Roots OfKnowledge

Can You Train Yourself to See Nothing but Allah?

I still remember the first time I read the translation of the Quran and really paused at the verses about the ecosystem. The clouds moving, the rain falling, the earth springing back to life. I remember sitting there thinking: How do I forget this so easily? How do I spend entire days moving through a world that is constantly pointing back to Allah, and not notice it once? But only when I hear a reminder now and again start noticing it?

That question is basically the heart of 'ihsan. The Prophet ﷺ described this highest level of faith as worshipping Allah "as if you see Him." Not literally with your eyes, but seeing His working in absolutely everything. How rain falls, how a plant pushes through the soil, how two people happen to cross paths at exactly the right second.

Nothing moves without His explicit consent. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere. And that’s exactly the problem, because it’s just as easy to stop looking.

Fast forward to my recent reading on the history of Sufism. Generations of Sufi scholars took this so seriously that they tried to turn it into a method. If constant awareness of Allah is the goal, they asked, can it be trained? Their answer mostly involved disciplined 'dhikr' paired with deep reflection on death and the hereafter. The theory was simple: the more you fill your attention with Allah, the less room there is for anything else.

Some of them pushed that theory far enough, and you arrived at 'fana'. It's a state where the sense of "everything else" doesn't just fade, but supposedly dissolves entirely, leaving only the awareness of Allah.

It’s one of the most debated ideas in the Sufi tradition, and many non-Sufis have criticised it, and for good reason. It sits right on the edge, between a beautiful description of spiritual absorption and something that can sound dangerously close to claims about union with the Divine. Scholars have argued about where that line sits for centuries, and they still haven't agreed.

I've been going through some works and putting together notes for an upcoming course on the history of Sufism. I'm trying to look at where these ideas came from, who pushed back, and what is actually defensible vs what got rightly rejected. It's a much messier, much more interesting history than the popular version of opinions circulating.

22 hours ago | [YT] | 14

Roots OfKnowledge

Attendance Is Not The Right Measure For Students

Students in Alimiyya courses often feel they should be allowed to move on to the next year because of their attendance or dedication. This should never be the measure for progressing forward. Attendance measures presence, not competency, and the two get mixed up way more often than they should.

The whole point of how these courses are designed is to get students to a level of mastery in Arabic text comprehension so that eventually they can pick up a book and read it on their own, building on all that valuable contact time they've had with a teacher in class. Arabic vocabulary is something you can pick up almost anywhere, honestly, even scrolling on your phone while sitting in traffic if you're disciplined about it. But the higher sciences aren't like that. They need rigorous attention and real contact time with teachers, there's no shortcut that replicates what actually happens in that room.

This is exactly why attendance is such a poor way of judging whether someone's ready to move up. If a student skips class, scrapes through their exams, and catches up afterward through borrowed notes, the teacher genuinely has no idea about that student's competency, reliability, or responsibility. Sure, the exam got passed, but the whole process that was supposed to build their ability to reason through a text on their own never actually happened.

I've seen students plead to be allowed to move to the next year, promising over and over that they'll improve once they get there. Maybe it's because they want to stay with their class friends, or the embarrassment of not being able to go ahead, or wanting to quickly complete the course, or some other reason. The problem is these courses, especially in the early years, are built like layers of firm foundations, each one holding up everything stacked on top of it. Skip a layer, and the gap doesn't just disappear, it goes quiet for a while and then shows up later. Take a student who never really nailed their Arabic morphology [Sarf], they won't necessarily struggle with morphology itself in the higher years, they'll struggle to parse a sentence properly, misread the structure of an argument, and end up with the wrong understanding of a ruling, without ever realising the actual problem goes back two or three years.

My advice to students who've failed a year is pretty simple: repeat it, or at the very least take real time to strengthen whatever you're weak in. Otherwise you'll suffer in the higher years, and honestly you'll probably end up dropping out anyway, just later, after a lot more time and effort has gone in.

What you should always be aiming for is to become a protector of the Deen of Allah, through research, preservation, and teaching. That only really happens once you've gone back and covered every weak link in your education and built a firm grounding in the higher sciences.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 32

Roots OfKnowledge

The 'World of Fiqh' is What Students Fail to See

If you asked me to describe studying a subject in madrassa, I'd compare it to someone saying to a student: "Your task this year is to figure out what I'm going to teach you, except I won't tell you what it's about. Instead, I'll give you pieces, and you have to put it all together, and by the end try to map out the whole picture."

