Medina and Athena: Restoring a Lost Legacy by Hamza Yusuf

salamualikum' greetings of peace my name is Sofia Emmet and I serve as an editor at Renovatio the Journal of Zaytuna College and tonight is kind of an exciting night because we are launching a joint project between Zaytuna College and our neighboring Catholic institution the dominican school of philosophy and theology you'll hear more about this partnership from the first speaker when I bring them up here just for now suffice it to say that it's a partnership based on the common heritage as we call it the common heritage series is what we're really about this events and we've been working on it for and it's about the based on the ancient philosophical traditions that are common to both the Catholic and the Islamic intellectual traditions and in particular it's on focus on pedagogy and dialectic as well but first a couple of quick points if you haven't yet seen the copy or being familiar with the copy of Renovatio the bookstore across the hall is open and will be open after the event so feel free to pick up a copy of that the talk being given tonight is partly based on the article that was published in the last issue of Renovatio and that issues available as well as previous issues the title of that piece was Medina and Athena restoring the Lost Legacy and then I just want to say quickly that a random Asha is a co-sponsor of this event partly because the topics for tonight and for tomorrow night these are topics that fall well within the scope or areas of interest of Renovatio which is essentially we invite writers and scholars philosophers and theologians historians to bring draw from faith traditions to draw from literature to draw from history and to help us grapple with the problems and the moral challenges of modern life and also to help us answer the ongoing sort of perennial questions or ultimate questions tomorrow is evening is also very interesting one and I will just say this about it that the talk will be given by dr. Andrew Hicks I believe he's here tonight I saw him earlier yes there he is who is a professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University the topic tomorrow is called the listeners guide to the cosmos it's about music and harmony and the cosmos in other words it's about the sounding universe and our place within it that I hope is enough it's sufficient for you to intrigue you to come back tomorrow night and listen to his talk our program tonight is very simple I will in a couple of minutes our moment actually introduce our first speaker and he will talk about the partnership that I mentioned earlier between the two institutions and after that we'll have you'll hear from our Provost as a to know dr. Amir Marashi and he will then turn it over to president Hamza Yusuf who is also by the way the editor in chief for Renovatio and he will be giving the talk tonight so let me introduce our speaker father Chris Rance he's a professor of liturgically studies in science and theology and director of institutional research at the dominican school of philosophy and theology among his research interests are beauty creative intuition and poetry sacred arts Catholic culture and Catholic worship he has been working along with sister Marian Farina at the DSP T who teaches philosophy and theology there with the scholars as eternal college as well so please welcome for the Chris Rennes [Applause] greetings of peace I'd like to begin with heartfelt thanks to Sofia and to the entire community here at Zeitoun of college for your kind hospitality in hosting these inaugural lectures which begin this new and exciting collaboration between Zaytuna and the dominican school of philosophy and theology which we have entitled the common heritage series quoting a conversation between Socrates and a young mathematician Joseph p-per in his classic work leisure the basis of culture comments there for the first time in the theaetetus without solemnity or ceremony almost by the way though fresh as dawn appears the thought that has become commonplace in history of philosophy the beginning of philosophy is wonder true to that premise this philosophical collaboration between our two schools began with a wonderful table servation made by myself and dr. mark Delp the past Dean of Zhai tuna College here who sends you his own greetings along with apologies for being unable to be with us this evening during discussions that were designed to support mark in his efforts to leads I tuna in its quest for institutional accreditation the two of us were struck that is to say filled with wonder at how much each of our academic programs relied upon ancient Greek philosophy we felt that this commonality provided Zeitoun a-- and d SBT with a unique historical moment in which to explore whether and how this common heritage might provide a basis for collaborative teaching and learning with the encouragement from our administrative leadership at both schools we formed a group of three faculty from each school dr. mark Delp dr. Umar Qureshi and Philibert Chang from Zaytuna College sister Mary Ann Farina dr. Margo Veda Vega and father John Thomas maligne from the DSP t and now I would like to transition for a moment in my introductory comments to a slightly edited text from dr. Dell which he said to me as his way of participating in the evening events so I quote in our meetings we often express to the concern that students as well as teachers of our own time increasingly resist not only formal argumentation but the fundamental act of drawing distinctions we thought that a course of studies deriving from the vast Catholic and Islamic traditions of disputation might convince our own students that far from being mere sources of emotional conflict formal disputation in the classic philosophical sense can free the mind to seek truth cooperatively over time we realized the need to create a shared learning environment that would deal with the common heritage of classical and medieval disputations while also honoring and respecting our different theological traditions and cultures the result is a plan to offer two pilot courses one next spring in 2020 and the following in the