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.

4 minutes ago | [YT] | 0

Roots OfKnowledge

What should guardrails on Islamic AI tools actually look like?

I remember the first time I heard about Fiqh, almost three decades ago, chatting with a friend over lunch. I never knew Islam had rulings, principles [Usool], and a methodology governing obedience to Allah, from the leader down to the street cleaner. Before that, I thought an Alim was simply someone who recited Quran and delivered sermons. That conversation is what sent me down the road of studying Fiqh.

Ten years later, Mufti Taqi Usmani visited our Ifta class, and one thing he said has stayed with me ever since. He quoted some of the earlier jurists, saying:

"إني ألجمت هذا الفقه وأسرجته لكم فأعينوني، فإن الناس قد جعلوني جسرا على النار، فإن المنتهى لغيري، واللعب على ظهري"

"I have bridled and saddled this fiqh for you, so help me, for people have made me a bridge over the Fire; the final outcome belongs to someone else, while the toil falls on my back."

That is the core of scholarship: accountability, what we know as taqwa of Allah. A real scholar thinks twice before answering a serious question, not only because of the research it demands, but because of how it should be:
1. worded,
2. to whom its addressed,
3. and sometimes whether it should even be answered publicly at all.

Ali (r.a.) said:

حدثوا الناس بما يعرفون، أتحبون أن يُكذَّب الله ورسوله؟

"Speak to people according to their understanding. Do you want Allah and His Messenger to be accused of lying?"

There is a great level of emphasis on how a scholar processes research of others and his own and then presents it to the public.

Before going further, it's worth being precise about what this argument is and isn't. Islam has no clergy and no ordained priesthood standing between a person and the Quran and Sunnah. Nothing here is arguing for one.

What Islam does have is the instruction to refer difficult matters to "ahl al-dhikr", those who have 'authority' or those who are competent in 'extracting' from the people of knowledge, the same way you'd consult a qualified physician rather than diagnose yourself from a symptom checker. That's not gatekeeping by rank; it's deference to demonstrated competence, and the two get confused far too easily in this debate.

Sayyidna Ali's (r.a.) question about quoting Allah and His Messenger peace be upon him isn't about who's allowed to read, it's about the fact that how a text is surfaced, to whom, and when, shapes what people take Islam to be.
When, on one occasion, he confronted the Khawarij for weaponising Quranic verses against fellow Muslims, he called it:

كلمة حق أريد بها الباطل
"a word of truth, intended for falsehood."

Access to the words was never the issue. What they did with them was.

This is why the traditional curriculum, Arabic, Usul al-Fiqh, Usul al-Hadith, deep study of Hadith and Tafseer, the fine detail of fiqh debate under a chain of trained teachers exists to build taqwa-based knowledge, not to produce people who can simply retrieve a quote.

Imam Ghazali wrote an entire book, Iljam al-Awamm an Ilm al-Kalam, loosely translated as "Restraining the Common People from the Science of Kalam", on exactly this: some material, in the wrong hands, does more harm than good, not because the material is false but because context is doing half the work of understanding it correctly.

So what actually changes with AI, given that websites like Shamela already put the raw texts in everyone's hands decades ago?

The difference isn't access to text; it's what happens after. Shamela retrieves. Ask it for every hadith on a topic, and it hands you a list, exactly what you asked for, nothing more. AI reads across the same corpus and then synthesises an answer, weighing conflicting positions, smoothing over disagreement, sometimes producing a conclusion that reads as settled when the underlying scholarship is anything but. That's not a faster search engine. That's a system performing something that resembles ijtihad, without a teacher, without accountability, and without the humility a real scholar has when a question is genuinely contested.

Replicating the mechanics of Ijtihad should never be confused with the genuine human representative of Allah's religion. This kind of tool, however well designed, was never going to deliver an Islamic utopia, no more than atomic power delivered a better world.

A layperson doing their own reading and drawing a tentative, sourced view is one thing, they know it's their own reading. A tool that hands you a confident, synthesised answer in the voice of an assistant is a different risk entirely, because it doesn't read like someone's opinion but rather like a result.