That's an oversimplified analogy, but for many students, it's exactly what happens when they study a subject like fiqh.

Most students, myself included, walk into a fiqh class with little to no grounding in trade, foreign policy, zakat, oaths, and the dozens of other domains the texts assume. The teacher might offer a little insight, but that's usually it. The rest is left to the student, working through each lesson and each piece of text as it's presented, trying to make sense of it in isolation. It's a bit like standing in a pitch-dark room and lighting a single candle that illuminates only the small patch of floor around you. Then you light another, and another, and so on. By the end, if you've learnt enough, you have scattered pockets of illumination — but you still can't see how it all fits together in the room as a whole. That room is what I'd call the world of fiqh: the total social, legal, and economic backdrop the texts were written to sit inside and which the texts themselves rarely bother to describe.

I've always believed there's a better way to do most things and that teachers must stay open to finding it. The candle-by-candle method is adequate in the eyes of those who teach it, mostly because it's the way the subject has in many cases been taught, not because anyone has tested whether it's actually the best way. What it overlooks is that these books were written in a Muslim state, where people would have naturally grown up immersed in its laws and social structures. Studying fiqh, for them, was an enhancement of a lived experience, filling in details on a picture that was already mostly drawn. It's not unlike someone who has lived in a country for years finally sitting down to study the fine print of its legal code: the room, for them, is already largely lit. Only a few small pockets need illuminating. I'm not saying that students in the past didn't face challenges but the list of problems has been compounding over the years.

For today's students, that's rarely true. And the problem compounds further: students are often learning Arabic alongside trying to decode complex legal texts. By the time their Arabic reaches a level where the text is legible, they've only just begun to grasp what's actually being said. This leads many students to find fiqh too hard, boring, or just lacking unity.

A solution to this is for the teacher to do the following:

1. Present the missing concepts before opening the book
Before discussing any chapter, expose students to the underlying ideas it assumes: ownership, contracts, disputes, raising a matter to court, out-of-court settlement and the role of agreement in a transaction. Without this scaffolding, the text is a conclusion without premises.

2. Summarise the whole chapter in plain language first, with visual aids and modern examples.
Take the chapter on trade: rather than starting inside the text's own terms, walk students through a modern transaction, a sale with a delayed payment, a dispute over a defective product, a contract with an ambiguous clause, and show how the same underlying principles apply. Once students can see the shape of the chapter in familiar terms, the classical text becomes something they're confirming, not decoding.

3. Teach the language of the text as legal language, not just Arabic.
Rather than treating vocabulary as a general-Arabic problem, focus specifically on the legal terms and set phrases the text relies on, the recurring words that signal a ruling, a condition, an exception, or a difference of opinion. This lets students start reading the legal architecture of a passage even while their broader Arabic is still developing.

Once students grasp what the world of fiqh is actually talking about, at every layer, from the role of the leader and the judge to court disputes, oaths, marriage, trade and financial dealings, and acts of worship, fiqh stops being a set of disjointed pages to memorise. It becomes alive: a room they can finally see whole, not just in scattered pockets of light.

This is where students who join ifta courses struggle to develop a deep understanding of the scope and range of how fatwa is given and instead become, at best, skilled at locating the answers to questions that are traceable in books. As for matters that are part of the World of fiqh but not necessarily in the books verbatim, they find it very hard to make sense of how to approach it.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 29

Roots OfKnowledge

Unfortunately no livestream today 🥲

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 16

Roots OfKnowledge

The Arabic Expressions in the Quran for the Beloved, (peace be upon him)


The love of Allah's Messenger, peace be upon him, seen in the Quran can only be truly felt by the one who grasps the Arabic expressions

عفى الله عنك لم أذنت لهم...
"Allah has pardoned you [O Muhammad]; why did you give them permission..."

---

When a lover talks to their beloved in poetry, the lover's submission to their beloved is certainly felt, but Allah's majesty remains pristine and magnificent

قل إن كنتم تحبون الله...
"Say, [O Messenger], 'If you should love Allah, then follow me, [so] Allah will love you...'"

---

When the beloved is reminded about the past and how their feelings didn't go unnoticed

ووجدك ضالا فهدى...
"And He found you lost and guided [you]."

---

Even the unspoken words of the beloved are understood

قد نرى تقلب وجهك في السماء...
"We have certainly seen the turning of your face toward the heaven..."

