The U.S. has over a million lawyers, so they have over a million fuqaha, so to speak, to analyze a much shorter document than our Qur'an, a document which is less than 5,000 words long in the U.S. Constitution. Whenever you ask a lawyer about the chances of a case, they'll say, I don't know. Ultimately, Allahu a'lam is a fundamental principle of our deen, but it's also fundamental to any civilizational project. As-salamu alaykum and welcome back to Dogma Disrupted. Today, we're going to be talking about Islamic knowledge in a secular age, so part of our continuing conversation on secularism and the effects on Muslims and Islam across the world. Today, we have a very esteemed guest, Dr. Usama Al-A'lami, who is a departmental lecturer in contemporary Islamic studies at the University of Oxford. Dr. Usama also has degrees from Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies. He completed his master's and then his PhD there on contemporary Islamic political thought. He's author of the book Islam and the Arab Revolutions, The Ulema Between Democracy and Autocracy. Welcome, Dr. Usama. Thank you for having me. It's really an honor. Amin wa ya'koum. So we direct everyone to, and we recommend that everybody read the paper. It's a wonderful paper that you've written. It's on the Yaqeen Institute website, Islamic Knowledge in a Secular Age. I want to just pull out a couple of themes from your work and maybe you'll end up probably restating some of the things in your paper, but hopefully we get to take it a little bit beyond that. One thing that many people sort of, or it's a common refrain that I've heard from many people, is that having multiple interpretations, whether that's of a religious text or scripture, such as the Quran or the Hadith, detracts from the authority of that revelation. So people will actually say, and they'll leave it in the YouTube comments, oh, you know, if the Quran were really an authentic, genuine
divine communication, then there wouldn't be so many interpretations. Does having multiple interpretations detract from the authenticity of a document or a scripture? And if not, why not? A fascinating question. And it really kind of, I think the theme of secularism that you're dealing with kind of encapsulates a lot of these kinds of skeptical perspectives towards traditional religious perspectives. And one of the arguments that I make in the paper is, you know, why is it, it's like in Arabic, they say, حَلَلٌ عَلَيْكُمْ وَحَرَامٌ عَلَيْنَا يعني, with respect to the secular tradition, they're allowed to have multiple interpretations of their canonical texts. They're allowed to, in a sense, revel in that sort of sophistication, something that we do in the academy, you know, to the point of absurdity sometimes. But when it comes to a sacred or religious text, somehow that's problematic. I think, ultimately, it's actually a great strength of our tradition. That's how it's always been seen. And I'm reminded of the statement of Omar ibn Abdulaziz, I don't think I cite it in the paper, where he says, you know, it's from the ni'mah of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala that the ulama disagreed with each other. Because if everyone had one opinion, there wouldn't be fusha or there wouldn't be space in our religion. So it actually creates space to have some difference of opinion. There are certain areas where there's no difference of opinion, obviously, and those are the core aqa'id, the core tenets, which we believe in. And, you know, that's what sets, you know, Islam apart from what is not Islam. But besides that, I think it's a great strength and a great sort of enrichment to the tapestry of Islamic history and Islamic culture and Islamic civilization, that we have this diversity, alhamdulillah. Now, that's a very, several important things that you brought up. One of them, I am startled
and I stopped being surprised by the blatant hypocrisy of liberalism and secularism. And I'm glad that you touched on that. Because when it comes to, I've had multiple people, you know, reach out all the time when it comes to skepticism, right. And we'll have, I think, a later episode with Dr. Nasr on skepticism, because he has a wonderful paper about that we would direct the audience to as well. But the idea is, okay, you have so much skepticism towards spiritual or religious truth claims. Do you apply this skepticism or this level of skepticism consistently across all levels or areas of your life? Or is this something, this level of skepticism is something that you reserve only for spiritual and religious claims? And what we find over and over, and this is what you're saying, is that this is not a consistent menhij. This is not a consistent methodology that people are deploying. They're actually being extremely selective, extremely inconsistent, and it belies their sort of ill will, we could say, and perhaps even their prejudice that when it comes to something that is maybe in the realm of science or maybe in the realm of history or maybe in the realm of anything that's something along the episteme that they already subscribe to, they're ready to adopt and believe things with very little evidence. And yet, when it comes to religion and it comes to scripture and it comes to revelation and things like that, now all of a sudden we have the highest level of skepticism. We have the highest, we don't believe, all of a sudden we don't believe in testimony anymore. That's one of the things that I come back to when talking about epistemology with people. Some people are like, well, how can we believe in testimony? I said, have you ever seen the United States Supreme Court? Have you ever been into the courtroom? Testimony is something that, you know, I've never been to China. I'm taking it on testimony that it exists. And yet, all of a sudden when it
comes to miracles or it comes to scripture, testimony goes out the window. It's only empiricism. It's only sort of what I can see, what I can touch, what I can smell. And this strikes me as a blatant hypocrisy. I'm not sure if you had any other comments about that, but I find it fascinating. Yeah, I mean, this is one of the prejudices of our age. And, you know, I have other work, which I'm still developing, kind of academic, but it would cross over with sort of a lot of the work that I do at Yathin and other places, which is that, you know, from an Islamic perspective, I think it's quite plausible to describe secularism as a deen unto itself. It's, you know, to use a phrase which was popular in the 20th century, Islam as a way of life, or secularism as a way of life as well. And there are various sort of sub-sects within or sects within secularism, you could say nationalism, liberalism, communism. People don't often reflect on the fact that actually part, you know, a sub-sect of secularism is Nazism, for example, or fascism. They're all secular ideologies as well. And so when it comes to this kind of reflection on or the sceptical outlook, when it comes to applying that to religion, but not applying it to secularism, in the same way, it is something which kind of is quite irritating for a lot of religious people, I think. But it's one of those prejudices that is so deeply seated, it's basically an Aqadi matter for these people. It's a religious belief, it's a matter of faith. And so it is something which is very difficult to dislodge. But at the same time, it's also deeply sort of centered within one's emotional makeup. So dislodging it is very disruptive to one's own discomfort. They have a yaqeen in secularism, right? And so I think, you know, that is an irony of our own times that always talks about, you know, knowledge being accessible, science being the ultimate
sort of arbiter of what knowledge is. But when you go into, for example, philosophy of science, there isn't actually agreement on what science is to begin with. How do you define science? Or if you read someone like David Hume and his, you know, reflections on scepticism, his ultimate answer seems to be, well, when you feel a bit overwhelmed by these thoughts, just forget about them, go whine and dine and be merry. Because ultimately, we can't solve them based on our epistemic sort of presuppositions. So I mean, it's fascinating that despite that, the Western civilization is currently built on secularism, and it's doing quite well for itself, I would argue. But it's, you know, an ideology that I think sustains itself ultimately by force. And at the same time, this disparagement of traditional religion is shown up by that sort of analysis, as being simply the assertion of the illegitimacy of another tradition, rather than the intellectual engagement with it. This is a bit far afield from some of what I've written in the paper. But I think this is extremely important for Muslims to reflect on, to recognize the confidence that they should have in their own tradition. But one of the things that I do touch on in the paper is ultimately, you also need to accompany that by the demonstration of sort of authority in the real world. And that's one of the reasons why one can understand this kind of skepticism, sort of contaminating the thinking of a lot of Muslims as well. And my own take is that we need to approach such Muslims with a certain degree of compassion. Sometimes we need to sort of like, just knock sense into ourselves as Muslims. But sometimes we also need to recognize, look, you're in somewhat adverse conditions, we can understand, you know, you're being overwhelmed by these
kinds of apparent assertions of raw power by the West. And yet, we need to keep our eye on the ball and recognize that this is all an illusion, really. And it's going to pass inevitably. Yeah, no, there's a lot to think on there. I think that annoyance is interesting to think about, the annoyance of religious folks regarding secularism. And just to linger on the frame and sort of what's going on here, I think something that's in your comments that we could bring out is that part of the source of that annoyance is that secularism is a worldview like other worldviews, which is what you're saying. However, what perhaps distinguishes it from other worldviews is that it denies that it's a worldview. And so, it denies that it has this posture of neutrality, it has this posture of not having metaphysical commitments. And so, we're saying, and thankfully, I think the scholarship has come quite far on this, you know, where now we're saying, okay, obviously, Asad and his whole project and everybody downstream of Asad doing a genealogy of secularism and shining a light and saying, wait a second, actually, this has commitments, it's not neutral. And so, if we're talking again to the man on the street or the person that wants to start, or if we're talking to someone who is a secularist, maybe as a point of entry, Asad talks about this, right? He talks about freedom of speech is also the freedom to be heard, right? And so, sometimes you have to do something disruptive because as you said, people are so sort of they're lodged in their worldview, they take so many things as self-evident and don't question it. Sometimes you need to shake them awake and discursively, we're talking about. And so, how do you do that? And I think the first step is often just to put everything on the same table, rather than their imagination, which is secularism, which is sort of this