It reminds me of a statement Imam al-Amash said to Abu Hanifa, r.a. when faced with a question he struggled to answer, Imam Abu Hanifa answered it:

يا معشر الفقهاء، أنتم الأطباء ونحن الصيادلة
"O jurists! Indeed We are the chemists, and you are truly the Doctors!"

Could a well-designed tool instead reduce exactly this problem by citing sources transparently, flagging disputed material, and refusing to adjudicate what it isn't qualified to adjudicate? Genuinely, yes, and that's an argument for building it carefully, not against building it. Nothing here says AI is not harmful. It says an unhuman-reviewed one is a live risk in a way Shamela never was.

To read the rest click here: liaquatzaman.substack.com/p/what-should-guardrails…

2 days ago | [YT] | 7

Roots OfKnowledge

It's become very common these days for people to ask for a ruling on a particular business venture or contract deal. My answer is always the same: without knowing the exact terms and conditions, no scholar can give a ruling.

Contracts are probably one of the hardest areas of fiqh, given the nature and complexity of certain deals. My advice to students of fiqh who want an in-depth, Islamic understanding of contracts is this:

> Study as many texts as you can, from beginner to advanced level, covering every chapter on trade, leasing, and everything that comes with it.
> Get a full breakdown of how a typical coffee shop operates: customers buying onsite, online, on credit, in bulk, plus every financial deal happening behind the scenes between the establishment and its suppliers and partners.
> Study contemporary books dealing with modern forms of Islamic trade and transactions.

2 days ago | [YT] | 20

Roots OfKnowledge

as-suffa.org/education/iftaa-course/

1 week ago | [YT] | 16

Roots OfKnowledge

The Trend of 'Anonymous' Students of Knowledge

A new problem has emerged online: students who want to study with scholars while remaining anonymous. Sitting in on an open lesson and benefiting from it has always been fine without anyone checking who you are, that was never the issue. But being counted as someone's student, or receiving their ijaza, is a different relationship, and it has never rested on anonymity.

Even when scholars corresponded and gave ijaza by letter across long distances without ever meeting in person, the scholar still knew who they were dealing with. Distance was tolerated; not knowing who was on the other end of it was not. The ijaza system of reliability and competency was built on that, knowing exactly who you took knowledge from, and who you vouched for in return, because study and teaching are chains of accountability, not just chains of information. Take away the names, and you take away what made the chain trustworthy.

Recorded lessons are closer to books than to study. A reader has no right to claim they 'studied by' the author of a book, at best they can say they benefited from it. To actually be counted as someone's student, or to qualify under them, requires disclosing who you are.

This matters most where the stakes are highest: online figures who evolved from debating others into criticizing scholars and their work outright, without ever producing their qualifications when asked, or having anyone reputable vouch for them. Identity isn't bureaucracy here, it's what separates informed disagreement from anonymous slander.

There are legitimate reasons to stay anonymous online: safety, a hostile environment, a convert or a woman in a restrictive country. Staying anonymous to the world is not the same as staying anonymous to the person vouching for you. A student can use a pseudonym publicly and still be fully known to the teacher who is teaching them and answerable to them; what can't happen is the teacher themselves not knowing. What's described here is different from that kind of protective anonymity, it's anonymity used to claim authority, or to attack it, while staying unaccountable to anyone at all.

The internet made the world a few fingertips away. I remember, when it first started, being amazed that I could reach world news and games from anywhere, and that unless I told someone, no one would know who I was. Anonymity became available to everyone by default.

The cost of that took years to surface. Nameless accounts can now type, slander, backbite, ruin reputations, and destroy lives with no name attached to answer for it. Even when they're later proven wrong, the damage is buried under years of posts and comments, buried deep enough that the person behind the account may not even remember they owe Allah repentance and their victims an apology.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, said:

عن أبي هريرة: [أتدرون ما المفلِسُ؟ قالوا: المفلِسُ فينا من لا درهمَ له ولا متاعَ. فقال: إنَّ المفلسَ من أمَّتي، يأتي يومَ القيامةِ بصلاةٍ وصيامٍ وزكاةٍ، ويأتي قد شتم هذا، وقذف هذا، وأكل مالَ هذا، وسفك دمَ هذا، وضرب هذا. فيُعطَى هذا من حسناتِه وهذا من حسناتِه. فإن فَنِيَتْ حسناتُه قبل أن يقضيَ ما عليه، أخذ من خطاياهم فطُرِحت عليه ثمَّ طُرِح في النَّارِ] (رواه مسلم)