---

That regular reminder that the beloved really needs...

إنك لعلى خلق عظيم...
"And indeed, you are of a great moral character."

---

When uttering the name of the beloved publicly and their true status...

محمد رسول الله....
"Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah..."

---

When someone tries to undermine the beloved...

ولله العزة ولرسوله...
"And to Allah belongs [all] honor, and to His Messenger..."

---

When not having living male offspring hurt the beloved, it was recompensed with the greatest title

ما كان محمد أبا احد من رجالكم ولكن رسول الله وخاتم النبيين
"Muhammad is not the father of [any] one of your men, but [he is] the Messenger of Allah and the seal [last] of the prophets."

---

When the beloved's birthplace was protected by His Creator Himself

ألم تر كيف فعل ربك باصحاب الفيل...
"Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with the companions of the elephant?"

---

The beloved's entire tribe is honoured due to him...

لإيلاف قريش...
"For the accustomed security of the Quraysh..."

---

Telling off others for not showing respect to the beloved...

لا ترفعوا أصواتكم فوق صوت النبي...
"O you who have believed, do not raise your voices above the voice of the Prophet..."

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 23

Roots OfKnowledge

Mukhtasar al-Qudoori videos [free access]
Here is a serious alhamdulillah. I have been recording and uploading for over 10 years

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...

Enjoy and share

A little test for those interested in the chapter of Wudu :

shorturl.at/uJn2B

Let me know how you did in the comments

3 weeks ago (edited) | [YT] | 5

Roots OfKnowledge

POV: You work a 9-to-5, but you’re also on the path to becoming a student of knowledge. 💼➡️📚

At 7:30 PM, the noise of the workday shuts off. For two hours, it’s just you, qualified scholars, and the words of the Prophet (ﷺ).

Balancing work or university takes discipline - but the peace you feel walking out at 9:30 PM? Unmatched.

Bring this barakah into your weekly routine this September!

🗓️ Enrolment Day: Wednesday 2nd September 2026 @ 7:30 PM
📍 As-Suffa Institute, Aston, Birmingham
👥 Open to Brothers & Sisters

🔗 Claim your spot: as-suffa.org/education/heirs-of-the-scholars (as-suffa.org/education/heirs-of-the-scholars/)

3 weeks ago | [YT] | 19

Roots OfKnowledge

According to the Hanafi school, voluntary Nafl prayers are not permitted from after the Asr prayer until Maghrib. Therefore, if a solar eclipse begins before Asr and extends past it, the eclipse prayer, Salah al Kusuf, can be prayed either in congregation or individually and then completed for the obligatory Asr prayer. Once Asr has been prayed, no further Nafl prayer may be offered. Instead, the remaining duration of the eclipse should be spent in dua, dhikr, and seeking forgiveness until the eclipse clears or Maghrib enters.

وإن غربت كاسفة أمسك عن الدعاء واشتغل بصلاة المغرب وإن اجتمع الكسوف والجنازة بدأ بالجنازة وإن كسفت في الأوقات المنهى عن الصلاة فيها لم يصل، كذا في الجوهرة النيرة.

1 month ago (edited) | [YT] | 15

Roots OfKnowledge

How Does a Scholar Balance Time To Answer the People's Questions?

One of the most challenging aspects facing the Ulema today is finding the time to answer people's questions daily. I used to find it genuinely stressful. A large part of my day went into reading messages and emails, listening to voicenotes, and replying, usually across several back-and-forths, easily two hours a day, on top of my regular work and commitments.

If I said I receive over a dozen enquiries a day, from people I know personally and people I've never met, I wouldn't be exaggerating. Some scholars have inboxes and WhatsApps that stay inundated without even inviting people to ask. Not to mention the pastoral side where many people just want to talk to a scholar, not to find an answer but to get issues they're experiencing off their chest. This is fine only if the scholar is trained in being able to handle the emotional baggage they have to carry as a result. This is something I've written about in a post on burnout of scholars.

Then my dear friend Ahsan Al-Haadee gifted me a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport, and I can't stress enough how useful it was. There's a case in there about a university lecturer who only replied to emails with a very specific subject and wording, anything outside that he simply didn't entertain and who kept a single fixed slot each week for answering emails, never before it and never after. As a result he was able to work at a much deeper level and produced a dozen papers a year.