open field or open arena in which Islam can fit and Christianity can fit and atheism can fit and agnosticism. No, it's actually that on a table, it's secularism and Islam and Christianity and that they're all actual worldviews and to have commitments about or strong feelings about how religion should and should not enter into the quote-unquote public sphere is in itself a worldview, right? So, it's extremely significant, I guess to particularize it, that's what we're talking about here, to take it away from being this just this background imminent frame, right, that everything else has to be subsumed into bringing it, putting it on the operation table and shining a light on it and saying that, no, this is a worldview just like anything else is a worldview, it has things that it believes in, it has values, it has certain commitments, and let's analyze and assess and evaluate this. And at that point, we can have the authority and the confidence to say, we'll put Islam up against any other worldview when it comes to coherence, when it comes to, you know, authenticity, when it comes to scholarship and things of this nature. Absolutely. I was just going to add one point that you've highlighted that scholarship is actually kind of, and we're talking about within the academy in philosophy departments, religion departments, etc. There's, you know, come to be a recognition of this, you know, embeddedness of secularism within a particular ontology as they sometimes use the phrase. So, you know, secularism has a particular metaphysics attached to it, and that is ultimately unprovable. So it's, in many respects, just like any sort of claim about metaphysics. I would argue that, you know, the Islamic tradition actually has very compelling reasons to accept its metaphysical claims more so than, you know, anything else I'm familiar with. But
at the same time, this again underlines the fact that this has happened, I think, you know, since the 70s and 80s when people like Asad and MacIntyre are writing. Alistair MacIntyre is a particularly important figure in my view. And if you think about it, John Rawls, who's one of these great liberal philosophers who kind of defines what liberalism is for much of the last part of his career, accepts in his later writings that MacIntyre's critique describing liberalism as a tradition is a fair one. Yet the mask of neutrality, the sort of pretense persists, and it makes the sort of the force that is applied, the violence of secularism or liberalism in our context, all the more kind of naked and really unacceptable, I think, in our own times. So, I mean, this is why Sheikh Omer Anjum, who you've interviewed as part of this series in the past, I think he makes a very good point when he says that this is one of the most opportune moments, you know, for Muslims discursively to try and critique it, even if we know that, you know, the United States is the most powerful military in the world and economically is still the most powerful. And it's not very clear, you know, how quickly that might go into decline, but the intellectual space has kind of eaten itself up because of the unsustainability of the pretenses of the Enlightenment. And so this is a massive opportunity for Muslims to take. That's an extremely significant point. And one thing that I like to remind people when, you know, they go to sort of the naturalistic or materialist causes, you know, it's like, oh, you know, this is so strong, and they've got the biggest military, etc, etc. Well, we're not really talking about, you know, sort of military opposition in the first place. And at the end of the day, there are hearts behind those machines, at least at the moment,
maybe in the future, that won't be true. But right now, there's hearts behind every trigger, every button, every sort of thing. And if you look back at revolutions, whether they're, you know, and that's a very broad term to use, sometimes it's intellectual revolution, sometimes it's military or political revolutions. One of the most compelling and powerful things that you can do is change someone's attitude. And to be able to flip somebody's heart is way more powerful than to do anything else. And that requires work or intervention at the discursive level, which you're talking about. And I completely agree. I think it's very, very, a lot of really important things are coalescing into a very important moment for Muslims in the West. The idea of the mass coming off, because a lot of people would say, you know, act surprised, and maybe genuinely be surprised, say, wait a second, you use secular violence in the same phrase, that's a non sequitur, how can those two things go together? I remember someone recently said, in a comment to another video we did about how, well, within secularism, then you could choose Islam. And so what's the big deal? And then the response would be, well, actually, you couldn't, right? And if you look around the world to situations where people did attempt to try to choose something for themselves that was sort of ran afoul of either the national personality of the state that they were in, or something that was sort of overtly publicly religious, etc., then it was struck down and squashed in the most violent of ways. So it's not just simply, you know, those are sort of the fissures, maybe, or the moments where secular power demonstrates itself. What, you know, what they call the Overton Window, what can be discussed and what can't be discussed, or in this case, you know, who can enter and upon what terms can you enter? Very, very important things going on, which is why we're having these discussions.
I think another thing, so just to circle back a little bit to the idea of multiple interpretations, and, you know, we're going to kind of play it about two extremes, because obviously there's two extremes that can happen there when it comes to authority and interpretation. So we have one extreme, which is sort of imagining that to have multiple interpretations is some sort of sign of weakness, or it's a sign of illegitimacy, or detracts from the authority or the authenticity of a revelation. How much of that is, is there such a thing, I guess I'll ask this question, is there such a thing as a text or a revelation that's not open to multiple interpretations? Where does the Qur'an stand vis-à-vis other revelations or other scriptures on this matter? Okay, so let me sort of have a stab at this. I have a particular perspective on it, but I'd love to hear your sort of comment on what I have to say. I mean, the Qur'an sends with it accompaniment. But then the Prophet ﷺ is described as bringing hikmah as well. And that wisdom is understood by the ulama as the Prophet ﷺ brings a sunnah which is mubayyin al-Qur'an, or that clarifies what the Qur'an means. And so I think my understanding of this is that, you know, a text by itself is open to unlimited interpretation in certain instances. It's not completely like there's a text there that's going to, you know, we can't assert that there isn't a text. We can't assert that there wasn't an author or in the case of something like the Bible, multiple authors, etc. But I think the fact that the Prophet ﷺ is sent and he exemplifies throughout his lifetime over the course of 23
years of nubuwwah, that what it means to live this deen and enact what the Prophet, what Allah ﷻ desires from us, I think is a good illustration of the narrowing of the field of interpretation. So you have the Qur'an, and Imam Ghazali is one of the great scholars who reflects on these sorts of questions, as does Imam Ash-Shatibi. But let me take the example of Imam Ash-Shatibi in the Muwaffaqat. He says something along the lines of, if you say, what's the dalil for wujub as-salawat al-khams, right? Now if anyone quotes aqim as-salah, you can say, well, an amr yadullu ala al-wujub, yadullu ala al-nad, yadullu ala al-karaha, for example. So a command form can indicate obligation, but it can indicate other things as well. I mean, look in the end- Permission or encouragement, there's lots of different situations in the Qur'an where it's not a literal command, right? Sometimes it's even tawbeekh, sometimes it's even tahaddi, right? Which is like a challenge, right? Like Allah ﷻ. Azizul kareem. Exactly. It's terrifying. But this is the power of the Qur'an, and the Qur'an is exemplifying the most eloquent manifestation of the use of language, right? So, you know, it manifests all of these various ways in which language is used. And as a consequence, I think it is important that, as Ashatoli says, ultimately it's the collective force
of the various reports, the various ayat that indicate the meaning of, you know, we know without a doubt, as a matter of, you know, no question that there are five salawats and that these are obligations, etc. And indeed, this is the sort of obligation which, if you deny it, takes you out of Islam, because you're denying a tenet of your faith, as well as like an action, of course. So, you know, that being the case, I think there has to be certain boundaries to interpretation which are laid out by the Prophet ﷺ ultimately. But where the Prophet ﷺ, you know, sort of, wasakata ʿan ashya'a, the Prophet ﷺ says that Allah ﷻ commanded certain things, and he prohibited certain things, but he remained silent on certain things. It wasn't for, you know, forgetfully silent, but so that there would be the, you know, option. And the Prophet ﷺ actually said to the companions, this special sort of ḥukm exclusively for the companions, don't ask about them, right? And the Qur'an also says, again, to the companions, this is exclusively for them. Then it explains, you know, don't ask about things which, if they are then shown to you, they will, you know, they will cause you difficulty. And then it explains what that means. And, you know, they are being shown to you when the revelation is coming down. So, I think that it's really fascinating to reflect on the way in which the Qur'an is speaking to specific contexts. But then, in our own time, and there's some khilāf among the ulamā about what the so-called arā'itīyīn, the people who ask, arā'itā in ḥasala kathā wa kathā, you know, asking hypothetical questions. Pete We have the manhaj of Abu Hanifa and then the manhaj of Imam Madik.