fall of 2024 students of our two schools in which participants will learn about and practice this classical tool that is directed to a shared discovery of truth using primary texts from Plato and Aristotle participants will explore how later commentaries from each of the two traditions productively engaged these common texts topics that illustrate our shared metaphysical commitments will help students both to adopt and to apply these skills to common concerns of contemporary Society in ethics and metaphysics it is our sincere hope and objective that this pedagogical approach will illustrate that there was no domain of human knowledge in the ancient world that did not originate from the intensive give-and-take of ideas which constitute learned and sincere disputation furthermore and perhaps more critical for our own time and place that disputation is a model for cooperative learning not only here in Berkeley but wherever there is an openness to wonder and a desire for the common pursuit of truth finally I would like to mention that the year of study in which we engage was made possible with frong funds from the Wabash Center which supports projects that promote the development of faculty pedagogy now it's my great pleasure to introduce one of the colleagues of this study project dr. omar Qureshi who is the Provost of zai tuna who will introduce our speaker for this evening [Applause] thank you father Chris Aslam o alaikum peace be to you all say tuna community RDSP t community dr. hicks we welcome all of you to tonight's event she comes a Yusef is a leading proponent of classical learning in Islam he's the president of Zaytuna College and has taught courses on Islamic jurisprudence ethics astronomy logic prophetic biography and hadith as well as other subjects he also has promoted and continues to promote Islamic Sciences and classical teaching methodologies throughout the world he has been a strong advocate for social justice peace conviviality among peoples and places for several years he has argued that that them versus us problem is fundamentally flawed as he considers himself one of them as well as one of us hence the common heritage project that we're all engaged in he's published numerous articles and translations including the prayer of the oppressed and purification of the heart he also serves as a vice president for the forum for promoting peace in Muslim societies an international initiative initiative that seeks to address the root causes that can lead to radicalism and militancy he's also has authored numerous articles and essays the liberal arts in an illiberal age freeing thought from the shackles of feeling and desire one does the human fetus fetus become human is the matter of metaphysics immaterial yes and no I would like to take this opportunity now to welcome our main guest speaker our our main speaker for this evening she comes a Yusef [Applause] thank you very much bismillah r-rahman r-rahim Mosul Allah and I say Mohammed why do scientists even kathira hamdulillah first of all welcome all of you especially dr. Hicks we had the pleasure of having dinner earlier a group of us and was really I think very intrigued by what he has to offer tomorrow and I really if I had to choose between this lecture or his I would definitely choose his so if you can't make both I'm sorry but I think he's really a brilliant young scholar and I think everybody's going to be very pleased with what he has to offer I also want to thank the Dominican College I I'm gonna embarrass Sister Mary Anne Farina a little bit so but I always tell people that Zaytuna College actually was founded by sister Mary Ann Farina because dr. had to man died many years ago we were in the yurt and she came down we had a meeting and she said have you ever thought about a college up on holy hill like a Muslim College up on holy hill and I actually hadn't so I told her if she's ever canonized or beatified I'll testify to one of her miracles but I've seen a few from her since then so I'm very impressed and we're honored to have her on on the board she's a very distinguished scholar herself and father thank you for gracing us with this this initiative I think is is really part of our history i people don't realize how much interaction has existed between the christians and the muslims in the past in fact recently on the Amir Stein sites on YouTube Philip Penn did a very interesting five minute I think it's seven minutes based on his two books working with the Syriac literature making an argument that more than about half of the Christian population in the world lived under Muslims for quite some time he makes an argument that if we look only at Western Christianity and its relationship which was often unfortunately belligerent from both sides megive a very distorted view of how Muslims and Christians interacted because there is another story and that's the one he highlights in his work I want to just before I get into the topic Medina and Athena I'd like to really explain to you very quickly what this is really about for me what this is about is dialogue and language and a commitment to the intellect and a commitment to reason and a commitment to the idea that human beings actually can speak to one another and can listen to one another and learn to do that and get better at it because it's something that we have to habituate ourselves to this it's not something that necessarily comes easily as you'll note with little children because little children have to learn how to be patient have to learn how to listen have to learn how to understand what's being said to them and not rushing to judgment so I just would like to read a short from from this is a work that Scott Crider did which is the art of persuasion and we published it in the curriculum series it's the second one after the Creed that we did in the series and I think because the importance of rhetoric in in our in our two traditions in the Western tradition and the Muslim tradition rhetoric was the subject that was studied are both of our traditions were obsessed with rhetoric because at the root of the idea of rhetoric is the art of persuasion that you can use words as opposed to weapons