Roots Of Knowledge ROK 😊

Almost complete alhamdulilah #14thNov

The more you read, the closer you come to the bedrock of truth. It is common for a graduate to settle for a certain level of understanding of an issue. Perhaps they picked it up from one of their teachers or read it here and there. They may even hear others repeating it, which settles it further in their mind. Eventually it is taken as absolute fact, and they become blind to the errors and gaps in their own understanding. The problem is compounded when they meet someone who has read and researched the matter far more extensively and gone deeper into it than they have. At that point, they find it hard to accept any further discussion at all. Yet anyone engaged in serious research, whether in the discussions of Usool al-Hadith or the debates over fiqhi rulings, will often come across matters they believed were almost agreed upon, only to find that later scholars had researched and revised them. Ibn al-Salah held that in later ages scholars could no longer independently authenticate hadith, and al-Nawawi and others disagreed with him. The early Hanafi position forbade taking a wage for teaching the Qur’an, yet later Hanafi scholars permitted it, and their view became the basis of fatwa. Revision of this kind is not an attack on our tradition. It is part of how the tradition has always worked. Some will object that this opens the door to questioning everything in our academic heritage. The concern is understandable, but the answer lies in who is doing the research and how. Academic research must allow competent people the freedom to present their findings. That is the whole purpose of years of rigorous training in the Arabic language and in advanced disciplines such as Fiqh, Hadith, Tafseer and Aqeedah. Research of this kind is bound by method, by expertise, and by respect for genuine consensus. Without that freedom, details are omitted and knowledge is narrowed, sometimes through partisanship and sometimes through simple ignorance. The doors of knowledge must therefore be guarded by competent men and women, and that can only happen through firm understanding and the guidance of experts who have walked the path themselves. This is the only way to reach the bedrock of fact, or at least to follow the principles of a science through to their full conclusions. The fruits of this are considerable. One of the greatest is the ability to answer misunderstandings about Islam and accusations made against it. Shallow knowledge cannot respond to a serious critic, but deep and careful research can. In fact, sometimes the unresearched matters can end up being the root of negative perceptions held by people online these days. If an institute only wants to produce speakers for the pulpit, that hardly requires investing in so many years and resources. The purpose of advanced study is to produce people who can research and reach as close to the bedrock of truth as possible. Otherwise, a graduate ends up like the curator of a museum, preserving the views of other scholars and treating them as beyond question. I don't have a problem with this so long as everyone understands where they stand and the limits of their education. It's only when they speak out against others in defence of views they believe to be unquestionable.

The more you read, the closer you come to the bedrock of truth. It is common for a graduate to settle for a certain level of understanding of an issue. Perhaps they picked it up from one of their teachers or read it here and there. They may even hear others repeating it, which settles it further in their mind. Eventually it is taken as absolute fact, and they become blind to the errors and gaps in their own understanding. The problem is compounded when they meet someone who has read and researched the matter far more extensively and gone deeper into it than they have. At that point, they find it hard to accept any further discussion at all. Yet anyone engaged in serious research, whether in the discussions of Usool al-Hadith or the debates over fiqhi rulings, will often come across matters they believed were almost agreed upon, only to find that later scholars had researched and revised them. Ibn al-Salah held that in later ages scholars could no longer independently authenticate hadith, and al-Nawawi and others disagreed with him. The early Hanafi position forbade taking a wage for teaching the Qur’an, yet later Hanafi scholars permitted it, and their view became the basis of fatwa. Revision of this kind is not an attack on our tradition. It is part of how the tradition has always worked. Some will object that this opens the door to questioning everything in our academic heritage. The concern is understandable, but the answer lies in who is doing the research and how. Academic research must allow competent people the freedom to present their findings. That is the whole purpose of years of rigorous training in the Arabic language and in advanced disciplines such as Fiqh, Hadith, Tafseer and Aqeedah. Research of this kind is bound by method, by expertise, and by respect for genuine consensus. Without that freedom, details are omitted and knowledge is narrowed, sometimes through partisanship and sometimes through simple ignorance. The doors of knowledge must therefore be guarded by competent men and women, and that can only happen through firm understanding and the guidance of experts who have walked the path themselves. This is the only way to reach the bedrock of fact, or at least to follow the principles of a science through to their full conclusions. The fruits of this are considerable. One of the greatest is the ability to answer misunderstandings about Islam and accusations made against it. Shallow knowledge cannot respond to a serious critic, but deep and careful research can. In fact, sometimes the unresearched matters can end up being the root of negative perceptions held by people online these days. If an institute only wants to produce speakers for the pulpit, that hardly requires investing in so many years and resources. The purpose of advanced study is to produce people who can research and reach as close to the bedrock of truth as possible. Otherwise, a graduate ends up like the curator of a museum, preserving the views of other scholars and treating them as beyond question. I don't have a problem with this so long as everyone understands where they stand and the limits of their education. It's only when they speak out against others in defence of views they believe to be unquestionable.