So, Imam Madik would say, has it happened? If it hasn't happened, don't worry about it, right? Maybe he was similar to, you know, my New Jersey upbringing, forget about it. But Abu Hanifa, on the other hand, would take this as something seriously, let's consider what if, what if, and we kind of build out or prefabricate sort of answers for these things, eventualities, if they actually happen. So, they're both part of the tradition. Amir Precisely, I mean, this is what's really beautiful about our tradition, that two very different methodologies, which will result in, you know, outcomes which are different from each other, sometimes quite strikingly. And this is another example. You know, I don't mention this in the paper, but the Hanafis consider it, I think, makruh tahrimi, if I recall correctly, for people to recite the Fatiha in the Salah. Or, I mean, you're not supposed to do that. If you're praying behind an imam, even for the silent prayers, in other madhhabs, it's considered something which is wajib. Yeah. That's not a problem among the ulama of sharia. They consider that these are valid opinions of different ulama, even though they are mutually contradictory. But on fundamental issues where there's ijma' across the madhhab, that's Islam. You can't sort of like, you can't leave that. Amir Right. So, that's extremely helpful. And there's a litany of things you just laid out here that touch on several points that I wanted to get to. What you just said about ijma'. So, if we're looking for, because earlier you referenced sort of the tenets, the fundamentals, the axioms, like what makes Islam, Islam, such that if you leave it, that's not Islam anymore, right? So, these are the sorts of things. Ijma' is one of the tools that we use to kind of delineate that boundary, right? If you can find a classical opinion, especially a madhhab behind you for some certain thing, then you don't have any right to,
or I should say nobody has the right to challenge your Islam or your belonging to the community. You are fully legible and identifiable as a Muslim. When backtracking a little bit, talking about interpretation and why multiple interpretations doesn't really have anything to do with detracting from the authority of the Qur'an, it's just a matter of language at the end of the day. Anything that's communicated in language is, almost all of it is open to interpretation. And as you're well aware, within the studies of legal theory, right? Min haythu'l-dalala, I say like when we're talking about, so when it comes to evidence, dalil, there's looking at dalil from its authenticity, is this valid to be used as evidence? And then there's min haythu'l-dalala, does the implications of this evidence actually lead you to the conclusion that you're claiming it does? And there's nas, and there's dhahir, and there's less than that. And the things that are truly nasi are very few, right? The things that are, there's only one way to interpret them, are very few. And some of the ulama, they say, only numbers, basically, like if we're talking about mirath. And then even that, some of the numbers, if Allah says seven or 70, or if the Prophet ﷺ says 70, does it literally mean 70, or does it mean just a whole lot, right? So the vast majority, just as a function of using language, it makes it possible to interpret it in multiple ways. And we have examples from the Prophet ﷺ about that. We have examples from being kids and trying to follow our parents' instructions that are examples of that. This is something that everybody should understand. But what you said is crucial, is that Allah did not just give us a text. He did not just give us language. He gave us an embodiment of the guidance that is expressed in language. And that is the example of the Prophet
Muhammad ﷺ, which is why the sunnah is an essential part of Islam, that you can't really call yourself a Muslim if you're Qur'an only, right? Or if you're a Qur'aniyun or whatever you'd like to call yourself. If you have a doubt, okay, may Allah guide you. And I hope that they use Yaqeen materials to help sort of educate themselves with full compassion and brotherly love and everything. But this is a red line. This is a red line. Because here's the consequence, and I think you put it out for us. The consequence of severing ourselves from that authoritative example of the Prophet ﷺ removes the guardrails for interpretation so that the text can become anything, right? It's like, I look at the word Salah, and now I want to say, well, it doesn't actually mean Salah, it means yoga, or it means any sort of sequence of motions. I can make that argument, right? Linguistically, and I can make- What does Salah mean, right? Yeah, it means, you know, a sort of a hand being over, right? Like from Salwa. So we can make those sorts of arguments. One of the most, if not the most important guardrail to the text, Allah's words becoming just a plaything to people and whatever they want to do with it is the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, is the need for Hadith. That's a really, really crucial, crucial point. And Ijma'at, you know, a lot of people are surprised to know that Ijma'at is the strongest evidence. If you ask people, you know, like, what's the strongest evidence? They think Quran, of course. Very few people, maybe some Shafi'i would say, you know, no, actually it's Sunnah. But Ijma'at is strongest. How? Because it's not just the sort of, it's not just a piece of evidence. It's also evidence plus interpretation, right? It's like, they wouldn't sort of, it has to be mustanad, which means it's based off of something that is either in the Quran or even in the Sunnah, but it's not merely agreement that it exists. It's agreement about its
interpretation, which is something that is maybe, which is a level beyond just saying, you know, Allah said this, or the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, said that. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. To what extent? Okay. So we've kind of got two extremes here. So we've got extreme that says there's no interpretation. Okay. Everything just, and that's appealing, especially to converts, many converts who come from sort of the sophistry of Trinitarianism and Christianity and things like that. And, you know, they're very attracted to the simplicity of Islam and in their, their sort of desire for that simplicity, they actually go too far and say, well, there's no such thing as interpretation. It's all just can be interpreted in one way. That's one extreme. And we're trying to show that no, there is interpretation yet it has guardrails. And then there's the other extreme, which is that absolutely everything is open to interpretation. A person who has a little bit of knowledge. Okay. I think that this is a crucial, it's not just an intellectual dimension. There's, there's a moral dimension that comes into it. At what point do we have the responsibility to admit our ignorance, right? As people who are engaged in interpretation and application, right? I'm not sure if you have any, any thoughts about that. I mean, it's a, it's an intriguing question. It's an extremely important question. We're touching on so many sort of like threads, which are so crucial for, you know, for our times, really. So let me say a couple of things from my history. One is Imam Malik's remark to someone who I think traveled to see him from Khurasan, right? So went across the entire sort of Muslim world to Medina, from sort of probably present date, close to the Afghan border, and coming to, and that's not an easy trip, right? I mean, it's these are, this is 7th century, 8th century Arabia, and asked him 40 questions, to which I think the report says,
to 38 of them, Imam Malik said, la adli. And the person said, I've come all the way to the Alim of Medina to ask this from Khurasan, what will I tell my people when I go back? And he said, kullahum Malik qala la adli, tell them that Malik said he doesn't know. And he answered, I think, two of the questions. And this is, Imam Malik was one of the most learned ulama of his age. There's no question about it. And there's, there are reports which are considered strong by the ulama, where the Prophet, peace be upon him, says that, you know, there will come a time when people will seek the Alim of Medina, the scholar of Medina. And Malik's contemporaries thought it was him, right? There was, I mean, I think there was more or less agreement that it was Malik. And that the later tradition kind of holds that to be the case as well. Yet, someone who is of such great standing recognizes the limitations of his own knowledge, and says, I don't know. And that's not in any way a flaw of Malik. That's a great mark of his integrity. And so I think in our own times, I mean, alhamdulillah, Imam Malik very likely was also reflecting on the fact that he is not familiar with the very distinct circumstances of Khurasan. And I have a feeling also that if the scholar went to Imam Abu Hanifa, he might have gotten a slightly different response. But, you know, there are different manahaj or methodologies at play when it comes to these sorts of questions. And I think it's extremely important in our time where we're kind of a civilization in flux. To quote one of my non-Muslim teachers in Princeton, Islam as a civilization is in, you know, Michael Cook basically says something along the lines of, well, Islam as a civilization is not really sort of there anymore. It's kind of fallen apart. I think that's a bit of an uncharitable reading, but it is in a desperate situation. And without power, you can't have the sorts of institutions that we have, for example, in the United States, which has, you know, the
largest numbers of universities of any country in the world. I give this fascinating figure, which I came up with while researching for the paper, that the U.S. has over a million lawyers. So they have over a million fuqaha, so to speak, to analyze a much shorter document than our, you know, Qur'an, a document which is less than 5,000 words long about the U.S. Constitution. And so I think that, you know, the lawyers, you will see this as well, whenever you ask a lawyer about the chances of a case, they'll say, I don't know. I mean, no, very few lawyers will come to questions and say, well, yes, this is a slam dunk case. Those are very few cases. And so I think there's a good analogy to be made that ultimately, Allahu A'lam is a fundamental principle of our deen, but it's also fundamental to any civilizational project, including the United States legal culture. But in addition to that, I would say that when Muslim civilization is strong, you will have structures in place, which, you know, give that deciding sort of vote. So the principle, the qa'idah fiqh here is, ya'ni, hukmul qadhi yarfa'ul khilaf. Where there is difference of opinion, but we need to adjudicate a final decision, that's what you have qadha for, right? That's what, and the qadhi, ya'ni, yaqumu maqam al-imam, or the khalifa, that the qadhi is basically the representative of the khalifa, and that's the, you know, the court of final adjudication in a worldly affair. And as the Prophet ﷺ himself said, that, you know, when you come to me, beware of taking the fire as your result. You know, when you come to me to dispute your cases, maybe one of you will be more eloquent with their argument than the other. But if you're taking something unjustly, know that you are only taking
a piece of the fire. So even the Prophet ﷺ, when he would engage in adjudication, would not know whether this is the truth. So it's not, you know, I don't know if we have hadiths explicitly, perhaps you can tell me where the Prophet says, but this is clearly an instance where the Prophet ﷺ could legitimately say about, you know, these sorts of legal cases, Allah is most informed. And I'm not sort of judging as someone who is judging on behalf of God, but I'm judging as a judge, and you have a responsibility to recognize your role in that. – No, that's extremely significant. It's something that Wa al-Halaq calls epistemic humility. I think that there's a good deal of epistemic humility that's built into Islam, and everybody needs a healthy dose of it. You know, we think of qudah, right, people who are judges and stuff like that as fairly remote and far removed from our situation. Yet, if we're talking about anybody who opens up the Qur'an and is trying to apply it to their life, you need the same sort of epistemic humility. So, and why I introduced this sort of dimension or additional lenses, if we're talking about two extremes, one extreme that wants to say, well, there is no such thing as interpretation, there's only one way to think about it, you know, that side needs its fair dose of epistemic humility, as much as the other side that says that everything is open to interpretation, and I can interpret it in this way and this way. You know, everybody has to sort of, you know, pump the brakes, as we say, and realize that this is something that's much bigger than you or me, and it's something that has, you know, important guardrails and sort of, as we've outlined, not just in the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, but also in the scholarly tradition. Yes, please, please. Add to that, you know, this is an old debate in our tradition. You have the Khawarij and you have the Murjiyah, and the Sunnah is in between. Yes, hold on. So,
