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The Qur’an and Intellectual Humility | Khutbah
More information is available to us than ever before, but the Qur’an reminds us that our knowledge is ultimately very limited and calls on us to always remain humble in our relationship with knowledge and the All-Knowing.
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Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. After praising Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and testifying to his unique oneness and to the finality of the Prophethood of Muhammad salallahu alayhi wa sallam, and after reminding myself anew of the taqwa of Allah, to commit yourself to being conscious of Allah and consistent and dutiful to Him and with Him subhanahu wa ta'ala, the glorified and exalted, my brothers and sisters, you know in the past the whys across civilizations, it's almost like a universal principle, they used to say that the more I learn, the more sure, the more certain I become of my ignorance. And this should make perfect sense because if you're learning something new every brand new day, you're learning yet something else that you didn't know yesterday. You're constantly being reminded of your ignorance. Of course, had we held on to that golden principle, in this day and age, right, we are in the age of unprecedented know-how. We are learning so much more, so much faster, we would become more humble than ever had we held on to the principle. Because we continue to develop more and more of a realization at just how astronomically complex things actually are. Nature actually is. You know those who specialize nowadays in weather, they talk about the famous butterfly effect. It's called chaos theory. It's this theory that it'll always be to us chaos. We can never know and predict weather at 100% accuracy. Never. And they give the example of the fact that a butterfly could be flapping its fragile wings somewhere in South America,
and then it just continues to build with, you know, atmospheric pressure or whatnot, until two weeks later, you have a tornado somewhere in Texas. How can you ever figure this out? The variables are just too many. Or a very good friend of mine is often, you know, sharing with me what we thought were no-brainers in medicine, that turned out to be actually very incorrect. He works with, you know, premature babies. And he said to me, when a premature baby is born, you think, no-brainer, give the baby some oxygen. What could go wrong with oxygen? Oxygen is a good thing. Who can ever assume that 100% oxygen could be, you know, even 1% bad? He said, but now we realize it wasn't so smart. Because now we're starting to realize that the limited oxygen that the baby gets while inside its mother's womb, for those, that full term, is actually good for it. Because the pathways of the blood, right, that bring oxygen to places and pull back, you know, the carbon dioxide from, that all those pathways don't finish spanning out, except that they're looking for oxygen, if you will, in simplistic terms, because this is not my specialization. If you give the baby too much oxygen outside of their mother's womb, you think it's healthy. But you could actually be slowing down the blood getting to its eyes, and they become visually impaired. Because their eyes aren't fully wired now, with channels for the oxygen to get there, and so on and so forth. Or he said to me once, that we thought we were improving on mommy's milk, when you give these babies formula. You see, formula, they pull the lactose from formula, right? And lactose is basically the sugar in the milk. And this will be my last medicine example, because this is not my niche. But he says, babies can't break down lactose, so you pull out the lactose, and it's better for the baby,
so the baby doesn't get gassy, the baby doesn't get fussy. But the mommy's milk has lactose. And we thought, let's refine it. Let's be smart here. Now we realize, that even though the baby can't break down this sugar, that it's in the mommy's milk, the wisdom in it being there, is that it's rotting a little bit in the newborn's belly, triggers the baby's immune system. And that's why we have nowadays, due to like intervening, meddling, we have weaker immune systems in general with babies. It could be remotely related to why there's so many earlier diseases, or so many different allergies out there, in the later generations or the current generations, in the newborns. And so, nowadays instead of getting more and more aware of our ignorance, with the acceleration of learning, sadly it's the very opposite. The more we learn nowadays, the more we're certain that there's nothing to know somehow, except what we've already learned, five minutes ago. The ludicrous nature, how foolish can we be? The missing piece here, why does one person learn and become humble, and another person learn and become intoxicated? Because this second person, all they see is themselves. When you remove God from the equation, this is the tragedy of the mindset, the worldview of a godless world, a godless personality, a godless society. When you think man, human, is at the center, what humans understand is all there is to be understood. What humans can't understand, cannot be understood. This is a delusion, right? What our science, and we should always remember so far, has told us, that's our new God, right?