Ill be talking about the history of Shrine culture inshallah 14th Nov

Knowledge has never been a quest to solely gather pieces of information When someone criticises your scholar/elders, etc., do you feel the need to refute them instantly? Or feel like they are being disrespectful? That's a natural reaction, but the next step you take is the difference between someone who has holistic tarbiyya in studying and someone who hasn't. A scholar is best understood as an investigator who uses years of experience and expert guidance to find information to solve a problem. He might use the aid of someone else to gather info, but that's all they are good at. Using understanding and common sense alongside the information is what helps the investigator reach a sound conclusion. In the beginning, a student traces the steps of experts trying to understand how they reached their conclusion. Once they've trained themselves enough, they can now apply what they've learned to their own time and cases that are unprecedented. Without engaging the mind in figuring out the what, why, and how, a student will always just be a collector, like a curator of a museum. In fact, learning without true purpose simply ends up being a journey of learning to be ignorant. This doesn't mean that a person spends years learning the ways of the experts just to reinvent the wheel in their own way. This would be a pointless exercise in any science. Taking the views of the experts is part and parcel of our tradition. But to shut off the faculty of thinking and not want others to question the scholars they religiously look to is a symptom of learned ignorance.

Don't limit your studies to one scholar or organisation Islamic institute teachers are, without a doubt, responsible for teaching students tolerance and respect for the views of other positions. Otherwise, their graduates will inevitably assume they are the only ones on the truth and everyone else is living in deviance and sin. Knowledge is not simply passing on bits of information to students. It is the act of qualifying students to see the weight of knowledge compared to other views and arguments. I've come across many students, unfortunately, who qualify from institutes and lack respect for other views and dismiss their validity outright. It's strange, especially after studying years of fiqh and hadith, where multiple views are taught and presented day in and day out. I wouldn't mind if they could think for themselves and use the skills they were meant to have from years of study to argue their positions. Rather, what happens is that they tend to pin all their views on the back of someone else's research. My advice to students who have only been exposed to one view in fiqh is to take out time and study under scholars of other schools to appreciate their position directly from their experts. قال أيوب السختياني رحمه الله: "إنك لا تعرف خطأ معلمك حتى تجالس غيره Ayyub Sakhtiyani said: Indeed you will not know the mistake of your teacher until you sit with others