the idea that some people thought, actually, there's only one answer, and if it's either my way or the highway, and these people actually feel... I am Islam. That's basically what those people are saying, right? It's like, I am Islam. If you disagree with me, you disagree with Islam. Right, and then you have other people who say, oh, they said, la ilaha illallah muhammadur Rasulallah, nothing matters after that. Yeah. Okay, so, alhamdulillah, you know, this is why it's very important to understand that we have a very rich tradition which clarifies what are the acceptable bounds, and, you know, that's a very capacious path to take, alhamdulillah. That brings us to the next point, which is extremely important, moving beyond interpretation to the idea of authority. And so, we find today that there's a lot of antipathy for religious scholarship. People just don't care, or they view it as something very small, right? So, we'll take the one camp, well, both camps, honestly, when it comes to saying there's no such thing as interpretation, or I can interpret things however I want, right? There's an implicit sort of just wiping the table clean of all of the 1400 years of scholarship. What are the forces, and particularly how has secularism affected this particular sensibility and orientation towards traditional scholarship? So, I mean, this is a very profound question, actually, and, you know, I would encourage people to also learn about the history of Europe, because unfortunately, you know, there's a reason the whole world is Eurocentric. These people took over the rest of the world. I mean, like, you know, forgive me for putting you on the spot, Tom, but your forefathers came from Italy, right? And, you know, as a consequence, the ideas that emerged in Europe over the last few hundred years are a global phenomenon, which we're all having to contend with. And this is referred to sometimes
as Eurocentrism within academic scholarship when it's thinking about it critically. But Europe had a very sort of like interesting trajectory when it came to dealing with religion over the last 500 years. 1517, it's actually been almost exactly 500 years, there was a certain Martin Luther who emerges and kind of starts to take on and challenge the authority of the church. And it precipitates a movement known as the Reformation, that, you know, then gives way to wars of religion, what are sometimes described as wars of religion, I understand there might be some contention about, because a lot of the time, these were actually political wars, but religion was the ideology on the basis of which a lot of people went to war in those days. And I find it fascinating how, you know, that creates a myth in, you know, later centuries, including contemporary times that religion is therefore a cause of violence. But Europe also goes through a series of, you know, highly secularising, sceptical movements. In the 19th century, you have something called higher biblical criticism. You have people like Feuerbach, who is deeply influential to Marx, who's one of the most influential social theorists of history, in a sense, who basically lose religion. These people are all people who are constantly going through a process and saying, well, actually, all of this stuff, you know, we've demonstrated that the texts that are referred to as the Bible are these composite texts that cannot ever claim to be authentically inspired by God in any meaningful sense. And that really has a massively corrosive effect in people's trust in religion. Of course, I mean, this continues, like the Catholic child sex scandals of the last, you know, few decades doesn't help, right? I mean,
in holding up the authority of the Catholic Church. Now, I mean, alhamdulillah, you know, Islam in many respects, hasn't suffered anything like that sort of internal disruption that has undermined its authority. The authority of Muslims has been undermined by Europeans coming and sort of like overthrowing Muslim civilization, and by force of arms imposing the modern nation state and secular orders globally, which will start to change, you know, form very different subjects to what was formed under Islamic civilization. So I think, I mean, I've given a kind of longish answer, but I hope it gives a bit of a panoramic view of why we have a situation in Europe that people have so much skepticism. I'll just add one final thing. The irony of ironies, in my view, and all this argumentation about religious violence, of course, because the wars of religion, or what I label the wars of religion, went on for, I think, over 150 years in Europe, is that the moment Europeans got rid of religion, they had World War I and World War II, the most violent confrontations in human history. Far worse. I mean, I think as a percentage of the global population, something like 8% of the global population was killed in those two wars. And these were, I mean, in my view, secular wars. You know, they were, it's not just my view that it's agreed, but my argument would be, yeah, liberalism. And fascism and Nazism and communism. I mean, you know, the communists in Mao's China as well, the tens of millions that they killed in the Cultural Revolution, just as an illustration of nationalism, of course, these modern day ideologies, which are basically ersatz religions, in my view, they substitute for religions, are, you know, far more deadly than anything that traditional religion could muster.
Yeah, there's so much there. And actually, I explore a bit of this, the European wars of religion, wars of religion, in my forthcoming paper on perennialism, because it is really hard to overstate the influence of that memory. It really comes down to European memory and experience. Now, the problem, one of the several problems is that that memory and experience was universalized, right? So instead of thinking that, well, this is just a European problem, it became interpreted as a global problem. But also at the moment of interpretation, pinning it on religion, right, was also dubious, for several reasons. And so that's brought us to this, I think, for talking to Muslims and why, okay, if we see that there's an antipathy for religious scholarship, there's sort of a skepticism for religious scholarship, even within Muslim spheres, and we didn't undergo the same historical sort of formations that European Christianity or Europeans or European Christians have undergone, then how do we account for that? And my thoughts, you know, my thoughts go in two directions. One, as you were saying, look at how Europe has conquered the Muslim world and installed its technologies of statecraft, etc. We have now such a thing as scholars for dollars, where there, you know, before in the pre-modern period, there were such a thing as like the Sultan scholars, right? And the, you know, the, you know, the paid guys, but the real scholarship was always going on outside of that. And, you know, outside of the grips of the dictates of the Sultan. It was very, very, you know, sort of easy to do that because everything was very decentralized and fairly independent, and they had their own, like, independent finance.
So, but now, with modern statecraft, we've seen a new thing where things are very centralized, and so now we have many of the prominent scholarly voices are tied to state governments that have monopolies on education, that have monopolies on who is counted as an imam or appoint imams at different sorts of places or misogynists, and that's a very problematic thing. And so we're wondering now, I mean, I used to even hear all these rumors before I went to Medina to study, people used to tell me, oh, you know, they just have to read off of the same khutbah and everybody says the same khutbah and it's prefabricated. Those were lies that wasn't true, but that was the attitude and that was the suspicion, and it's only imaginable in a place in which a modern state, which is held accountable to no authority above itself, is able to sort of seep its tentacles into every sort of religious institution and learning institution. So that's one direction, right? So we have this sort of skepticism towards religious scholars because, yeah, we're worried, like, are they actually just the mouthpiece of the government and representing state interests, and we have plenty of examples to choose from with that. But then in the other sense, when we come to the West, we find that we live in the ether, or the aftermath, right, of the historical experience of Europeans and Christians. And so if you're only 1% to 3% of the population, like in the United States, I'm sure in the UK you guys are a little bit more than that, you know, but you're still a minority, right, and your kids are going to public school and they're a minority in their classes and they're a minority, sort of, you're going to pick up these sensibilities.
You're going to actually, you know, through the air and through osmosis and how everybody's sort of talking about things and, you know, the different representations in media and books and movies and et cetera, et cetera, you're going to pick up on the sense that religion is responsible for violence, that religious scholars are generally not to be trusted, that they're not, you know, sort of moral, they're sort of in it for themselves or whatever sort of things, and that this has an effect on Muslim youth. And it's something that's very, very, very difficult to deal with. Right. I mean, you've highlighted a very sort of wide array of challenges that we face in our own time. And one of the things, like, sometimes you can think about these things and feel a sense of overwhelm. But I also think that, you know, this is, we live in a time where it kind of seems to reflect the hadith where the person who holds to their religion is like someone who's holding to hot coals that are burning them while they are doing that. And so, in many respects, the edger of tenacity towards the deen is, insha'Allah, far greater as a consequence. So I think, you know, every era has its challenges. Allah is always in charge. That's never going to change. And so I think, you know, it's important to have a sense of serenity as we approach these sorts of questions as well. I just wanted to highlight, like, one of the things that you said that Europe going global. I'm not sure who's done the research on this. I've seen bits and bobs here and there. But, you know, the systematic deconstruction of Islamic
pathways of learning, and ways of conveying, you know, civilizational knowledge, not just the Qur'an and sunnah, but how the Qur'an and sunnah manifests in civilization. And, you know, ultimately, power is quite important to be able to Allah will restrain people with political authority in a way that he won't restrain them through the Qur'an, because the Qur'an is teachings. But sometimes, you know, people need to have, you know, the force of the law, and the risk of having the book thrown at them, so to speak, to keep them in check. And so I think, under those circumstances, we are living in a very unusual situation. And this is something I do highlight in the paper that we do, ultimately, we are engaging discursively with an issue which Western civilization, which would be a nice idea, you know, came and sort of imposed upon us at the end of the bayonet, right. And so as a consequence, we need to also up our game, eventually, that our discourse needs to be able to be persuasive at the levels that change the calculus, in geopolitical terms. We're very far from that. And unfortunately, we also have Khawarij types in our age who, you know, run with this sort of a mentality without any ta'anni, without any sort of proper deliberation and create far more problems for Muslims than they create solutions. So that's just a side comment I wanted to make. And I think, again, you've brought a lot of threads together. So you might have to remind me of certain components, if you want to direct me. You're ultimately talking about the question
of authority being undermined by the nation state centralizing power. And I think, I'll say a couple of things about that. I think we sometimes think that, you know, scholars associated with states are, it's a factor of problem. And the reality is, you know, Abu Yusuf wrote Kitab al-Kharaj for the Khalifa. You know, there were some of the ulama were very wary of associating with the Amir, but like Abu Hanifa, but his own student, Abu Yusuf, made a different call on that question and recognized that, look, my knowledge as, you know, someone who can provide, basically, the proper guidance on how to conduct tax affairs of the Khalifa, which was a massive empire at the time, and empires, of course, highly decentralized. You know, the states within them are puny, compared to modern states, but they do still need some guidance on working on these broad matters. And so being a Qadi, some of the scholars said, you know, you should always avoid Qada, and Imam Abu Hanifa essentially died in prison because he refused to become a Qadi. And other scholars, like, you know, you think of someone like Imam al-Ghazali, he wrote Al-Mustawthiri, he wrote various pieces. Al-Mustawthiri is an ideological work he wrote for the Abbasid Khalifa to justify going to war against, you know, state enemies. He wrote, at the same time, Nasihat al-Muluk, which is fascinating to read, because it's him telling off the Khalifa, or the Sultan, I think, that you have to adhere to the Qur'an and Sunnah, you have to adhere to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's commandments, and you have to read this on a regular basis as a form of tarbiyah for yourself. And you have to have like muhasabah before your flock and those sorts of things. So I don't think associating scholars is ipso facto problematic.
