brings us, I think, to some some parting advice. I know we wanted to talk about sort of the strategy for the average Muslim. How do they navigate these things when they come across difference? What should their attitude be? So super brief, the Prophet Allah Azza wa Jal said, Allah will never burden you beyond your capacity. And so everyone has a different capacity. There is like the novice scholar and there's the, you know, tier one caliber scholar. There is the layman that has no access to anything. Right. Even if they were to, you know, reach the evidences, they mean nothing to them in sort of derived rulings perspective. So everyone's going to exert their capacity to find the strongest opinion when there's a difference. That strongest opinion for the layman means the strongest scholar because your evidence is the scholar, not the text. Right. That's why the majority have the ability to evaluate the text. And that has to be stressed. And there's a little bit of a circular sort of debate here on like, if I don't know the text, then how do I referee between the scholars? And that's a fair point. And that's why the majority, according to Ibn Qayyim, said that even if your capacity was fame, and Allah knows that from your heart, you're excused in front of Allah. That I accepted because this guy had the biggest notoriety, believe it or not, because that's Allah's fairness. It makes sense. What else could they judge? What else do they have to go off of? Many of us have more, by the way. You can sort of ask the Imam of the Masjid who's specialized in Islamic finance, or you can sort of network your way into a better hunch. But that's it. It's all Ijtihad. Your Ijtihad is to exert your effort to find the strongest opinion. And once you're there, you got to commit yourself to it and not impose it on anybody. You don't have an opinion. You're a follower of someone else's opinion because they're less likely to be wrong. So you don't take somebody else's opinion and then go and force it on other people. Yeah, and turn it into an axel in people's heads.
Yeah, it happens a lot. And then now we go to the people that are learned, that are in training, and then these people that are able to access the evidences. And, you know, there's an overplay in Asanid, I was discussing this yesterday with someone, that like authorization. Yes, there's a little bit of like, because of groupism also, there's a little bit of gatekeep that happens with like, hey, who authorized you? Yeah, but someone's got to authorize you at the very least, like someone's got to authorize you. When we say a mujtahid, all of these scholars we hear about in the past, the greatest of our scholars said, I was running from giving rulings and opinions until 70 of my teachers forced me to, as Imam Malik said, or someone else would say something similar. So when you are recognized, it's like peer recognition in medicine or anywhere else, right? When you're recognized by your peers as having undergone sufficient training, and you don't have the conflict of interest of like certifying yourself as an independent researcher somewhere, then in that case, you're going to follow the evidence and you're obligated to commit yourself, commit yourself to wherever the evidence takes you, even if it departs or diverges from the greatest scholars. So long as it doesn't divert from all of them, because then that would be inexcusable. But within the excusable realm, that's what you want to do. Yeah, that's a great little point you slipped in there too about the, like most things, there's two extremes, right, with gatekeeping. So you have some people that, unreasonable expectations, okay. But then you have other people who take license where they shouldn't really have license. You know, they, ijazahs that are just pieces of paper that, you know, or ijazahs, they were in the room, right? On their phones. During the... All the folk stories, I have a lot flooding me right now. I'm sure you do. Or, you know, showed up at a mosque in Istanbul and now, you know, considers that some sort of ijazah to do something. Yeah, no, exactly. So there's a fine line between those. And everyone has to be very sober as to their level of knowledge and not overstate one's credentials.
But I think probably that maybe the biggest take home point is too, that this is for your personal worship. And that's not necessarily for you to weaponize, right, against somebody else and then to go and say, well, you're doing it all wrong. So-and-so said this, or this one hadith that I memorized say that, right? As Shaykh Abdullah used to say, If you have memorized something, then you have forgotten something, right? Is that if you've memorized something, then, or you have forgotten things, right? And then there's multiple things that you haven't memorized and that have escaped you. So, panel, a fantastic discussion. Do you have any final thoughts on unity and diversity you'd like to leave the listeners with today? May Allah bless Shaykh Abdullah. I really missed out on... I sat through like very few gatherings of his and I really missed out. I wasn't in Medina for all along, but you are truly blessed and privileged. May Allah grant you due gratitude for that experience. Ameen, Ameen, Ya Rabb. Well, thank you. This is a wonderful discussion. Obviously, there's a lot more to talk about. We hope to have you back again soon. And may Allah restore your health. Shafakallah, Shafakatan, InshaAllah. SubhanakAllahu wa bihamdika sharafan la ilaha illa anta, astaghfirullah wa atubu ilayk. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh.
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