What logic, our logic, presumed logic, delivers us to, that's the ultimate fact, that's the reference point. That's where people are now. What does the Qur'an do? The Qur'an shatters this for a person. The Qur'anic worldview says Allah is at the center, Allah is the source of all knowledge. وَلَا يُحِيطُونَ بِشَيْءٍ مِّنْ عِلْمِهِ إِلَّا بِمَا شَاءُ They don't know anything, that is the default in man. He's blindfolded, utterly incapable of discovering anything. They do not have anything of his knowledge, except the little bit he permits. That's the Qur'anic grounding, the Qur'anic worldview anchors you in that humility. Intellectual humility, it guards you from becoming intoxicated with the little tidbits you learn here and there. وَاللَّهُ يَعْلَمْ وَأَنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ Allah knows, you don't know. Except the bit he permits for you to temporarily know. And the Qur'an doesn't just state these as facts. The Qur'an remedies and builds guards for the person that could fall into this. You know, so many depictions in the Qur'an on this issue. You have the story of Dawud and Sulaiman, who are prophets and kings in the Qur'an. And people come to them as the authorities for judgment, right? In one instance in the Qur'an, Allah says, إِذْ يَحْكُمَانِ فِي الْحَارْثِ إِذْ نَفَشَتْ فِيهِ غَنَمُ الْقَوْمِ وَكُنَّا لِحُكْمِهِمْ شَاهِدِينَ Recall to them, O Muhammad, people need to remember these things. It's very important. The incident of Dawud and Sulaiman, when both of them passed their verdict on the crops that were overrun, and we were witnesses to this whole account. فَفَحَمْنَاهَا سُلَيْمَانَ
And so we gave the proper understanding, the right verdict, supreme justice to Sulaiman, meaning not Dawud. The verse says, وَكُلَّنْ آتَيْنَا حُكْمًا وَعِلْمًا But both of them, we endowed them with wisdom and knowledge. So no one looks down upon Dawud, right? What happened here? What is the overrun crops? A man came or a group of people came and said, this guy, his flock of lambs came into my property and ruined my crops. They ate everything. So, you know, compensate me. Penalize him. So Dawud عليه السلام, his verdict was, he ruined your assets, your farm, so you get his assets. Fair is fair. The flock belongs to you now. Sulaiman عليه السلام disagreed and said, no, that's not fair. He ruined his assets for one year. He's going to get a crop next year. And he gets his assets forever. He gets to keep the flock of sheep for one year. He can sell their wool and make babies out of them, right? Whatever you're going to get milk. He keeps his flock for one year until his farm grows back the next season. Then he gives him his flock back. So that more pristine, more nuanced version of justice was the understanding Allah gave Sulaiman. وَكُلَّنَا آتَيْنَا حُكْمًا وَعِلْمًا But we gave them all knowledge and great wisdom, both of them. There's another incident like this, actually, in Sahih al-Bukhari. Abu Huraira رضي الله عنه narrates that an elderly, older woman and a younger woman, both with their children were taking care of the lands in the mountains and a wolf mauled the older lady's child and killed it. So the older lady abducts the younger lady's child and says, this is my kid. So they fight over the child and they bring the fight to the king and the prophet, Dawud عليه السلام.
And he says, after hearing from both parties, the evidence seems to suggest that it does belong to the older woman. And he gives the older woman, who isn't the mother, the child. And so as they're exiting, Sulaiman عليه السلام is returning home, and the younger one complains to him, your father gave this lady my kid. And the older one is saying, that's not her kid, it's my kid. The verdict's been passed. That's it. So Sulaiman عليه السلام says, ائتوني بسكين أشقه بينكما Just bring me a knife, I'll fix it. I'll split the kid in two between you. You get half and she gets half. And so when he said that, the actual mother, the younger woman said, no, please don't do this. May Allah have mercy on you. He belongs to the older woman. But when the older woman didn't do the same, when the older woman didn't flinch, he realized it's not your actual child. And he said, no, he's yours. And he overturned the ruling of his father again and gave the child to the younger mother, the actual mother. But then you go further in the Quran, and you find in Surah An-Naml, Sulaiman عليه السلام, who understands so much, and you know, the languages of the animals, and he controls the domains of the kingdoms, even the animal kingdoms. He says, you know, this bird, my scouting bird, the Hopi bird, the Hood Hood messed up, and I'm going to punish it severely. And then the bird comes back and says, أحط بما لم تحط به I have discovered something that you're oblivious to. You know nothing about. وَجِئتُكَ مِن سَبَأٍ بِنَبَأٍ يَقِينَ I have just come to you from a kingdom in Yemen called Sheba. I've come to you with certain news about this kingdom that you know nothing about.