But what you highlighted is the modern state has become an ideological behemoth, in a way, that historically, the ulama were the controllers of the levers of ideology, right? Their worldview was what set the template for discussions about what is legal and what's illegal. And I make this comment in the paper, that throughout our history, the ulama recognized their rank as being above the Khalifa in ultimate terms, or above the rulers in ultimate terms. Yes, the Khalifa has a special symbolic significance, which cannot be outmatched by the alim. But the ulama as a class, as Ibn al-Qayyim says in Alam al-Muqaeen, but as was a reality in the time of the most recent iteration of the Khilafah in the Ottoman Empire, that if the Khalifa went out of line, the ulama could come together as ahl al-halli wal-'aqd, the people who have that ultimate authority, including political authority when it's necessary to wield it, to say that the Khalifa has gone out of line, we confer legitimacy over this person who is now replacing you. And so, I mean, I think, obviously, you know, the ideal isn't always the reality. And sometimes there is, you know, I think it's the responsibility of ulama not to precipitate constitutional crises, for example, as Ibn Abdus Salam, when he confronted the Mamalik, I'm sure he was very measured in the way that he, you know, confronted them and made sure they didn't tax the people of Egypt.
But at the same time, he didn't completely disrupt their legitimacy altogether, because not having a ruler, as the ulama have said, you know, throughout our history, and this reflects true ahl al-sunnah perspective. What's really wrong with our time, and the state ulama, the ulama sultan, sometimes they're called, is that these people are no longer reflecting the true tradition of ahl al-sunnah wal-jama'ah on these questions, where, actually, as Imam Ghazali says, you're supposed to do amr bil ma'ruf an-nahi al-munkar with the sultan. They're saying that all of that is not allowed, you have to basically obey the sultan. That is a problem, actually. We see a situation where maybe in the modern state, the center doesn't hold. Maybe it can't hold, right, because, you know, all the examples that were sustainable that you brought up were sort of pre-modern examples where you have, just as you said very articulately, you know, the ulama class and certainly the sharia as the ultimate authority, right, and then the government or governing force, or even if we want to call it a state, there's some argument about that, you know, is accountable to that. There's something above it, and the unique feature of the modern state is that there's nothing above the modern state. The modern state lives for its own ends, it operates for its own ends, and, you know, no one can really hold it in line. Supposedly, we have social contracts. I've never seen it. I've never been able to remove my signature from one, right, or seen where I sign the dotted line. You know, it's a myth, really. And so that kind of creates a situation where, yes, now you've got the Khawarij problem, but also the Murjiyya problem, you know, revealing itself yet again where you have the scholars that are very close to the administrations and regimes that don't enjoy the good and forbid the evil, that don't call out the evil that they see, and then because that happens, you also give rise to different Khawarij ulama that are saying,
well, if we don't have any ability to hold them to account, or there's nothing to hold them to account to, then we're going to just take the matter into our own hands and go off the deep end, which strikes me. You said earlier about, you know, irony of ironies, and one of the things that I think is an irony of ironies is that we actually have circling back to opportunities and optimism. In the West, we have a unique opportunity, I think, and this is something I had planned on ending the conversation on, but it's appropriate to mention it here, about sort of creating independent and decentralized Islamic scholarship, that we have freedoms to establish organizations that you don't have in the Muslim world. You can make sort of endowment-based religious scholarship, you know, madrasas or seminaries or whatever. They're very immature, the ones that we have in the West at this moment. There's been a lot of activity within the last 5, 10, 15 years, which is great, but to understand what it could become, right? Like, it could actually become an enormous asset to the ummah, to have a place in the world where Muslims could go and train outside of state control, engaging in, you know, real pressing questions, not have someone tell you, well, you can't ask that question or you can't, you know, research this thing, you know, it's out of bounds and you're going to have the mukhabarat sort of on your case, right? You know, that is, I think, a real, real thick silver lining that we have and a really interesting sort of opportunity that we have to avail ourselves of. Yes. Can I perhaps suggest, I mean, like, I'll just add a wrinkle to this because, of course, we know living in these societies.
So the way in which you characterize the state, I think the Muslim world has these states which are rapacious in ways that, you know, there's a lot of variation in the West. So the fact that yateen or other sorts of Muslim institutions can reside in a place like the United States, maybe it wouldn't have been possible immediately after 9-11. Right. But it is something which there is a sort of first amendment and a certain amount of free speech that is allowed yet. And I live in a country without a formal Bill of Rights, incidentally. So who knows? I mean, we have long constitutional traditions in Britain, but we don't have a written constitution. And, you know, it has caused problems recently with Brexit and so on. And so the predictability of stability in the West, I don't want to make sort of like, you know, unfounded claims about. But I think our circumstances are different to much of the Muslim world. So we do have these historic opportunities. At the same time, I think we do need to be very careful and wary of, you know, idealizing our circumstances. I know that there are certain red lines. There are certain things that I can't safely talk about in the public sphere if I want to have a job. Yeah. Just as an example. And I think, you know, someone like yourself, Tom, may Allah grant you tawfiq and barakah in your role at Yaqeen. But by being in a place at Yaqeen, you may have certain sort of leeway to talk about certain things, which I think certain other people in the public sphere will have certain constraints on. So to that extent, I think it's important for us to establish these sorts of institutions which are genuinely independent. They have, you know, they are funded by endowments. And but at the same time, I think we need to be circumspect about, you know, the reality of colonization giving us a leg up on the Muslim world.
And, you know, many of my greatest teachers are either based in the Muslim world or, you know, are sort of and they are working within certain constraints. And I want to give them their due as they really deserve the institutions where to have that independence. So I think we have a double duty being in the West and we set up these institutions, but we also, you know, work tirelessly against empire, which is one of the ways in which the nation state as an entity in the Muslim world, the post-colonial nation state, which is this repressive, rapacious regime, can maybe be sort of not given a free pass as the West just systematically does. So I hope that sort of qualification makes sense. – Very well said. Makes complete sense. The funny thought that occurred to my mind is that, you know, the Islamic scholarship in the West is similar to, you know, the MLS signing Messi, right? It's like compared to the level of scholarship elsewhere. And that's not a knock. It's just being realistic. And we have a duty to our ulama everywhere. My teachers as well as yours are abroad, you know, and that's still, if knowledge is passed through the hearts of people, you know, then that's where the ulama is. So it's a very important corrective and something to keep in mind going forward. Double duty is a very helpful way to think about it, Mashallah. I'd like to pivot if we can to addressing sort of the man and woman on the street, right? So we're talking about authority and how secularism erodes sort of trust in religious authority. And again, we can imagine two extremes. One in which, you know, there's too much authority given to people who don't deserve it. And then the other, which is, you know, undue skepticism.
How does a normal average Muslim go about finding reliable scholars? This is actually, this is a $10 million question, maybe more than that at this point. So, I mean, subhanAllah, in the US, I find this a bit more challenging than a place like the UK. The UK is a tiny country. And so, you know, having access to scholarship and reliable scholars is, I think, easier in the UK. In the US, Muslims are very diffuse. If you're fortunate enough to be, you know, in some of these Muslim hospitals, I don't know, I feel like the tri-state area might have a good amount. You have, Northern California has, you know, some institutions. You have Minnesota area, you know, the, what's it called, Illinois area. And of course, Dallas, where Yaqeen is based, mashaAllah. And so... You're flexing your geography, your knowledge of American geography, mashaAllah. I mean, subhanAllah. I mean, I did live in the country for five and a half years, but I probably reached really the edges of my knowledge of geography in the US. And so, consequently, I think, you know, if you're living in some of those communities, you can probably find ulama who are, you know, good. But I think fundamental to this is a point that you've made in the past, and I make in the paper, which is, we as a community, particularly in the West, do not value al-shari'ah. And there's a massive dereliction of duty. And my grandfather, rahmatullahi alayhi, you know, was a great scholar in Bangladesh. And he was once asked very impudently by someone who was, you know, visiting, saying, why are all these mulvis, mulvi is the term sometimes used in somewhat disparagingly, such idiots or something like this. He was saying, why are these people such sort of ignorant people?