The Continuous Need for Counterweights Any society that translates and imports the works of another culture must be ready to assimilate foreign ideas. To save the tradition of the society from being watered down, there has to be a counterweight that keeps the tradition firmly rooted. This can only happen if the tradition is grounded in academic and rational foundations. Otherwise, it's only a matter of time before the culture and traditions are replaced with the more dominant ones. Due to the early translation movements in the Abbasid caliphate, Muslims saw the impact it was having & countered this by developing the rational sciences. As more foreigners accepted Islam and learned Arabic, linguists began to produce dictionaries in order to safeguard the Arabic language that was spoken at the time of revelation. In the 1800s, with the spread of European science and Western philosophy through colonialism, the Muslims had to roll up their sleeves and learn foreign ideas to produce sound responses and remove doubts that had crept into the minds of many Muslims. This process of countering foreign ideologies will continue until the day of Qiyamah but requires men and women to seriously dedicate themselves to understanding both the Islamic sciences and foreign ideologies. Today, hadith-rejecting movements, feminism, and liberalism are simply byproducts of foreign ideas without a robust counter-movement to educate the masses. Social media clips can only drip-feed responses to remove doubts and confusion that slowly arise. To be naive and tell the people to ignore the ideologies may have worked in the past as a temporary response, but it was never a long-term solution. The dominant presence of social media that has entered every single household cannot be ignored.

I'm doing a 4 question survey to help me with my upcoming course on Sufism. I would really appreciate it if you could fill in the form : https://forms.gle/KF4UFXvx4nt65RW79

Unfortunately I won't be able to do livestream today Inshallah ill try to have it tomorrow same time

Is Hadith Rejection a New Madhab? Those who outright reject any authority of hadith in Islam tend to follow the same pattern. I understand that many hadith rejectors out there are naive because they are not able to see through the weak objections. Their rejection usually stems from one or more of the following: > A weak grasp of the Arabic of the Quran and the linguistic standard it was revealed in > Little or no exposure to the science of isnād > Reliance on the research of Orientalists > Inconsistency in deciding what does and does not count as part of Islam > A personal crisis or a bad experience with religious figures > Mistaking online arguments between Muslims for the systematic study of the sources Every argument they raise against hadith applies equally to the Quran: 1. “This hadith is absurd.” If they dismiss a hadith as absurd without examining how scholars have interpreted it, they will eventually face a verse of the Quran that seems absurd to someone else, and they will have to interpret it. The principle they rejected becomes the one they need. 2. “Hadith transmission is unreliable.” The Quran reached us through the same human chains of transmission. If those chains cannot be trusted for hadith, the same scrutiny applies to the Quran. 3. “Hadith was compiled too late.” The same objection can be raised against the meanings of the Quran’s words. Those meanings were preserved orally for decades by men and women before being recorded in books. If late compilation invalidates hadith, it also invalidates our understanding of the Quran. 4. “Hadith has made the religion complicated.” Rejecting hadith does not make religion simpler. It replaces one scholarly tradition with countless individual ones, as each rejector follows their own trajectory and bends the verses to suit their own reasoning. 5. “The religion was hijacked by men.” The Quran itself exists, is transmitted, and is applied only through people. If the people who carried the religion cannot be trusted, then no one can be trusted with the Quran either. Islam is protected by Allah, and that protection does not rest on one or two individuals. Its preservation is a collective effort, continuously discussed, debated and corrected across every science of the Quran and Sunnah. Without trust in the early generations who carried it, we may as well wash our hands of Islam altogether.

For those who have been asking about the books Im going through for the upcoming course, check the link : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XoX8p93tybCe078vYscCjKONJLXAkIG3?usp=sharing Some of the things I've found very interesting on the topic: > The ultimate goal to attain closeness to Allah whilst living in a material world > the development and systematisation of self-rectification > introduction of new terms such as Tasawwuf > the breakdown of the aspects of internal states and the heart > character refinement and the need for healthy companionship > the harms of cherry-picking methods to refine oneself > the routes of deviation on the journey > mass movements under trained individuals and the Khanqas/Lodges > philosophies developed to make a coherent institute > Debates around innovation, supernatural acts and hierarchy of saints > Objections raised throughout history by various scholars

