Roots Of Knowledge ROK 😊

You can let hadith chains go in one ear and out the other, or you can spend a lifetime appreciating the code hidden inside them. I remember the first time I studied hadith with their full chains. I found the names of the narrators fascinating. We’d only touch on certain chains briefly and I could never fully imagine them as real people: some were well-known judges in their villages, some held the post of governor, and some were known for their occupations, such the butter merchants (the butter-walas of their day). Even now, I keep discovering more about these chains and the little anecdotes and stories attached to particular transmissions. In simple terms, a chain is like a sophisticated barcode. It lets anyone who wants to know whether a hadith's transmission can be relied upon check it for themselves. One of my favourite examples involves Imam Malik, the great jurist and hadith scholar of Madinah. Even though he had already written his book, the Muwatta, the collectors of hadith would still seek out his students, and even his students' students, and carefully choose one chain over another to record in their own books. Below is a table by Sh. Muhammad Said Hasan Bukhari comparing the various chains Imam Bukhari recorded in his Sahih that go back to Malik. What's striking about the table is that Imam Bukhari doesn't rely on just a few of Malik's narrators. He takes from over a dozen people, some of them direct students of Malik and others students of his students. The table also shows which narrations appear in the main body of the Sahih and which appear in the secondary ta'liqat. On top of that, it identifies every place where Imam Bukhari received a hadith by studying the book with his own teacher, as opposed to receiving that particular hadith through oral transmission. All of this shows the lengths Imam Bukhari went to in reporting hadith. He didn't simply settle for having a copy of the Muwatta at home. Some people say that the early hadith collectors didn't write books, however, that is not factual. There were books and manuscripts found, and furthermore, the collectors went to great lengths to authenticate as much as they could through oral transmission to preserve the legacy of hadith.

Unfortunately there will not be a livestream today I will try to reschedule for tomorrow inshallah

On demand course Usool Fiqh : https://www.urooq.com/courses/7

Surah Yaseen Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSCByKt3vw-YeAHcRq0d4mm6KiyUVuayF

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.

Using Hadith as a Springboard Teachers who deliver Hadith classes are sometimes tempted to share their own interpretations or 'Ijtihad' with their students. This can be a slippery slope, especially if the view hasn't been thoroughly researched and fleshed out. Students will rarely contest their teacher's views. I sometimes see this happen on the mimber too, a speaker quoting a hadith to back up their own extrapolated view. It's a quick-fire way of evidencing that might work for the general public, but it doesn't hold up with those who have experience in the field. Even if someone doesn't strictly follow a school of fiqh, their research still needs to be honest. A view should really only be shared after thorough investigation or by attributing it to someone more learned. Otherwise it's half-baked and makes the tradition seem like a playground for anyone to experiment. My advice to anyone teaching Mishkat or even a book like Zaad at-Talibeen is to focus on giving a sound, established understanding of the text, rather than using the hadith as a springboard to promote personal views.

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.

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 in the World of fiqh that are not in the books verbatim, they find it hard to know how to approach them.

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, who works through each lesson and 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.

I don't think anyone doubts that becoming a better Muslim, inwardly and outwardly, is the journey of life. No one will ever achieve it without flaws, but the slip-ups, admitting them, then getting back up and continuing, are true perfection. One of the greatest blessings in your day is people who remind you to do better for Allah's sake. They don't have to move their lips, just their character can be enough.

Unfortunately no livestream today

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..."

Some possible meanings I put together from a grammatical and balagha point of view for the verse Any other possible ones?

A little test for those interested in the chapter of Wudu : https://shorturl.at/uJn2B Let me know how you did in the comments

Mukhtasar al-Qudoori videos [free access] Here is a serious alhamdulillah. I have been recording and uploading for over 10 years https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSCByKt3vw-ZQCAe5AVs21BEwogOj1Zhv&si=6OrJfrORVn4Zu218 Enjoy and share

After 3 years, I finally finished Notes on Intro to the book Hanafi fiqh for those studying Hidayah. The chapter headings still need reorganising but alhamdulillah, ready to be taught to the new batch of Hidayah students inshAllah, May Allah accept my little efforts

For those wanting to practice Arabic https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuu7raYSGGLW_jpInua-3IT_M4HeIG5Z0&si=aVvoYInhSjx0CnrZ

Imam al Suyuti addresses this by categorizing interpretation into valid and invalid. Invalid interpretation contradicts established Islamic principles and relies on nothing more than personal whim. Valid interpretation, even when offering a fresh angle, remains firmly grounded in the Quran itself, the statements of the Prophet ﷺ, the understanding of the Companions who witnessed the revelation directly, and the rules of the Arabic language. Readings that meet these criteria are not considered tafseer bi al ra'y (interpretation by mere personal opinion), even if they are new. This is precisely why books of tafseer have accumulated varied explanations over centuries rather than repeating one single fixed reading, with each scholar remaining consistent with their own interpretive framework. What, then, does "the fire" actually represent? If the person lighting the fire is a hypocrite, how did that manifest in the daily life of Madinah? Some scholars held that hypocrites never truly had faith in their hearts to begin with, because once true Iman takes root, it does not leave. Therefore, the "fire" must represent something short of genuine belief—a surface level mimicry of it. Proposed explanations include: * Their public declaration of Islam. * The physical protection and social benefits that came with claiming to be Muslim. * The discord (fitnah) they were actively trying to stir. * A temporary flicker of real faith that was gained and almost immediately lost. * Absolute bewilderment from having never held true light in the first place. This answers the third question: the fire represents one of these states depending on the commentator. As for the fourth question, "their light" refers to whatever measure of guidance or temporary security they briefly enjoyed under each reading. Even through their outward performance of Islam, they gained a temporary sense of light in this life, much like a thief benefiting from the light of someone else's home. The fifth question is particularly fascinating: why does the text use "darknesses" in the plural? Truth is represented as light (nur) in the singular, because it has one ultimate source: Allah's guidance brought through the Prophet ﷺ. Darkness, on the other hand, appears in the plural (zulumat) because it encompasses everything in the absence of that light. Ibn Ashur notes that these darknesses represent the actual layers of disbelief, lying, and mockery the hypocrites were immersed in when dealing with the believers. When read together, the parable captures the exact accusation leveled against the hypocrites at the start of Surah al Baqarah: trading guidance for misguidance. Whether the fire represents a verbal declaration, an outward mimicry, or a brief taste of real faith, the result is identical: light was right there in front of them, and it was lost. That is the real power of the image: not that they were completely cut off from guidance but that they had access to it in some form and let it go.