And my grandfather, as related by my uncle, didn't dignify it with a response. But later on in the conversation, you know, started to learn about the man's children. And he said, oh, I have three children. One of them was absolutely a star student. So I sent him off to study medicine. The other one, he was good. He was sharp in maths. So he went and did, you know, I think something like engineering and so on. And then when he asked him, but what about the third? And he said, oh, that was a complete failure. So he went and asked him to go to the madrasah. And my grandfather's response, that's why. I mean, like, you know, this sort of, and this is something I've complained about for years. It's one of my first articles when I was a student at university, I wrote a piece, just after university, about the fact that, you know, people very often complain about the uselessness of ulama. Oh, we don't have, you know, good ulama. Where are they? And why aren't they answering our questions? Why aren't they addressing the concerns? So many problems in our communities, et cetera. And it's like, you as a community, we as a community, have failed to prioritize the cultivation of good scholars, which is only going to come about with cultivating good institutions, pouring money into a sector which basically has no state backing whatsoever in this country. I mean, maybe for the good, in a way. But, you know, you're all sending your kids to become, you know, high-flying doctors, engineers, lawyers, all the rest of it. And you have, obviously, brilliant infrastructure. You know, we have Muslim lawyers who are probably, you know, graduates from Yale Law School and ready to go to the Supreme Court in 20 years' time to become Supreme Court justices or something like this. But we haven't done anything like the investment that we need in our ulama. And so I think, I don't know if this is very directly answering your question, but we do have a crisis of resources within our community, which is, I think,
you know, sometimes people refer to Sheikh Gugul, Allamatul Asr. And, you know, there are pitfalls. Sheikh Gugul, so to speak, is akin to a book, right? And so depending on how reliable the book is, and some of the ulama, I mean, as far as I recall, Sheikh Muhammad al-Hassan, I haven't read this in Suyuti myself, said that Imam Suyuti says, so he's one of the great scholars of Mauritania in our time. And he said that Imam Suyuti's view was that books fulfill the fard kifaya of having ulama. And the thing is, that's assuming, you know, the ability to access books and understand them when you read them. So, you know, he basically was saying that, and Sheikh Addad was saying that, you know, in our own time, we can say to a certain extent, this obligation is partially fulfilled by this. But we have a situation in our parts of the world, in the West, where we might have access to the books, but no one can read them. People don't know the language. And in a place like Mauritania, where Sheikh Addad was giving this lesson, it's a very different picture. Everyone is remarkably literate in the sharia. And so I do think that in our time, we have these great opportunities. I learned, I consider Sheikh Muhammad al-Hassan al-Addad one of my great teachers. I've never met him. I've never met him in person. I've only ever, you know, watched his lectures online or listened to them as mp3s that I downloaded. So I think, you know, it is extremely important to have the opportunity to sit with the ulama and take from their adab. As Imam Malik's mother used to say, you know, take from the adab of your teacher. I think it was Rabi'at al-Ra'i. But Imam Malik's mother would, you know, get him ready for class, put the turban on him and say to him, خذ من أدبه قبل علمه or something like this. Take from his adab before his knowledge.
How far away we've come from that, subhanAllah. So you really introduced an important point because, you know, sort of thinking about systems, right. If we're struggling to find or trust, you know, scholars, reliable scholars, then we have to be taking the long-term means to create that pool of reliable scholars. And if we're not, then we don't really have any leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing the scholars that we find in our midst. Extremely significant point. You get what you pay for. You get what you pay for, exactly. And your receipts show your priorities. I think there's another addendum to that. Of those who currently exist, so how do you pick out a sheikh to do or a, you know, whoever else that we want to put in his stead among all of the other folks that you could have chosen from? And this is where the weakness of books, and I'm obviously somebody who benefits tremendously from books just like you, but one of the weaknesses is that there's something of a playlistification of faith where you're in the driver's seat for which book you're reading, how you're applying it, how you're understanding it, etc. Rather than the interface with a live human being is supposed to provide that interface for you, the sequencing, the how you're supposed to, what emphasis you're supposed to put, right? So how we're choosing, one thing that you brought up is the character, right? Character, and that's one of the most important things. I think that in this time period of secularized knowledge, to bring it back to your paper, we also demean and we also kind of don't give it its full value.
We're too impressed by the memorization and the intellectual capabilities, and we've lost sight of the moral component, and we know that everything that we learn, if we don't take care of the moral component seriously, that it's actually going to be a huj alayna wa laysa lana. That's going to be against us on a day of judgment. It's going to build a case against us and not a case for us. So getting the character part right and the etiquette or edib or whatever we want to translate it as is extremely important. We can say, oh, this person, yeah, they have liabilities, but what they say is true. Well, what if you take on the liabilities that they have? And what if that actually puts you in a very compromised position on the day of judgment? That's something extremely serious that people need to take seriously. I don't know if you have any comments on that. If there's any other criteria that you'd like to introduce just for somebody if they're trying to figure out part of that. I think the point of edib and the point of tazkiyah, the point of suluk, the point of tasawwuf, and purifying one's heart in these processes, you know, this is something that many of us, and I think in the West, perhaps more so than other places, because very often our access to knowledge is mediated in the way that you've suggested, rather than being direct. It's something that we struggle with. And I'll be frank that, you know, this is something where I think this is going to be a lifelong journey for me. And I don't think that's, you know, something I have a huge amount of control on in the West necessarily. But I think this is kind of going back to the allahu a'lam point, that knowing your limitations. knowing that this is an area where I am weak, and I will always try and seek, you know, from whoever can offer it.
And, you know, maybe not the best example, I'm not a great fan of what Hamid As-Shamsi describes as the post classical tradition. But Al-Sha'arani was a great Sufi scholar of Egypt, and he had an illiterate teacher. I think, you know, some of the choices he made in terms of kind of forswearing his formal knowledge, I don't agree with. But I think that is illustrative of a wisdom that is recognised throughout the early tradition as well, where people say, that some of the early scholars said, you know, I spent all my time in philosophy and theology and kalam and so on. But here I am dying on the aqeedah of the old women of Nishapur. And, you know, there is something very remarkable about the devotion of the average person that even an alim, when I, you know, see people like this, I want to take from their nur, as it were, right? I want to sit down with them. And I want to, you know, have that, Imam Ali, r.a, used to reportedly sit down with the fuqara and hear their stories, and empathise with them and cry with their difficulties. And this is, you know, there are various ways that our ulama talk about the purification of the heart. And, you know, your warnings about, you know, just becoming a qutbi, as some of the ulama warn against. You know, this is reportedly a problem that Ibn Hazm suffered from, that he basically learned his knowledge from books. And unfortunately, he was very harsh with his, you know, his style is very harsh and critical with other people. Sometimes I think learning compassion from one's teachers is also very important, because we're all idiots when we first come and we don't know anything. And we should we should recognise that the ulama also say, you know, I spent my entire life learning. And the only thing I learned that I was even more ignorant than I originally thought I was. So that humility is just so key, inshallah.
Can I add one final thing? Let's give something of a practical answer as well. Oh, sure. Yeah, because people are, you know, would be asking, Okay, well, if I need to learn knowledge, what do I need to do? So we talked about the qutbi side of things. I think, you know, it's extremely important if whether you're going to do this formally, or whether you're going to do this as kind of something that you're cultivating for your own correct knowledge. And development and so on. And I think that resources like those offered by Yaqeen and various other institutions do offer the average person a lot. And people should take advantage of these things. A lot of it is imaniyat. I think when it comes to learning the basic fiqh of, you know, we as Muslims have to learn the basic fiqh of any action that we are going to be engaged in. And that's actually quite a broad range of things. And unfortunately, our communities are not set up to train people to think about, for example, mu'amalat maliyah. Like when you're, what's the hukm of opening a bank account? Right, yeah. Or should you be getting a credit card? I mean, my god, when I went to the US, everyone works on credit. And it's like, I came from a culture where that's kind of haram, so to speak, right? I mean, there's many ulama who say that having a credit card, because there's the shard, the possibility of that is haram. Okay, there are some ulama who will. So I think that we do need to all facilitate within our communities on a wide scale, the opportunity to learn your fara'id a'iniyah. Yes. Your absolute obligations that you as an individual will face. On top of that, people who want to seek formal knowledge, you should seek out a teacher. And, you know, people like myself or Sheikh Tom, you know, you can write to us if we don't have the time. We'll probably pass you on to someone else who will, inshallah, have the time. And I think one final thing I'd say about this is that, actually, two final things, if you'll permit me. Please, of course.