That kind of model can frustrate people who expect scholars to answer immediately. I've had people go on a rant when I replied after several days. I understand where they're coming from, especially if it's a serious medical issue or family dispute needing a swift response. But not every question can be answered quickly even when it's demanded, since giving a proper fatwa often requires real deliberation and investigation. It's reported that Sayyidina Umar (r.a.) would sometimes spend weeks pondering a question before answering it.

Scholars should definitely give time to the public for genuine issues but not to the point of burnout or at the cost of everything else in their lives. That's especially true when a question demands hours of research, consultation with senior scholars, or reading through pages of a contract to check a clause.

A few models are already in use, and a few more are worth considering alongside them.

Some scholars run free live Q&A sessions, where people can attend and ask directly, with the scholar answering what they can in the time available. Others run a paid subscription service, where the public pays monthly and gets their questions answered within a set turnaround by qualified scholars.

Where people aren't comfortable paying, the better model is a mosque-run waqf fund that supports scholars financially so they can set aside fixed hours purely for answering the public without it competing against their income. There's real precedent here too, the Khulafa were paid for their duties and paid those who taught the Ummah. I'll leave the wider debate on charging for religious teaching for another time.

In the long run, though, none of this replaces the real solution and that's having more male and female scholars trained up to meet the scale of what the Ummah is actually asking for.

What other options have you seen work?

1 month ago | [YT] | 24

Roots OfKnowledge

Studying Fiqh Ground Up & Knowing That Everything Is Not From Imam Abu Hanifa

liaquatzaman.substack.com/p/studying-fiqh-ground-u…

For those who aren't familiar with fiqh books, they are simply a collection of investigations and discussions that some of the most knowledgeable jurists have carried on for centuries and will keep carrying on. Study any work of fiqh, in my case the Hanafi school, and you notice quickly that the discussions aren't stagnant. The wording of the Quran and the transmitted hadith themselves is fixed; that never changes, but how jurists understood and applied that wording was a live, ongoing conversation. Fiqh is the concentrated effort of the experts working on that conversation, and it develops over time, as and when required, as new scenarios and cases are introduced.

The easiest way I've found to picture this is a tree. The trunk doesn't move once it's grown, that's the early reasoning laid down by the founders of the school. But the branches keep splitting, and the further out you go, the more room there is for movement, disagreement, and new growth in directions the trunk never anticipated. But everything grows from that same trunk not grafted from the outside. And the trunk comes from the roots.

A student who starts by mapping the trunk first, then works outward, watches the whole tree take shape and can see exactly where each branch left the one before it. A student who starts from a later work is looking at the tree with sections already cropped out of frame, because that particular author, writing centuries after the founders, only preserved what still applied by his time. To that student, everything reads as if it grew straight from the trunk. In simple terms, everything is "from Abu Hanifa." The early reasoning that actually forms the foundation, and the later debate that grew out of it, mix into one another, and a great deal is lost in that mix.

None of this is a case against starting with the condensed, later texts, Nur al-Idah and books like it exist for good reason, and most students, at most stages, are better served learning a settled, practical ruling than wading into centuries of khilaf before they can pray correctly. And the settled position in these texts usually isn't arbitrary either; later jurists did real work reconciling and preferring between the earlier disagreements, and in most cases their preference reflects sound tarjih [academic preponderance], not a random branch that happened to survive. The distinction that matters is narrower than "later is worse." It's the difference between learning practical fiqh, which the condensed texts serve well, and being able to actually engage the school's reasoning, defend it, or work through a genuinely new question, which requires seeing why a position was preferred and not only that it was. Knowing the outcome and knowing the reasoning behind the outcome are different kinds of knowledge, and only one of them transfers when the circumstances change.

Take the ruling on travellers in the Hanafi school as a case study of exactly this, not because every chapter of fiqh branches this widely, travel happens to be an unusually rich topic, but because a rich example is the clearest place to see the method at work, and the method itself does generalise even where the number of branches doesn't.

A student who only studies Nur al-Idah or al-Fiqh al-Muyassar will see all the rulings of the traveller as fixed and expect anyone who discusses the chapter to have the exact same answer. But for someone with a ground-up approach in Hanafi fiqh, ideally under a teacher who can keep the tracing anchored rather than left to unsupervised reading, they see the varying layers of discussion like a timeline. This helps them to understand how to answer unprecedented cases that weren't discussed by anyone before them.