Sufism. A word that sparks devotion, debate, and plenty of questions. How did early Muslim asceticism develop into organised tariqahs? Which sources shaped its teachings? And how do we distinguish authentic foundations from later additions? Join Mufti Liaquat Zaman for From Zuhd to Tariqah: The Story of Sufism An academic exploration of its origins, development and controversies. Whether you’re sympathetic, sceptical or simply curious, bring your questions and deepen your understanding. 📅 Saturday 14 November 2026 | 9 am-3 pm 📍 As-Suffa Institute, 156 High Street, Aston, B6 4UX 👥 Open to brothers and sisters 🎟️ Early bird: £19.99 | Standard: £29.99 🍽️ Lunch included 💻 Join the livestream for £9.99 Before you defend it. Before you dismiss it. Study it. Book your place at as-suffa.org/sufism

Fasting Hidayah Lesson 2 : https://youtu.be/jX06xtCSKQk 00:00 - Recap: the hadith "there is no fasting for one who doesn't intend from the night" 01:05 - Interpretation 1: the hadith refers to "Kamal" (completeness), not validity 01:21 - Interpretation 2: fasting must start from Fajr, with intention attached to the majority of the day 02:21 - Why even Shafi'is accept a Nafl fast with morning intention 02:40 - Fasting as one stretched Rukn (Mumtad) vs. Salat's multiple Arkan 04:19 - Imam Zufar's "Ila" argument (elbows in Wudu) applied to fasting 06:54 - Differentiating an "Aadah" (habit) from an act done for Allah's sake 07:45 - Imam Zufar's view: is intention even necessary for a Ramadan fast? 09:12 - Usool background: time as a dharf (vessel) vs. a mi'yar (whole duration) 09:21 - Explaining "al-akthar hukmul kull" (majority takes the ruling of the whole) 11:05 - At what point can the intention for Ramadan be made - how far can you delay it? 11:32 - Other fiqhi examples using "al-akthar hukmul kull" (awrah, wiping over bandages) 12:45 - Why this doesn't apply to Salat (can't delay intention mid-prayer) 14:54 - Why it doesn't apply to Qadha fasts either 18:30 - Why intention can't be made after Zawal 20:31 - Sahibul Hidayah's issue: Zawal (Imam Quduri) vs. half-day/Nisf al-Nahar (Imam Muhammad) 22:40 - Why Hanafis don't always follow the matan text as the strongest position 23:50 - Sahibul Hidayah prefers Imam Muhammad's "half day" position 26:30 - Difference between Zawal and Dhahwat al-Kubra (half day) explained with timings 28:30 - Does this dispensation apply to a Musafir (traveller) too? 29:22 - Imam Zufar's view: musafir must intend from Fajr since he's not obliged to fast 30:55 - Response: no dalil distinguishes musafir from muqeem 31:38 - Parallel example: Fatiha in Salat and why rulings aren't split without a dalil 35:51 - Summary of this section's reasoning 35:53 - New masalah: can Ramadan be fasted with any niyyah (mutlaq, nafl, or another wajib)? 38:03 - Imam Shafi's view: nafl niyyah is "abith" (pointless/playing around) 40:33 - Shafi'i's two qauls on mutlaq (unspecified) niyyah 42:56 - Imam Aini's treatment of the Shafi'i position in Al-Binayah + book recommendations 43:29 - Hanafi response: the fard is automatically specified (muta'ayyan) in Ramadan 46:19 - Analogy: calling out "a man" to the one person in the house 48:00 - Example: fasting Monday not knowing it's Ramadan - does nafl niyyah still count? 48:27 - The "paint on a wall" analogy for how extra description gets overridden 50:23 - Closing note: next lesson requires strong usool foundations 51:01 - Full lesson recap of all points discussed

A saying of Imam Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Shaybani, the student of Imam Abu Hanifa, that I have always loved: "Whoever does not know the people of his time is ignorant." Knowledge of texts alone is not enough. A scholar has to understand the people in front of him: their circumstances, their needs, and what will bring them together rather than tear them apart. If we want to protect our communities, we need teachers who hold their positions with conviction and their fellow believers with love, and students who understand the difference between the two.