Massoud Vahedi

This report is not simply weak. It's weakness is compounded. It's isnad revolves around a weak transmitter → truthful transmitter who errs → anonymous transmitter → ʿAlī. You also realize how useless the isnad is once you observe the other nonsense reported through it. قال نعيم: حدثنا الوليد، ورشدين، عن ابن لهيعة، عن أبي قبيل، عن أبي رومان، عن علي، قال: «يظهر السفياني على الشام، ثم يكون بينهم وقعة بقرقيسيا، حتى يشبع طير السماء وسباع الأرض من جيفهم، ثم يفتق عليهم فتق من خلفهم، فيقبل طائفة منهم حتى يدخلوا أرض خراسان، وتقبل خيل السفياني في طلب أهل خراسان، فيقتلون شيعة آل محمد بالكوفة، ثم يخرج أهل خراسان في طلب المهدي» This report about al-Sufyani and "the Shia of Āl Muḥammad", which is attributed to ʿAlī through the same isnād, matches Shi'ite lore that coincided with the Abbasid revolt. The descriptions that allegedly matche ISIS are also applicable to the early Abbasid insurrectionists. It is about time this baseless report is decommissioned: Proto-Abbasid lore is being misconstrued as a deep prophecy.

The ta'assub (fanatical affiliation) of today is for the most part not towards madhhabs. Instead, it is largely towards nation-states, celebrity personalities, organizations, and institutes.

The Problem With Secondhand Information You either know something yourself, or you know what someone told you about it. The moment you're putting your trust in the second kind, you inherit the responsibility of verifying whether what you've been told is accurate and whether it's the whole truth. When it's about a person, this problem becomes especially delicate, as it claims that so-and-so said or did this. The problem is that hearing about someone secondhand can quietly construct a distorted image of them in your mind, either inflating them into something more than they really are or, the opposite, tarnishing their character and reputation. The latter is what we call backbiting and slander. I remember the first time I heard about a particular scholar, back when I was studying. The image formed in my mind was based on what others said and became exaggerated to the point of making him seem almost superhuman in certain ways. That image bubble burst the moment I actually met him a few times and realised he was human, like everyone else, and that most of what I heard was not accurate. The same distortion happens with ideas and texts, and it's arguably more consequential, because it can shape what people believe about an entire school of thought or what a scholar actually says. I remember hearing statements like Abu Hanifa only knew 17 Hadith, that Imam Malik prayed with his hands to the side due to impaired arms, that Imam Ahmed didn't have a Fiqh School because he was weak in Fiqh, or that all four schools of Fiqh unanimously agree that cutting the beard short is sinful. It took me a while to try to uneducate myself from those claims after speaking to scholars from various backgrounds and reading the original material. Those who haven't studied Arabic, or read the original books themselves, are permanently limited to whatever secondhand sources they can access. I've heard graduates quote Fath al-Bari without having read it. I've heard people critique Ibn Taymiyyah without having read his works in the original Arabic. I've heard people characterise the Hanafi school without having opened a single one of its original sources. This puts them at a real disadvantage, and worse, if they don't recognise the limitation, they have no way of knowing how far their understanding has drifted from the reality of the matter. Secondhand sources, by their nature, are prone to four recurring failures: 1. Misunderstanding: the summariser simply got it wrong. 2. Decontextualisation: a point is lifted out of the argument or circumstance that gave it its true meaning. 3. Extreme exaggeration: a modest position hardens into a caricature by the time it's repeated. 4. Bias of the source: the person relaying the information has their agenda, consciously or not, shaping what they chose to include. Errors are always possible even when reading a text directly in its original language, but secondhand transmission compounds the problem. Every additional link in the chain is another opportunity for human error to creep in, and those errors accumulate rather than cancel out. This brings me to the challenge of our day, social media. It can be said that it has created near-perfect conditions for distorted information on steroids. A claim about a person or a text can now travel through hundreds of retellings within hours, each one slightly reshaped, before anyone involved has had the chance to check the original source. Speed, distance from the source, and the absence of any real accountability all work together to make secondhand distortion worse than it has ever been.