For example: the Quran states clearly that a person on a journey may shorten their prayer from four units to two. The practice of the Prophet ﷺ confirms it, he would shorten his prayers on a sufficiently long journey. But neither source says outright whether shortening is obligatory or optional. The Sunnah and the practice of the Companions add that a temporary stop along the way doesn't end the dispensation; someone stopping overnight is still travelling. Yet other reports show prayer being restored to four units on certain occasions of temporary residency. So even the earliest layer of source material leaves real gaps. This still requires due diligence and careful study of the sources to arrive at sound reasoning and an answer; otherwise, obedience to Allah is replaced with ignorance and following one's own preference.

This is exactly where fiqh does its work: not inventing rulings from nothing, but building the consistency and underlying logic that lets a jurist answer questions the text never addressed directly.

The obvious question that follows: how do we know when someone stops being "on a journey"? Only while in motion? Or still while spending a night or two at a hotel along the way? Working from the positions and narrations of the Companions, the Hanafis settled on a marker: staying in one place for fifteen days or more ends the dispensation, and the person returns to praying Zuhr, Asr, and Isha in full. This temporary base was given the name watan al-iqama. New terms begin to emerge to make the discussions easier to follow.

That threshold sounds simple until you start applying it to real situations, and the jurists knew it. Consider:

1. What if the person spends one night elsewhere during those fifteen days, do they still count as a temporary resident?

2. If they stay at several locations within the same town or city, does that count as one place, or does it need to be the same premises?

3. What if they travel in and out of the city repeatedly but return each time, eventually accumulating fifteen nights there?

4. What if they never intended fifteen days at the outset, just a few days, then a few more, then a few more, until the total passed fifteen?

5. What if they never intended to stay at all, but a flood traps them until the water recedes?

6. Can a person hold more than one temporary residence at once?

7. Can a person hold more than one permanent residence?

8. Does a travelling woman who begins praying while menstruating still have the dispensation once she resumes prayer?

9. When does the ruling of shortening prayers actually start?

None of these get answered by guesswork. The jurists worked from a framework built by the earliest scholars, proposed answers within it, and debated them there.

One load-bearing concept in that framework is intention. Intention is what separates a traveller from someone simply wandering, and it's what separates someone settling at a location for a set number of days from someone merely stranded there or planning to leave the next morning. It's also part of what defines a "location" in the first place, as opposed to treating the whole earth as one undifferentiated place. It isn't the only tool the jurists reach for, question five, the flood, turns on necessity (darura) rather than intention, since someone trapped by rising water hasn't failed to form an intention, they've been prevented from forming one at all, a different category with its own logic. Question eight likely involves how two separate dispensations interact rather than intention as such. Intention is the dominant thread running through several of these branches, not a single master key that unlocks all of them.

Question four shows the intention framework at work most clearly. The Hanafi approach doesn't count days accumulated by drift. It asks whether the person formed a single, decisive intention (jazm) at one point to stay fifteen days. Someone who kept extending "a few more days" one stretch at a time never formed that intention, so under the classical reasoning they would keep shortening their prayers throughout, regardless of how long they actually ended up staying. Someone who, on day one, decided firmly to stay a month would lose the dispensation from that moment. This is worked through here as a well-established classical position, not a live dispute, which is worth flagging since not every branch below is settled this cleanly.

Two people who spend an identical number of days in the same city can end up with opposite rulings, because the ruling was never really about the days. It was about the moment intention crystallised, or didn't.

That's the branch this particular question grew on, and you can trace it straight back to the trunk: the same concept of intention that separates a traveller from a wanderer is doing the work here too, just applied to a harder case. Several of the other questions branch off that same root in their own directions; others, like the flood, draw on a neighbouring root entirely. Seeing which is which is exactly why a student who only reads the later, settled positions without tracing any of them back ends up with a list of disconnected rules to memorise, instead of a small set of principles that generates most of the list.

Finally, an interesting discussion raised by some of the later jurists is the issue of having multiple properties scattered across different cities and locations. Does this count as being a resident at multiple points of residence, or does one have to have family there? Unlike question four, this was never resolved cleanly by the early jurists; it became a genuine, live point of contention between later ones, which is why it's left open here rather than answered. How do they define watan asli, and how is it nullified? The aim isn't to hand down a ruling on these questions but to appreciate that navigating differences of opinion like this one, and the rigorous discussion around them, is a large part of what studying fiqh actually involves.

1 month ago | [YT] | 13