I remember watching a Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, one of the great scholars of the last 100 years or so. And he died at the age of 99, lunar years. But he had actually a TV show, Shari'a wal Hayat on Al Jazeera. And, you know, one of the things that he once said, which struck me, because he was talking about mufawda'at al-'ilm, you know, in our time, the kind of chaos in sort of like knowledge and fatawa and these sorts of things. And he said, part of the problem, actually, is that some of our great ulama do not come out into the public. They're these reclusive figures who are, you know, excellent research scholars. And, you know, it's a challenge because it takes a certain type of personality to be in public and really engage. You know, there's a beautiful hadith in the Sahihain where it says, المؤمن الذي يخالط الناس ويصبر على أذاههم خير ممن لا يخالط الناس ولا يصبر على أذاههم The believer who goes and mixes with people and is patient with the tribulation of having to deal with people is of a higher rank than someone who doesn't. But Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi was saying, look, I actually also put part of the blame of the widespread, problematic fatwas emerging in the public sphere on the fact that the ulama do not take on their responsibility as they ought to and come onto these public fora and teach people what's correct. So that's one dimension that we also have a responsibility. But I think the narrative, basically, you relinquish the narrative to other people. And that's an argument that people make to be active on TikTok, right? And it's like, and other things. I mean, without opening a can of worms, but I mean, the argument there is, if nobody does it, if nobody does it, then you're ceding the ground to other people and other voices that are going to, it's going to be a train wreck. I agree with that. And this is, you know, as you say, I don't want to open a can of worms, but these are very serious. Like you have to make maslaha-based judgments.
And I trust, you know, some scholars whose positions I would not adopt personally in terms of like, I'm someone who, I did register on TikTok like a year ago and I immediately unregistered. It's a place of fahish as far as I'm concerned. I think I registered and then unregistered within about 20 minutes or something, maybe less. And so, and I immediately took it off my phone. And later I learned that apparently they like crawl your data and consume it on levels that are, I mean, and it's Chinese and you don't want to in any way support, you know, the state that is doing so much harm to our brothers and sisters. But, you know, which is a massive difficulty in the, given the fact that everything that we consume is produced in China. But I guess the one final point I'd make is that there's also the very, and this is a point that I make in the article, there's a very important area of priority that we've failed in, which is providing opportunities for female ulama to develop. And this is something which, you know, the anecdotes I give in my paper are reflective of conversations I've had with people in the Muslim world, but also people in the UK. I don't know what the scene is like in the US quite as much, but I remember having a chat with a sister at Princeton University who was saying, you know, they were kind of fascinated by the fact that there were female, you know, Muslim students who were pursuing Islamic studies, you know, because they want to become ulama, because most of the women he knew who were pursuing Islamic studies in academia at higher levels were doing it because they wanted to understand why Islam was so misogynistic. So, you know, if you go in with that frame and something which is obviously being fed to us on a regular basis, the diet of our day, and it's something that needs actively
to be resisted, that sort of ideological claim, I think, you know, it's not helped by the fact that we actually don't provide female scholars those sorts of opportunities anywhere near the scale that we have for male scholars. No, that's definitely a fair point. And maybe we'll circle back as the final question. I'll ask you a very, very hard question about that. But just for the record, because we brought it up, and I think you cut off your sentence as you went to something else when we're talking about the issue of credit cards, I want the viewer to understand that we're not issuing a fiqh ruling here, that the issue is divided into two opinions as to whether an agreement can have a haram sort of condition put upon it, right? So no one's advocating for paying interest or anything like that. The agreement or the fiqh issue hangs on, is it permissible to agree to pay interest in a certain circumstance that you don't plan on ever being in or not, right? And so, you know, I just want to make sure that everybody's on clear ground when it comes to that issue. There are some scholars that say that it's permissible to agree to that condition and to never let it happen, right? So you're always paying off your balance before time. You never, ever get to the point where you're actually paying interest. And then there's other than that who said, no, it's not even permissible to agree to that condition in the first place, right? So just want everyone to be on bayina and clarity when it comes to that. So one last thing that I want to touch on before maybe a final question is that now we're shining a light on a problem, which is the eroded authority of scholarship and sort of the dismissal and improper valuation, insufficient valuation of scholarship. But we're also not advocating for a complete, just like submissive, you know, uncritical engagement with scholarship either.
That just that there is one extreme that is way too high on skepticism, there's another extreme that's way too high on obedience and, you know, complete uncritical submission to personalities, to celebrities or whatever have you. So what are sort of reasonable things that people should keep in mind that might be red flags or things that are, they're not transgressing the bounds of what's reasonable criticism or skepticism, but there might be important things to keep in mind when it comes to going on this journey of starting to engage with scholars of various sorts. I think that's really an excellent question, like how do you find the balance between, you know, undue deference and undue irreverence, as it were. And I think, to be frank, I think most of us in the West, most Muslims in the West are at risk of the undue irreverence or, you know, not giving enough. It's important to recognize that because society might come and shift as to which sort of situation it deals with more. And I agree with that assessment. Yeah, we deal with more irreverence than we do with super reverence. Right. And so, in that regard, I think, you know, we do need to encourage people, and that's why, you know, the past hour and a half almost has been about, you know, talking about the problems of these secular normativities that condition our approach to religion in the first place and make us think and look down on, you know, ilm shar'i, unless, illa ma rahim Allah. And, you know, unless, inshallah, if we've had it, if we've been exposed to a good upbringing
that, and in a good community very often where there are exemplary ulama, which is something that, you know, inshallah, we as a community are increasingly working on, we had some difficulty with. So, you know, the irreverence point is something which I think we need to be more wary of, and I'll just leave that there. But what do you do when the reverence goes beyond the limits? And I think, you know, the point I make here, and I actually have a book about this, which talks about it in the context of problematic political alliances of certain official scholars very often, and as I indicated already, official scholars aren't ipso facto evil, but, you know, very often in our times in states which are run by, I think, legitimately, people who can be legitimately characterized as quite, you know, pernicious, authoritarian, repressive dictators who are sometimes persecuting Muslims just because they're being more religious. In those sorts of contexts, the ulama who prop these people up, you know, you have to recognize that actually this is not, these aren't the people of ilm that we should be deferring to. I think, ultimately, it comes to adherence to the Qur'an and Sunnah, and, you know, if someone is breaking an ijma' then it's, you know, very clear that you don't adhere to them. And I remember, but, I mean, at the same time, I'll just add a qualification that there can be difference of opinion that we're not aware of as well. And Shurah Imam al-Masiri, they used to say about the great sort of Sicilian scholar, I think, or al-Masiri, I think, was Sicilian or Cypriot, I can't remember now, but from the Mediterranean, a Maliki scholar who reportedly would not do inkar of people very often because he knew the aqwal of the ulama so well.
So there are so many different opinions on certain questions that he wouldn't go and say, well, you shouldn't be doing this because, you know, this is wrong and so on. I personally think that, you know, I'm quite sure the ulama would say you can actually still do inkar. But there are certain instances where, you know, you're just expressing your disagreement with, and if someone says, well, I follow another opinion, and you can still advise them that, you know, in my view, just as a humble believer, I feel quite, you know, I feel that maybe you should consider another opinion, etc. And that's, you know, there are degrees of that sort of engagement. So I think that it's extremely important to ultimately make sure that people are not going against the Qur'an and Sunnah. But, you know, that requires a certain amount of knowledge. And that's why, you know, there has to be this kind of balance between, okay, I'm showing reverence to this person, but are they giving the right sorts of signals? Are they saying that, ultimately, Allah and His Messenger are our guide, you know? As opposed to maybe putting themselves forth as the guide. Maybe that would be a helpful distinction. I think that's a very important distinction. And it's a common problem. I mean, you will have, unfortunately, a lot of people who will not do enough to highlight that I'm a fallible human being. The ulama are not ma'soom. And this is the term I use in the paper. Isma, or protection from error, which is divine protection from error, is exclusive to the Prophet ﷺ. And so no one after him, Abu Bakr radhiAllahu anhu, in his first khutbah, when he became khalifa, said, I've been placed in charge of you, I'm not the best among you. I mean, we actually disagree with that. But so he's wrong about that one. But, and then he says, and so if I do what is, you know, if I'm, if I'm correct in my thing, then support me. And if I'm not, then correct me.
And so that recognition from the get go within sort of the Muslim ummah after the death of the Prophet ﷺ is ultimately a recognition of the fact that we cannot ever switch off our brains, we cannot ever say to Allah ﷻ on Yawm al-Qiyamah, Oh, I did such and such a, you know, very serious sin, because that person told me it was fine. You have an akhil as well. I mean, you know, there are you can imagine conditions where people have been sort of like, completely taken advantage of. And you know, if a child does that, that's fine. But we really need to try and dispel this myth within adults, that, you know, adults have the right to completely defer to another human being, even if they can switch off their consciences, right? No, you can't do that. I hope that gives a sense of, you know, it's a complicated issue. Yeah, no, it's important. It shows us that we say these things, but we don't necessarily live according to what we say is our understanding, which is, it's not just that everyone can make a mistake. It's just as a statistical reality, everyone will make mistakes. And so, you need to plan on the scholar or the shaykh that you admire most making mistakes. Like, it's going to happen, period, full stop. Now, there needs to be some distinction and nuance as to a typology of mistakes, right? There's different types of mistakes. We can, you know, some are just going to be sort of intellectual mistakes. And if they're minor, then they're very forgivable. If they're major, then maybe it would start to cause you to doubt their reliability as a scholar or their erudition. And then there are ethical mistakes. And even that, there's a typology, there are small sort of ethical mistakes and slip ups that every single human being is going to fall into, right?