Imam Abu Hayyan, the great Arabic grammarian and mufassir who authored the famous tafsir work al-Bahr al-Muhit, changed his madhhab twice. He first started off as a Maliki (which was the dominant madhhab of his native al-Andalus), then changed to a Zahiri, before finally settling with the Shafi'i madhhab. Interestingly, despite this change, he continued to have a soft spot for the Zahiri school, particularly its founder, Imam Dawud.

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"Imam Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti pretty much left no disclipline without writing something on it. I have a book in my possession, which is almost a blbliography, which mentions the works of al-Suyuti. The number of works which al-Suyuti authored according to this book are 700. This is with the exception of one field: mathematics! Imam al-Suyuti faced problems with the area of calculations and matemathics, saying that he found them to be most difficult." - Dr. Ahmad Saad al-Azhari (with slight rewording)

حرمة نظر العورات في المرآة ونحوها لشهوة: قال ابن حجر في تحفة المحتاج ٧ / ١٩٢:" يحرم نظر فحل بالغ إلى عورة حرة) خرج مثالها فلا يحرم نظره في نحو مرآة كما أفتى به غير واحد ويؤيده قولهم لو علق الطلاق برؤيتها لم يحنث برؤية خيالها في نحو مرآة؛ لأنه لم يرها [[ومحل ذلك كما هو ظاهر حيث لم يخش فتنة ولا شهوة]] وليس منها الصوت فلا يحرم سماعه إلا إن خشي منه فتنة وكذا إن التذ به كما بحثه الزركشي ومثلها في ذلك الأمرد".

"A skilled mufti would have to determine, in his or her view, the correct stance towards making analogies based on rukhsahs...determining what new, unprecedented parallel cases are proper for analogies with established Shareeah rukhsahs is a most difficult step. In sum, the default ruling (azeemah) is the ruling that is to be applied under all normal circumstances. Rukhsahs are exceptions to the general rule. As such, rukhsahs are in need of clear evidence to override the default or norm. Making analogies based on those Shareeah rukhsahs seems to be acceptable but one has to apply much caution when doing so, since one is already starting with a situation that is an exception to the norm." - Jamaal Zarabozo

And a later Shaykh - Dr. Hafidh al-Battah - added a fifth matter: "And I add a fifth: the manners of Muhammad ﷺ, who was the teacher of goodness to mankind."

The great Syrian historian and scholar Shaykh Muhammad Raghib al-Tabbakh said: "The acquirement of knowledge requires three things: 1. The wealth of Qarun, 2. The lifespan of Nuh ('alayhi al-Salam), 3. And the patience of Ayyub ('alayhi al-Salam)." His student Shaykh 'Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghuddah said: "And I will add a fourth matter as well: the residence of the Sultan, that is, a grand residence that is big enough to fit all his books."

"Virtually all environmental legislation in Muslim countries is borrowed from the industrialized West, in spite of the many principles, policies, and precedents of Islamic law governing the protection and conservation of the environment and the use of natural resources. Much of this legislation remains inadequate and unenforced. One reason is that many people in the Muslim world have little sympathy with laws that are derived from alien beliefs and values and have no legitimacy in their eyes. A number of sharī‘ah practices do continue to govern or influence the ways in which people use their natural resources, particularly in rural areas. In most Muslim countries, however, these practices do not receive official recognition, and even where Islamic legislation is constitutionally recognized, it is seldom applied effectively or creatively. The exceedingly rich contributions that Islamic law and ethics have to offer remain largely unarticulated and unrealized. Although environmental law is not yet recognized as an independent discipline within Islamic law, ample bases do exist for its development. Much as the discipline of Islamic economics has been formulated and developed in recent decades, that of environmental law can be derived from the objectives, principles, precepts, and instruments of Islamic jurisprudence, as well as the myriad substantive rulings of the sharī‘ah that pertain to the environment." - Othman Abd-ar-Rahman Llewellyn, “The Basis for a Discipline of Islamic Environmental Law”