Narrated by Abu Hurairah: "Do you know who the bankrupt is?" They said, "The bankrupt among us is one who has neither money nor goods." He said, "The bankrupt of my nation is the one who comes on the Day of Resurrection with prayer, fasting, and zakah, but who also comes having cursed this one, slandered that one, consumed the wealth of this one, shed the blood of this one, and struck this one. So this one is given from his good deeds, and that one is given from his good deeds. If his good deeds run out before what he owes is settled, their sins are taken and cast upon him, and then he is cast into the Fire." (Muslim)

May Allah protect us.

1 week ago | [YT] | 27

Roots OfKnowledge

Marrying Mermaids in Fiqh?

Why are mermaids mentioned in books of Fiqh if there have never been any proven cases of them?

Books of Fiqh were never designed to be read off the shelf by people with no prior training in the school and its principles. Without that firm grounding, the text sits completely stripped of context. In fact, an untrained reader will almost certainly supply their own context, misconstruing delicate discussions on matters like marital affairs, trade, Zakat, foreign policy, and military warfare.

If someone without training tries to read straight through these classical manuals, they will likely come across discussions resulting in them walking away shocked, alienated, or ready to discard the efforts of the jurists entirely.

I lost count of the number of times I heard our teachers say that a particular discussion was meant only for the four walls of the classroom, not for the pulpit of the mosque. That isn't gatekeeping or trying to veil the teachings of Islam from the world. There is a real difference between the normative teachings of Islam that are meant to be practised and known and the underlying mechanics jurists used to arrive at Ijtihadi conclusions in the first place.

Think of these complex discussions like a detailed, woven tapestry. It is beautiful and coherent when viewed as a whole. But zoom in on a single thread, and you see something that looks alien, stripped of the beauty of everything tied around it. Classroom discussions deal with every individual stitch and weave, incomprehensible to the untrained eye when pulled out on its own.

What our teachers were really telling us is that statements cherry-picked from technical works of Fiqh and Aqeeda cannot be understood by the general public without prior exposure and training.

Classroom discussions were designed to flesh out every possible problem a married couple might face, for example. What if a husband turned out to be a woman? What if he pronounced a divorce in his sleep? What if a couple, after fifty years of marriage, children, and grandchildren, discovered they were long-lost siblings?

According to many scholars, the subject of discussion didn't even have to be something that had actually happened. It could be a purely hypothetical thinking exercise:
1. What if aquatic human creatures existed,
2. could a person on land marry one?
3. If a pig fossilized and turned into salt, would it now be pure to consume?
4. If the sun set, but then somehow reversed and rose back over the horizon before setting a second time, would a person have to repeat their Maghrib prayer?

That is the actual answer to the mermaid question, the Fuqaha weren't claiming mermaids exist any more than they believed the sun might set twice in one evening. These were mental stress-tests, built on the conviction that Allah's religion is complete, meaning there had to be an answer for everything that could conceivably happen until the Day of Judgment, whether that answer came directly from the Quran and Sunnah, or through indirect Ijtihad by reasoning through edge cases like these.

None of this means anyone was ever expected to go out and marry a mermaid. It was never meant to work that way. The mermaid isn't the point; she's just the hypothetical tool to get the legal mind running. What actually matters is the legal reasoning the jurist worked through to get there, the exact same way a law student today gets handed an absurd scenario that could never happen in real life, just to test if they can apply a legal principle properly.

If you can work out how fundamental doubt over what someone even is affects the conditions of a valid marriage, you've built a framework you can actually use on real, messier cases:
1. disputed lineage,
2. a person whose conversion is questioned,
3. or someone whose identity at birth isn't clear.
The scenario was never real. What you walk away with is.

That approach made sense in a world where those discussions stayed inside the classroom. It makes far less sense today.

In modern times, Islamophobes and critics actively scour these texts for material to condemn Islam, looking for anything that clashes with contemporary law, reads as discriminatory, or simply sounds excessive and heavy-handed out of context. And unlike students in a Darul Uloom generations ago, today's public has direct access to the exact material once confined to a scholar's private library. Classical textbooks, articles, and commentaries are now searchable by anyone, and plenty of people feel it's their duty to upload these snippets on social media, stripped of the framework that made them make sense in the first place.

This is exactly why scholar training can no longer stop at classical text analysis alone. Graduates must be trained not only in Aqeeda, Fiqh, Hadith, and Tafsir, but in how to navigate the public when these matters get raised, rather than brushing them aside and hoping people will simply stop asking.

The whole "four walls of the classroom" approach worked for centuries because those discussions actually stayed in the classroom. That reality is gone, and pretending it isn't won't bring it back. I hope that writing posts like this, explaining the internal mechanics ourselves before someone else presents them in bad faith, is what modern adaptation actually looks like.

Imam Abu Hanifa was once asked why he spent so much time discussing hypothetical cases that had never occurred. He replied: "We train ourselves for calamities before they strike."

1 week ago | [YT] | 45

Roots OfKnowledge

Emotional Burnout of Graduates of Islamic Institutes

Those whose job it is to listen to people's problems are forced to carry the emotions of others without ever having walked in their shoes. I remember reading about this issue in Fiona Murden’s book, Mirror Thinking. Doctors and nurses are at the highest risk for emotional empathy burnout due to the relentless nature of their daily work. Studies have shown that the primary way they cope is through a parallel process in the brain called 'cognitive empathy', which allows them to manage the impact on their own mental health and continue doing their jobs.

As Fiona Murden writes:

"A doctor needs to understand the causes and symptoms of a disease, but not catch it. They have to get close enough to the disease to understand it but ward against becoming infected with every virus that comes their way. In the same way, a doctor or nurse needs to understand the emotions and concerns of patients (i.e., showing cognitive empathy) so that they can fully diagnose and treat them, but neither ‘catch’ their emotions (i.e., showing too high a level of emotional empathy) nor ignore them, which would prevent understanding (immunisation). If a doctor or nurse caught every disease they would become too sick to work. The same is true if a medical professional catches every emotion through emotional empathy. It wears down and burns out the person on the receiving end. It’s critical to understand where one stops and another starts." (Mirror Thinking, p. 111)

Imams, scholars, Muftis, and anyone tasked with answering personal community queries are equally prone to this emotional burden. People naturally pour their hearts out, often becoming deeply emotional- when seeking Islamic guidance for their struggles. As a result, the scholar’s mind absorbs the problem as though they were experiencing it firsthand. Imagine carrying that weight five or six times a day: processing grief, chronic illness, bitter divorces, heartbreak, and domestic abuse. Every interaction builds a reservoir of heavy emotion. People might not see it on the surface, but scholars live with these cases mentally, attempting to process them while sitting with their own families, meeting friends, and fulfilling their wider community duties.

Doctors are explicitly trained for this. Cognitive empathy is built into medical education from day one; no junior doctor is thrown into a ward and left to figure out emotional survival on their own. By contrast, a Mufti issuing a fatwa on a divorce or a scholar sitting with a grieving family may have spent years mastering Fiqh, yet no one ever sat him down to teach him how to protect his own mind from absorbing years of pain and grief.

To navigate this, scholars must be:
1. taught cognitive mirroring, training the mind to remain close enough to understand a case without letting it become their own lived pain.
2. Alongside this, there must be access to regular debriefing and therapy from trained mental health professionals, rather than expecting sheer willpower or spirituality alone to carry the load indefinitely.
3. Communities, too, must wake up to a simple truth that the scholar carrying everyone else's grief needs someone helping to carry his.

This is not something an individual should have to navigate alone. Traditional seminaries spend years teaching Fiqh, Arabic, and Hadith; devoting even a fraction of that time to preparing graduates for the emotional realities of pastoral work is essential.

P.S - The only attacks and debates require another level of mental training ;)

1 week ago (edited) | [YT] | 40

Roots OfKnowledge

Self-development of a Madrasa graduate is fundamentally tied to a life of continuous study and research

One of my teachers, near the end of our graduation from ifta class, said: "Every year that passes without you developing yourselves and offering meaningful service to the wider community, whether as an Imam, teaching children, delivering 'Alimiyyah courses, giving regular lectures, writing articles or books, issuing fatawa, or anything else, is a year you drift further from your connection to your books, and your potential for growth quietly diminishes with it."

I am going to be a bit blunt here, but bear with me. A graduate spends years studying the Arabic language and Islamic sciences in order to develop their understanding of Islam and use it to serve the wider Muslim community, people who do not have access to that same depth of study. To put it simply: if books and research hold no interest for a graduate after their studies, circumstances permitting, they haven't done justice to their teachers' time and dedication. Too many graduates dedicate little to no time to developing themselves academically and spiritually, and limit themselves to serving the community only in what and when it suits them.

Sadly, I have seen this pattern repeat itself again and again. Graduates of Darul Ulooms and other Islamic institutes complete their studies, but finding few opportunities to continue developing in the khidmah of Deen, they slowly lose their value and potential impact in the community.

Of course, financial burdens have forced many graduates to make choices they would never have made under better circumstances, that is not the problem described here, it's a failure of the system to support them properly.

Imagine someone graduating from Oxford or Cambridge ending up stacking shelves in a local supermarket and tutoring children in their spare time. Now imagine scholars who were considered senior lecturers at prestigious centers of learning in their home countries being invited to the West to take up roles as Imams in small-town mosques, only to gradually lose their desire to teach and research because of a lack of support.

I thought about this a lot and came to the conclusion that one of the main issues lies in an assumption many carry outside of the classroom: that the Alimiyyah course injects students with every piece of Islamic knowledge they will ever need, with no further study required.

That is far from the truth. What the course actually gives a graduate by the end are the tools to keep studying and developing on their own: Arabic proficiency, a grounding in usul, and the ability to navigate primary classical works in 'Aqeedah, Tafseer, Hadith, Fiqh, and beyond. They will still need to turn to those books whenever a real question comes their way. But the more they engage with them, the more their own value, both socially and academically, will continue to grow.

What matters isn't ticking off a fixed number of hours in the day. A maktab teacher, an Imam, a chaplain, each will need a different rhythm of study depending on their role and circumstances. What matters is having structured time carved out at all, rather than letting study become something that only happens if there is time left over.

Ultimately, graduates owe it to each other to help identify one another's weaknesses, whether that means revamping the educational institutions and madrasas they come from, or creating real opportunities for the khidmah of Deen in their own communities. Of course without government support the public play an important role in facilitating male and female scholars in their localities and not treating them like the 4th emergency service. If you do not want your children to have that financial lifestyle, do not expect it from graduates who have their own families and responsibilities.

Without that mutual support, it is far too easy for a graduate to drift into a career that pulls them further and further away from what they spent so many years pursuing.

1 week ago | [YT] | 33

Roots OfKnowledge

Saeed al-Nursi writes:

"When metaphor falls from the hand of knowledge into the hand of ignorance, it turns into literal truth ('reality') and opens the door to superstitions."

Beautifully sums up the problem with the crisis of lack of breadth and depth in understanding linguistic expressions in the Quran and Sunnah.

If it were not for the scholars of Usool and Balagha, I believe the Quran would have become a toy in the hands of misguided ones. Probably ending up like the scripture of other faiths that once held authentic teachings from Allah.

Those who criticise hadith and find it hard to accept certain meanings. This, in my understanding, mostly boils down to distorted meanings, even if that distortion comes through the translations. It gets worse when untrained individuals passionately push only a single meaning of a certain matter, even though the early generation had differences amongst themselves. This shows up in at least two distinct ways.

The first is taking a description too literally. Imagine someone adamant that the Earth is flat, based on the Quran describing it as something "spread out." Some scholars historically read this description at face value, not because the language demanded it, but because nothing in their context contradicted it. The mistake wasn't a failure of Tadhwaq so much as a failure to revisit a literal reading once better understanding became available; what should concern us is when people cling to that literal reading even after the linguistic and scientific case against it is clear, insisting all other meanings must be discarded.

The second, more serious way, is stretching a qualified statement into an absolute one. Take the narration: "There is no Iman for the one who has no sense of trust." This is a familiar construction in hadith. It describes an incompleteness of faith, not its absence.

Untrained readers routinely miss that distinction and push it to a much harsher conclusion: that a dishonest person cannot be a believer at all, a move that edges toward excommunicating fellow Muslims from the faith itself, something the wording never actually supports.

This lack of Tadhawwuq, the ability to taste linguistic nuance, is what results in the religion being subjugated to one's limited understanding.

Of course, translations have exposed those untrained in Classical Arabic to meanings that create a warped image of the Quran and Sunnah that's hard to make sense of.

The only solution is for serious students of knowledge to take the responsibility of providing explanations and discussing the limitations of translations.

1 week ago | [YT] | 42

Roots OfKnowledge

من جدّ وجد!
هكذا سمعتُ من أحد أساتذتنا مرارا، حتى كتبته على غلاف كتابي، ولكن بقي في الكتاب ولم يصدّقه قلبي إلا بعد مرور عقد من عمري. فالعربية، كغيرها من لغات الإنسان، لا تُتقَن إلا بكثرة السماع والقراءة والمحادثة والكتابة. لم تسمع أذناي قطّ بمن أجاد العربية من غير أهلها، ولم يجهد نفسه في طلبها. كأنّ الله أراد أن يكون السبيل إليها هو الهدف؛ لتعظُم اللغة في حياته.

ولكن الأمر بلغ قمته من الصعوبة عند كثير من طلبة المدارس الدينية في العصر الراهن. فكم من طالب أو طالبة يلتحق بإحدى المدارس طلْق الوجه، مشمِّرا للعلم، كأن قلبه يطير شوقا إليه! ثم يُهال عليه من القواعد ما يُهال، فيحفظ هذا ويكتب ذلك، حتى تفتر همّته ويعجز بنانه. ثم يُنكّس رأسه، ويقلّب كفّيه ندما على ما أنفق من وقت وجهد، ويأخذ في التساؤل مع نفسه: هل أخطأت في الالتحاق بدراسة العربية؟ أم أنا ضعيف العقل لا أقوى على تسلّق هذا الجبل؟ فيترك الدراسة ولا يلتفت إليها بعد، ويبقى في نفسه طعم مرّ كلما تذكّر العربية.

ولا ينبغي أن يكون الأمر هكذا؛ فإن الناس متفاوتون في الفهم وإدراك المعلومات، وإن المنهج في الدراسة ليس منزَلا من السماء حتى لا يجوز تعديله أو استبداله بمنهج آخر، بل هو اختراع إنساني يخضع لعقل دون عقل. فإن أفاد قوما، فليس معنى ذلك أنه يفيد كافة الطلبة، وفوق كل منهج منهج.
ومن عواقب هذا الجمود في التمسك بمناهج بعينها أنه أدّى إلى أن كره كثير من الناس تعلّم اللغة العربية في المدارس، بل جرّهم ذلك إلى اتهام أنفسهم بالتخلف، لا في منهج اللغة فحسب، بل في الأصول والقرآن والحديث والفقه أيضا.

والمنهج القويم يشتمل على إتقان ناحيتين: الأولى المواد المتدرّجة، والثانية طريقة التدريس. وكلتا الناحيتين تفتقر إلى عناية شديدة من المدرسين المسؤولين، الذين كثيرا ما يتمسكون بقولهم: "إنا وجدنا كبارنا على هذا"، فتوارثوا الطريقة كابرا عن كابر دون مراجعة. والحق أن تغيّر الظروف وأحوال الناس يؤثر لا محالة في المناهج، فتحتاج دوما إلى إعادة النظر. لا سيما إذا قصر زمن الدراسة وتقاعد الهمم.

فإذا ظفر الطالب بهاتين الناحيتين، أي مدرسٍ متقنٍ يُلقّن الطلاب المادة درسا فدرسا، والتدرجِ المناسبِ لمستواهم، لم يبق عليهم إلا الجدّ من أنفسهم. أما إن كان غير ذلك، أتعب الطالبُ نفسه، ولم يحصل في نهاية المطاف إلا على معلومات غير متّسقة.

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