What do all these stories have in common? Allah continues not just to show the most knowledgeable people that He knows best, but He continues to show us, because we need this so badly, so we don't get intoxicated. He continues to show us that even those beneath us sometimes, Dawood being corrected again and again by his son. Then Sulaiman عليه السلام, the wise, is being corrected by a bird, right? Being educated by a bird regarding what he has no idea about. This remedies in us that lack of intellectual humility that is rampant and will continue to be rampant in a human-centric world, in a godless personality and mindset. You know I've said to you before, the number one supposed proof for atheism out there is that it is illogical, it doesn't make sense that there's a God if there's problems in the world. Just because you can't see the wisdom through the problems, doesn't mean there's no wisdom. Your lenses need to get fixed. You're not the reference point. You see chaos because you're like an ant on the carpet seeing colorful strands in every direction. You don't have the ability to step back and see the beauty in the tapestry. Or as one writer said, you're like the caterpillar that sees the world closing in and thinking this is a disaster, but in the grander scheme of things, you're about to turn into a butterfly, you're about to morph into something more profound, more beautiful. Right? You just can't see it. Or like others in the godless society who say the scientific proof for evolution being these useless organs we have, they call them these vestigial, functionless organs. This is proof left over organs from pre-evolutionary days. There were about 180 of them by the way. Now they're down to like the appendix and people are talking about, wait, we might have figured out what the appendix is for. 180 vanishing proofs of evolution
as we continue to learn each day their functions, humble down and know that knowledge belongs to God. لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك له أشهد أن محمداً عبده ونبيه ورسوله This evening inshallah, of the reasons why I was reflecting on these stories is because we begin the story of knowledge tonight. We'll continue our journey through Surah Al-Kahf after Isha every Friday night and we're at the story of Musa Alayhis Salaam Al-Khidr and that is the story of knowledge and it follows the same pattern. Allah sends Musa Alayhis Salaam who is superior and more knowledgeable than Al-Khidr Alayhis Salaam but he still has to go learn from him the fact that there are things I don't know that I may never be able to know and you all know in general the story, right? Why did you puncture that ship? They're all gonna drown. He couldn't see that there was more to the story even though he Alayhis Salaam was in a basket as a baby and didn't drown. Notice the relevance of those three stories and then they go on and the kid is killed like what are you killing a young lad for? And it was more than meets the eye just like you, oh Musa, right? People thought you committed murder and that's why you fled from Egypt as a supposed fugitive and there was more to the story. Why didn't you take money? These people wouldn't even host us. Why didn't you take money for rebuilding that wall for the two orphans when we were so desperate for it? And he couldn't see that you, oh Musa, yourself at a different time help those two girls in Median at the well when you were so desperate and you didn't ask for payment.
Sometimes things can be right under our eyes and if Allah doesn't permit for us to know them we will never know them. You know very quickly that's like this other incident that is not in the Quran but it is mentioned in some of the history books that Musa Alayhis Salaam said, I want to see your justice play out in this world because normally the next world is for repayment more often than not this world is the exam room. That's the results over there. But he wanted to see it to increase in faith on top of his faith and certainty on top of his certainty. So Allah said to him, All right, go to this location and don't get involved. So he goes and he finds a soldier pull up on his horse to drink and drop his bag of money. Doesn't get involved. And then a young boy comes to drink from that same lake or river finds the money, gets happy and walks away. Doesn't get involved. And then an elderly blind man comes making his way to the lake to drink. The soldier comes back, Where's my money? He tells him, What do you mean money? I'm blind, I can't see anything. I didn't see your money. He gets frustrated and kills the old man. Musa Alayhis Salaam is not allowed to tell the first guy you dropped your money or the second, that's not your money kid or the third one. Stop, don't kill the innocent man. And he goes back and says, Ya Allah, I don't get it. I asked to see your justice and like a hard-earned money dropped. Kid takes something not rightfully his. Innocent man being killed. He said, Oh Musa, what you cannot know, what you could not have known is that this soldier had killed this young boy's father. So against his will, I'm having him spend on this young kid in place of his father. And that old man, years ago, had killed that soldier's father. And so he deserved what happened to him today. You know, Allah told Musa Alayhis Salaam with Al-Khadir, and in this second story, don't get involved, right? So don't miss the point. If you see injustice,
we were told differently. We were told get involved as best you can. But the idea is when you see the world happening around you, right? Or when you see the world becoming conceited with the little bit of information in the age of know-how and technology and science and otherwise, don't ever allow that to rattle your faith. Don't ever allow that to eat away at your certainty that only Allah is Al-Aleem Al-Hakeem. Only He is the most knowing. Only He is the most wise. Let it never get you to question the fact as Allah said, وَمَا أُوتِيتُم مِّنَ الْعِلْمِ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا You have not been given of knowledge but little. All you know and all everyone combined will ever know compared to what we won't know, this is nothingness, a drop in an ocean. So may Allah Azza wa Jal give us the intellectual humility that helps us better understand Him and always trust and properly rely on Him and assume always the best of Him, Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and the intellectual humility to earn us His love for submitting ourselves and bowing down in front of His great names, Al-Aleem, the perfectly knowing, Al-Hakim, the most wise. And may He give us that intellectual humility that allows us to love one another and be loved by one another. Al-Aleem, Al-Hakim.
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