"If you are a student of knowledge, for every field and discipline you have to memorize one foundational text. But in the field you are specializing in and chosen to be your specialty you need to memorize much more than that." - Dr. Ahmad Saad al-Azhari

YouTube's level of censorship is arbitrary, and arguably getting out of control. Entire pages and video playlists are getting deleted without any notice. We often talk about how much knowledge gets produced, but a lot of it gets censored and blocked from playing any effective role in the 'marketplace of ideas'. If you listen to an amazing talk or lecture that you like to refer to from time to time, you are better off downloading it so you can ensure you have access to it, rather than experiencing the pain that you might never have the chance to listen to it again.

The website https://ar.islamway.net/ has been down for almost 2 months. If the site is really gone for good, then this is a huge loss, because the site had thousands of PDF and MP3 files that cannot be found elsewhere. A lot of rare lectures from a host of major scholars could only be found there, and it appears that no backup sites exist. This is a reminder that even in the digital age, a lot of knowledge can disappear in the blink of an eye.

The scholars of uṣūl al-fiqh say that non-Muslims are accountable for the detailed rulings (furūʿ) of the Sharīʿah. The fuqahāʾ (jurists), on the other hand, say that they are not. Does this mean the two groups contradict each other? The answer is no. When the scholars of uṣūl say that non-Muslims are accountable for the detailed rulings of the Sharīʿah, they mean that non-Muslims will be held responsible in the Hereafter for failing to follow Allah's commands. When the jurists say that non-Muslims are not accountable, they mean that non-Muslims are not required to perform acts of worship or other rulings of the Sharīʿah while they remain non-Muslim, because Islam is a condition for those acts to be valid. So, the two groups are speaking about different issues: the scholars of uṣūl are discussing accountability before Allah in the Hereafter, while the jurists are discussing the validity and legal obligation of performing acts of worship in this life. - summarized from Shaykh Hamad al-Hamad

Some people might say that the Hanbalis contradict themselves because they hold that removing three hairs while in iḥrām is enough to incur a fidyah. Yet removing three hairs at taḥallul is not enough to exit iḥrām. If three hairs "count" in one case, why not in the other? As Shaykh 'Abd al-Muhsin al-Zamil explains, the answer of the Hanbalis is that these rulings concern two different legal principles. Shaving or shortening the hair for taḥallul is a commanded act of worship. A commanded act is not fulfilled until the required act has been fulfilled in a complete sense. The Sunnah explains that the Qur'anic command to shave or shorten the hair means shaving or shortening the entire head, as the Prophet peace and blessings be upon him shaved his whole head and said, "Take your rites from me." Therefore, removing only three hairs does not fulfill the obligation and does not bring about taḥallul. By contrast, removing hair while still in iḥrām falls under a prohibition. The legal maxim is that a prohibition applies to all parts of the prohibited act. Thus, removing * even part * of the hair is considered a violation of the prohibition, just as eating part of a loaf violates the instruction, "Do not eat this loaf." On this basis, the Hanbalis say that removing three hairs is sufficient to incur the relevant ruling. In other words, the first question is, "What is sufficient to fulfill a commanded act?" while the second is, "What is sufficient to violate a prohibition?" Since these are different legal questions governed by different principles, the Hanbalis do not see the two rulings as contradictory.

قاعدة مهمة للمنتقِدْ: ليس جميعُ ما كتبنا نعتقدْ أصلٌ أفادهُ الإمامُ الخيضِري وأعمِلنْ قرينةً إنْ تحضرِ الصورة من قناة فوائد الديوانين: https://t.me/arrewayahalthkafh/3976