But then there are major ethical mistakes that we would, I think, be legitimate in expecting better from for the scholarly class. And so, where does it leave the viewer? Sorry, I mean, this is a thing that I think people should put more thought towards as to drilling down on the granular details of this typology. What are the sorts of mistakes that you should expect from your scholars and mashaykh and be ready to forgive and overlook? Because in a certain sort of way, that's the sign of maturity. You're not going to be shattered by, you know, the fact that, you know, I've heard, you know, some of our teachers said, you know, crazy things. But at the same time, then there are other issues that, you know, that should be maybe red flags, where you should say, oh, wait a second, well, this actually impinges upon this person's credibility or trustworthiness. Now, I think we need to have more specific conversations about that. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a challenging one. But it's one of those things, which it's a dereliction of duty for us to ignore that question. Yeah. And so I absolutely agree. I mean, for those who are interested in how this might manifest in a political context, I have written a book about how it has manifested in the last decade in the Middle East, with respect to the scholars who there were learned ulama
who justified mass murder in support of the state against unarmed protesters. And these include people who are teachers of, you know, scholars in the West, scholars globally, because they are so sort of influential and so learned. But, you know, the moment something like that happens, you recognize that Allah will be the ultimate judge. This scholar in particular, I actually still have some of his books, and actually, some of them are very useful, particularly in Usul al-Fiqh. But, you know, just as I have, you know, Henry Kissinger's kind of book on diplomacy, and he's like one of the very leading scholars on realist sort of political theory, I can, I can read that without morally valorizing, or, or putting him in a position of authority. Yeah. Two things that I'm going to combine. One of them was we're talking about scholars and the relationship to the state. And you said that we don't necessarily ipso facto, like, like by default, or categorically dismiss scholars for, you know, their proximity to state actors or the government. However, there might be a certain sort of thing or involvement that should make us pause, especially in the modern era.
And then we talked about the need for female scholarship and for structuring female scholarship and giving women more opportunities, because, you know, and there's various sort of ways of justifying that, you know, just the fact that we need our children and the most, we need our children to be literate, Islamically, and the most immediate and far reaching intervention that we can do to achieve that is to intervene at the level of people's mothers. But there is there is a critique that's that's launched by feminists that is similar sort of to the scholars for dollars critique, which is that, well, if Islamic scholarship is dominated by men, then that categorically means that they're not representing women. And we see this in, you know, in popular sort of political culture by saying, well, I don't think that men should get to write laws of, you know, that affect women's bodies, right? That's sort of, you know, how it's articulated within the sloganeering of today. Is this legitimate critique? Does the fact that the majority of scholars were male, does that detract from the authority of the scholarly tradition? Does it impinge upon their ability to represent the interests of women? Yes or no? Yes or no? I'm not going to give that yes or no. I mean, this is so I take this as mainly a question on gender rather than on the Muslim plan. But with respect to the question of gender, I actually think that this is a question which shouldn't be given a yes or no answer. I think the, so let me start off by pointing out that, you know, I'm a student of Sheikh Muhammad Akram Al-Nadawi. And, you know, he's a great scholar of hadith in particular. He's also a faqih in the Hanafi Madhhab. But, you know, his most noted work right now, I mean, he's in the process of completing, inshallah, may Allah grant him tawfiq, a commentary on Sahih Muslim.
And he wants it to be an authoritative commentary. So he has great ambition for the book. And he's taking something like Fatah al-Bari as his model, in a sense, but on Sahih al-Bukhari. But before this, he wrote over the course of his, I mean, I expect over the course of his 30s, actually, subhanAllah. When you see your teachers do these sorts of things, you realize, okay, we're not going to reach those august heights. But, hafidhahullah, he published, he's recently published in the last two, three years, a 40 volume book, a biographical dictionary, Al-Waqa bi Asma'in Nisa. It's a biographical dictionary that encompasses all of the female hadith transmitters that he could find in Islamic history, down to the present. So, I mean, shout out to my sister. She's actually in there because she's a student of his as well. He has several daughters that are all listed there because they have had the opportunity very often to travel with him and hear from other scholars. But, of course, he himself is the musnid or the person who, I would argue, probably the most important musnid in the UK. I know Sheikh Muhammad Ziyad al-Tukla is another person who's actually settled in the UK recently. And, you know, he's a younger scholar, but has even more asanid. Hafidhahullah. But Sheikh Akram is a great scholar of hadith and he has over 8,000 biographies in that biographical dictionary. So, we cannot say that, you know, women were excluded from the scholarly tradition. You know, that's a bridge too far as far as I'm concerned. And yet, I would say that, you know, there needs to be a recognition of the value that, you know, scholarship has for both men and women.
And women, there's no, I personally can't, don't really recognize any theological or juristic reason to prevent women from pursuing sacred knowledge. And why the obligation upon them won't be to attain to fataheen knowledge is exactly equivalent to men. But one of the points I do make in my piece is that, you know, Islam does presuppose certain social functions for men and women, which may allow, you know, men to engage in those spaces to a greater extent than women. I actually argue in my paper that because women are, not inevitably, but many women will become mothers. This is something, of course, encouraged by our own tradition with respect to, you know, امارة الأرض تزوج وتكثر فإني مكثر بكم الأمم The Prophet ﷺ says, marry and multiply because I will take pride in the fact that I will have the largest of the ummahs on Yawm al-Qiyamah. And so with that being a kind of, you know, something which is highly sought after in our deen, you know, that can take a lot of time and energy. But that also means that they can be mothers to believing men and women who will, they will instill with that knowledge. I also happen to think, and this is where I'm going to get a bit controversial perhaps, that, you know, having been in classes with Shaykh Akram, you know, Shaykh Akram would have men and women in his classes. And this is quite unusual for a sort of like an Islamic seminary context. But, you know, I think it's a great credit to Shaykh Akram that he did this. And having been in his classes and, you know, seen the value add that comes from having sisters in the class, while asking questions which are often, you know, different to the sorts of things that would come to my mind,
you recognize actually, you know, why should I say that those questions are less legitimate to inquire about? In fact, they didn't occur to me sometimes, and maybe sometimes they will be somewhat gender specific. But that also illustrates to me that some of my questions are actually often gender specific, because I'm concerned with the realities that I face in society. So there's that dimension. I think the problematic dimension that arises from, you know, the feminist sort of inspiration that, you know, might be a source of some of these questions is to say that male knowledge is illegitimate. And, you know, you can't say that and be a Muslim. Right, there we go. I mean, like the Prophet ﷺ, and also, I mean, on more specific issues, such as what to wear, the Prophet ﷺ told women what to wear. So, I mean, like, those sorts of things, we need to recognize that those are boundaries that we cannot cross. You know, no feminist theorist will ever displace the Prophet's place in my epistemology on pain of, you know, still being Muslim. So, but I do think, I genuinely think that, you know, we are impoverished in our engagement with the Qur'an and Sunnah, if we do not have exemplary female ulama. And very, you know, Imam As-Suyuti, and this is something which, you know, various, Sheikh Akram talks about in some of his writings, but various other scholars, like, if you go and look at the Biographical Dictionaries, a lot of these scholars did have female teachers. It was very common, particularly in early years. So, that's something that we need to revive in our own time. Well, that's a very, very nuanced, you know, answer to a very charged question. But yet, not evasive. I think you gave a clear and important corrective to the framing of the question,
which is that if we can recognize the value of female scholarship without falling prey to feminist epistemic assumptions, which, you know, and I plan on to go into this more in future episodes on this podcast, and also in future papers about what's called standpoint theory. So, this idea that within feminism that, you know, you're sort of almost deterministically shaped by your gender or your social position. It's going to box in, in a very deterministic way, what you can think, what you can feel, what you can say about a subject. And this is a tool that's used to delegitimize and erode authority in particularly male scholarship. The reasoning goes that's behind the question is that, well, you know, yeah, they're all men. So, what could they know about, you know, things for women? Quite a lot because we're all human beings. But that doesn't mean, so pushing back against that framing and that epistemic assumption doesn't mean that we don't have a strong tradition of female scholarship on our own terms and from within our own motivations and, you know, sort of worldview. So, that was what I was after. And you did a very good job putting that out there for us. So, we've, I think, reached the end of this conversation, or at least this segment of it. And I hope to have you back again soon, inshallah, to keep talking about these issues and others. Dr. Osama, thank you so much for being with us today and for shedding light on so many things. It's really been an honor and a pleasure. And I hope that we have many future opportunities to talk, bismillah. Ameen. SubhanakAllahumma wa bihamdika sharaan la ilaha illa anta astaghfiruqa wa atubu ilayk. As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. Wa alaykum as-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh.