Auron ka hai Payaam aur, mera Payaam aur hai, Ishq key dardmand ka tarz-e-kalaam aur hai! (Iqbal)
There is no “theology” per se in Islam. Islam is Islam, full stop. Second, Islam abhors wasteful, directionless and meaningless arguments and hair-splitting and gossip – qeel wa qaal. Finally, abortive and purposeless back-and-forth like this is a non-starter to begin with. It does not take anyone anywhere. It is wasteful of time and energy. And it is a typical loser trait.
So, when it comes to knowledge, don’t be surprised if Muslims want to know what kind of knowledge we are talking about. They will ask Islamic knowledge of the “holy” kind that will somehow get them a passport to Jannat or secular and worldly knowledge of the ordinary kind that everybody goes to school for?
For, “Islamic knowledge,” they will say, “is the best knowledge and all else is at best a waste of time – Khurafaat – and at worst a pathway to Jahannam.” They will argue that the path to hell is paved with “bad” knowledge. But what someone should tell the Muslims is this: Knowledge means knowledge. Full stop! And it is knowledge of all things knowable. There is nothing esoteric, mysterious or complicated about it.
Knowledge is simply getting to know things you did not know before. At least that is how the Qur’ān defines knowledge. If you think you have a better definition of knowledge, you are welcome to it. In fact, I would like to know it too. Muslims with shallow understanding of the Deen and only a peripheral acquaintance with the world have wasted a great deal of time and energy debating what knowledge was good knowledge and what knowledge was bad knowledge. They have also raised issues such as whether nice Muslim kids should even go to college to have all that “bad” knowledge stuffed into their heads. Especially, if that nice Muslim kid happens to be a female.
For sure, Akbar Allahabadi – that talented, witty and “college”-educated Urdu poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – was not serious, and he was only using satire and sarcasm, when he described the role of colleges in his days as follows: Yoon qatl say bacchon kay woh badnaam na hota; / Afsos kay Fir’aun ko college ki na soojhi! Paraphrase: Pharaoh would not have had to kill all those infants. Too bad he could not come up with the idea of a college. But somehow all too many Muslims – “good” Muslims in particular – seemed to have gotten the idea that colleges were bad for good Muslim kids. Especially, during the earlier part of the last century and especially if those children happened to be female.
WATCHING MUSLIMS IN ACTION
As a child I have personally sat, like a fly on the wall, and observed Muslim movers and shakers and Islamic scholars of considerable standing and repute arguing back and forth on some of these same issues. I have seen them debate how it may or may not be such a hot idea for gifted Muslim children to go to college and learn all the dubious stuff colleges teach. Especially for those of them whose characters were not yet properly developed.
At least that is the recollection I have. It was a long time ago. And I may be wrong in the way I recall things now. Sometimes I hope and wish I am. Maybe they all voted the other way. Or maybe what they were saying was that all too often colleges are a graveyard of personal morality and character for young and impressionable Muslim youth, in which they would not have been completely wrong. But there is a great big presumption here.
We seem to assume that from a purely “moral” point of view it is far worse for boys and girls to take an open interest in each other than for them to tell lies and steal. And that people who pray extra Namaz and do extra Dhikr of some kind, but who never keep a promise and never show up for anything on time, are somehow better human beings than those who are deficient in the former but meticulous with regard to the latter.
I am not sure that is how Islam works.
Allah bless them all – the people whose discussion I was privileged to observe in person as a child. They were good people. Just misinformed in some ways, I thought, about Allah’s world and somewhat unsure in their practical approach to Allah’s Deen and its role in that world, even though the specialty of many of them was the Deen itself.
In any case, here is what the Qur’ān itself has to say on the subject of knowledge. To me, there could not have been, and there indeed is not, a better definition of knowledge anywhere in the world. So, here it is: ‘Allamal insaana maa lam ya’alam.
And here is what this divine miracle of an Aayat may mean in broad paraphrase: And God Almighty, the maker and master of the world, imparted to the human being – that means you, me, our ancestors and our posterity – all the knowledge that he or she did not have before. He taught human beings everything they did not know earlier: maa lam ya’alam.
That means there are two worlds or universes if you will: the world of the Known and the world of the Unknown. And there is an organically inverse relationship between the two. That means as the one expands and grows the other contracts and diminishes. It is like water and fire. The job of the human being – any human being – then is to make the world of the Known grow larger and concomitantly make the world of the Unknown dwindle in size.
That is the mandate God Almighty gave humanity the very first day of revelation. It goes without saying that those who make their world of the Known grow in size will be more successful in dealing with the challenges of this world, whereas those who are swallowed up in the world of the Unknown will become a victim of the vicissitude of time and the depredation of those better informed and better educated than them. It is that simple.
And that is precisely what happened to Muslims – in India and elsewhere. Those with better education got the better of them, while those with flawed character among them such as Mir Ja’afar and Mir Sadiq in India double-crossed them and betrayed them to the British. Many of their characterless leaders also let them down during the Mutiny, which in many ways was a war of independence in which both Muslims and Hindus fought the British shoulder to shoulder.
Due to the last-minute betrayal and treachery of their characterless and traitorous leaders, the Muslims were crushed by the Colonial British who proceeded to make an example of Muslims by massacring them by hundreds of thousands and hanging their corpses throughout Delhi.
In the Arabian Peninsula and the land of Syria during World War I, corrupt and characterless Muslim leaders did precisely the same thing. They betrayed the Muslim Turks to the British and the French, dismantling the 400-year-old Ottoman caliphate and leaving the Muslims for the first time in their 1300 year history without the overarching socio-political umbrella of the caliphate to hold them together.
This act of millennial betrayal by traitorous and characterless Arab leaders with Muslim names, pedigrees and professions paved the way for the Balfour Declaration through which the British granted a national home in Palestine to the Jews of the World, which in turn led the establishment of the Zionist state of Israel in Palestine at the end of World War II.
So, the whole thing was a Muslim handiwork. It is a standing monument, if you will, to Muslim lack of character and consequent acts of betrayal and treachery over the ages. That is what people do when they call themselves Muslims but somehow turn out not to have character, which is a defining attribute of Islam. That is why no character, no Islam. And that is also why character and education are so closely intertwined in Islam.
As for the meaning of education in Islam, how do you make that Qur’ānic definition of Ilm or knowledge any better or plainer: Allamal insaana maa lam ya’lam? How do you improve upon it? You can, if you want, hire a few super-scientists and super-scholars of our time and get them to give you a better definition. But I don’t think they can. And even if they did the Qur’ān would have beaten them to it in any case. That is why I became such a fan of the Qur’ān. It continues to puzzle and astound me how so many better people than me and so many brighter and sharper minds than mine fail to see this simple fact.
Is it because all the university learning we have acquired over the years has failed to light our hearts and illumine our souls? Is it because decades of socialization into a culture of denying God has left us incapable of examining the question of God’s existence and his power over our lives with an open mind? As the Qur’ān says, Innahaa laa ta’amal absaar, wa laakin ta’amal quloobullati fissudoor, meaning, it is really our hearts that go blind, not our eyes.
[Write to the author at Drsyedpasha@aol.com. Also visit www.IslamicSolutions.Com and Listen to Pasha Hour International.]