to persuade one of my teachers wrote where men lack the arts of communication intelligent discussion must languish where there is no master of the medium of exchanging ideas ideas cease to play a part in human life when that happens men are little better than the Brutes they dominate by force or cunning and they will soon try to dominate each other in the same way the loss of freedom follows when men cannot live together as friends when a whole society is not built on a real community of understanding freedom cannot flourish and this is why it was so important for the people that founded this country this idea of Education in fact the only private institution mentioned in the Constitution is the press because they understood the absolute importance of an educated population and if you look at at their op-eds 250 years ago they're now considered literary classics because they were a highly educated group of people and and they were obsessed with Greece and Rome they were Christians most of them some of them were deists and Masonic practitioners but they were committed to the idea of Education and they saw it as very important have the universal idea this comes later but there's a reason why they put in order to form a more perfect union moving towards that perfection so I wrote after that as an art of communication rhetoric obviates the need for physical or psychological coercion which occurs either when words lose their force or in their absence force takes their place violence is merely rhetoric carried on by other means and while blood may be no reasonable argument it has persuasive qualities to which lesser and coarser men quickly resort indeed it too often proves to be the most expedient means to end a dispute with violence the polis has failed brute force determines the direction of human matters as Adler states if we are deprived of the art of rhetoric we are deprived of freedom freedom to think freedom to feel and freedom to choose persuasion over force civility over violence and ultimately our humanity over our enemy devoid of the art of rhetoric we are too we too easily descend to the level of brutish beasts we more readily assented with it we more readily assented the vertiginous heights of magnificent creatures noble in reason infinite in faculty and unparalleled in apprehension I stole that from somebody history is replete with the power of persuasive arguments it must be said though that rhetoric itself is no guarantor of such exalted results it is after all an art that can be deployed in the service of both lofty ideals and lowly ends Socrates knew too well the dangers of rhetorical Ronan's one of the greatest red ores of American political life the 19th century South Carolina senator and 7th vice president the United States John C Calhoun shamefully used his exemplary rhetorical skills to argue for the continued enslavement of countless souls as a positive good for an example of the artful use of rhetoric for nobler purposes we need only look to Reverend Reverend Martin Luther King jr. who's passionate public speeches moved a nation struggling with the vestiges of slavery toward a more perfect union dr. King's assassination on April 4th 1968 led to another eloquent example grounded in a command of rhetoric when the then Senator Robert F Kennedy spoke before a mostly african-american crowd that same day in Indianapolis delivering the sad news which it had not yet heard of the assassination Kennedy's ability to blend pathos ethos and logos in the perfect storm of Kairos is credited with helping prevent in Indianapolis the riots and violence that plagued many American cities at the time one of the interesting and intriguing aspects of Kennedy's speech is that he quoted Aeschylus I think that's the last time a politician has quoted Aeschylus now we're lucky if they quote The Simpsons so the topic tonight is Medina and Athena Athena is the Arabic way of saying Athens there's a tradition called Jerusalem Athens and and much has been written on that tradition this idea of the the impact that Hellenistic thought had on the Christian tradition and it's it's essentially something that emerges over time but you can see the the roots of it at the very inception of Christianity and certainly in John's Gospel the one sees a powerful relationship with some of the Hellenistic thinking but the idea of Medina and Athena is not as well known certainly not in the West I think Muslims who know their tradition and know their Scholastic tradition are very well aware of this relationship so this lecture is really about that Lost Legacy now I would preface that by saying that arguably the the the Persians the Iranians today are still very much in touch with this tradition and in the Shia tradition there has been a very robust philosophical engagement and arguably and there are many recent researchers in this area that have shown that the idea that somehow philosophy died out in the Muslim world there's this argument it's an Orientalist trope that during this very early period there was a lot of Islam they called Arabic philosophy al-farabi al Kindi even sina these these become they have their Latinate terms the the names move into Latin for abuse and Avicenna and Averroes and highly regarded in the european scholastic tradition but they don't see the the continuation of that philosophical tradition it actually is quite stunning because philosophy moves into theology in the Islamic tradition and there's a profound philosophical theological tradition and then it moves into a type of Theo Sofia which you find in writers even as as late as just over a hundred years ago you still even believe it or not in what's today called Saudi Arabia what was then called Arabia there is a great metaphysician from alasa quite late but you have people like mierda mad and sad or Dean mullah Satara they call him I mean these are some of the most important human philosophers that we have and that's why people like Corbin who discovered him from the West spent his entire life after he discovers him studying him so to say that it's a complete loss legacy I think would not be true but for the Sunni tradition in many ways it is arguably a lost legacy and I think for me personally I think it's part of the reason why our own tradition has fallen into what I would call an ossification a type of stagnation in dealing with a dynamic civilization when you look at Western civilization I don't know how many people saw the film gravity but I have a friend of mine who's a philosopher who says one of the secrets of Western civilization is what he calls dynamic clinging this ability to in the in in the midst of immense movement and transformation this ability to hold on and cling where other civilizations just completely are it's like a tornado comes through them and they're just overwhelmed but at the outside of that film gravity you have a Muslim technician he's working on the thing and and then you have this woman who's trying to fix they're out in space and then you have George Clooney who's in this rocket ship he's just the bus driver and he's just kind of playing and it it shows I think the three ways in which technology you have the people that use technology as a kind of game they're just floating around and this is what he was doing but then they find out there's a there's about to be a lesion of a satellite that's falling apart and and the woman won't stop working and this is the Western obsession with even as global warming and all these things are happening we just keep working you know despite the dangers that are inherent the Muslim is the first - he's just collateral damage so he a piece of shrapnel goes right through his face I think his name was Zane and he's just gone and then the woman though she clings on to the thing so this is the dynamic clinging of Western civilization she just holds on for dear life anyway it's a very interesting film because I think there's a there's a lot of very interesting questions that that arise out of that film one of them is the the the idea can religion really be removed from our lives because each space station she goes to there's a religious icon in it so no matter how divorced we get from Earth the Buddha's there in the Chinese space station and the Orthodox icon is there in the Russian space station is that religion is still the questions of religion are still troubling us and then the idea gravitas that we in essence are like the George Clooney character just without were weightless one of the Arabic words for human the humans and the spirit world are the Thielen the too weighty ones you know that humans are supposed to have gravitas right we need to get back to gravity which is how the film ends with her prostrating on some earth so the term liberal arts has become an increasingly ambiguous term due to the disparate ideas and images it evokes amongst educated people an important failing of modern education lies in its in abilities to draw distinctions and to define terms the idea of really thinking about what words mean because people know words like democracy but can they define it are we in a republic or are we in a democracy these are actually very important ideas that are often just left unexamined both of which have been long decided distinctions in defining terms have been long obsessions of the Scholastic mind in logic we're taught that we can arrive at a definition only through an understanding of the genus and it's difference from from others in the same genus so what's the difference how does how does how does a human that's clearly got animality how is the human different from other animals the genus of the liberal arts falls under the rubric of education but what differentiates a liberal education from others in order for us to arrive at the definition of the species of liberal education the distinction resides in the word liberal which juxtaposes in contrasts it with a servile education so in the classical world that there were liberal and people that were free the Liebherr the person who was free and and and then there was the the the servant class so free people got educated and what they were educating were the arts and serve all people learned crafts learned skills these terms come out of a pre-modern understanding of societies that had hierarchical structures so the Hindu tradition has has in essence done what happens naturally in almost every society so the Hindus have this they have the Brahmin and these are the educated people we have people in universities that have chairs and professors these are the Brahmins of our civilization and then you have the Castilla the military people so we have our Pentagon and all these military people the police force these are the people that keep and then you have the the the the issue of people the merchants and the farmers and all these people that do these things and then you have these people at the bottom who do these like the people that collect garbage and the people that do the menial tasks that most people would not feel comfortable doing I mean it's interesting that hi rose RK is that it's it's a sacred rule it's it's this idea of that God has designed a world that has hierarchy that were born into hierarchy and so a liberal education was given to these free people as opposed to the vocational training given to the servants and slaves that taught them utilitarian skills so they could provide the goods and services society needed goods and services and these are two really beautiful words that have been so bastardized in our economic understanding where pornography becomes a good and Netflix becomes a service such skills and crafts could be learned through apprenticeship and did not require the rigorous training of the mind although it did require rigorous training I mean we once had carpenters and if you go into houses built a hundred years ago they're quite stunning because they had master carpenters that had journeyman carpenters from shore you know they were able to work by day and but they apprentice for seven years to learn a craft a liberal education the pre-modern period pruners prepared a student for three essential occupations and and this is the ancient world the theologian who tended to the ills of the soul the lawyer who tended to the ills of the society and the physician who attended to the ills of the social of the physical body the theologian so these were the three trainings thus a society through a liberal education and through this elite had trained Minds to tend to the elements of these three aspects of life on earth the moral and spiritual life of the soul the social commercial and political life of men living together and the healthy life of the physical body necessary to enjoy the other two aspects of their lives the seven liberal arts and seven is a is one of these numbers it's it's it's it's the summon of three and four which are very interesting mystical numbers and so seven in the Arabic tradition there's a very interesting thing that classical Arabic does so you count to seven but at seven you you don't just go to eight right it's like my child told me this joke once about what why is six Afraid of seven right because it ate nine so they go from they say seven wertham Aniyah so there's a Wow in classical Arabic between seven and eight to indicate that something changes and this is called the law of octave in music where there there there's there's something that happens when you get to seven there's there's a shift and there's a very interesting book of yours er by Ron Landau who was one of the founders of the integral school over in San Francisco he wrote a book about the law of eight the octave the law of octave and he used his own life as an example so 7 is the age of discrimination and then 14 you enter into adolescence 21 adulthood I mean this and these are major shifts in your life happen occur at 7 so 7 is one of these numbers it's it's a mystical number in the Islamic tradition the seven liberal arts divide the world into spirit and matter quality and quantity soul and body and educate a person achieve competency in both the life of the mind and the life of matter the qualitative studies involved a spoken language of literature especially poetry which is extremely important in the pre-modern world the thought processes of the mind that conceptualize judge and reason and the development of an aesthetic sense necessary to effectively persuade praise accuse or defend the quantitative studies focus on the mysteries of numbers through a mastery of arithmetic and geometry applying them to music as numbers in time and then to the supernal world as numbers in time and space so you studied arithmetic which is discrete number but then you studied geometry is a study of number in space and then music and time and then astronomy is music in time and space where you enter into the music of the spheres this holistic approach to education cultivate a mind open to wonderment and a mind reverential to the harmony of creation the roots of this form of education can be traced back to the mystery religions of Egypt Babylon and Greece you also India undeniably has elements that to this tradition that are quite ancient its greatest development emerged in the Jewish Christian and Muslim civilizations and so I'm arguing here that it really the Abrahamic faiths are the fashion errs of this tradition in a way that previous civilizations did not do and so they embrace these qualitative and quantitative arts better to understand their respective scriptures and the physical world around them the Muslims considered revealed books to take two forms those embodied in the actual words of God so you have the revelation itself the ye the key tab found in the Torah the Psalms the Gospels and the Quran and Muslims believe that all peoples had some type of revelation whether oral or written revelation but there was another revelation which is the so you had the turd weenie and the Queenie the revelation of nature the first was studied with the tools of the Trivium and the second with the sciences of the quadrivium so these these tools enable people to penetrate the mysteries of the world that they are embodied in in his useful book learning to flourish a physical philosophical exploration of liberal education Daniel de Nicola provides us with a beneficial taxonomy for the contested term of liberal arts because now it's become very contested what liberal arts means he represents he presents five purposes of liberal education the transmission of a cultural inheritance across generations self-actualization leading to a normative individuality understanding the world and the forces that shape one's life engagement with an action in the world and the acquisition of the skills of learning arguably the best of the liberal arts colleges will have all of those elements in them so first we need to define I think these two terms education liberal and one of the interesting things about political scientists is they almost always write treatises on education it's very interesting people that are obsessed with the order of a society people I mean obviously people like Cicero that were very concerned with with political science and then you have Locke who wrote on education also Kant wrote on education so and then in our tradition the same thing occurs at morality who was a political scientist also wrote on education Imam al-ghazali who wrote both in political science and in education so those two words education liberal so the the useful definition I think comes from the 19th century theologian Cardinal John Henry Newman who in discourse six about the idea of University said quote education is a high word it is the preparation for knowledge and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation end quote obviously this definition begs the question what exactly is knowledge and this is a very important doctors say in the people to us wrote considerably on what is knowledge because he argues that a confusion of knowledge is at the heart of the problem of modern society which has led to a loss of societal decorum which leads to a rise of false leadership which creates further confusion in knowledge so that answer demands an immense amount of thought and and the metaphysical assumptions embedded in any given civilization determine their conception of what constitutes knowledge so it is by no means a facile problem nevertheless let it suffice for us now as it serves as a common-sense understanding of Education as for the word liberal Aristotle provides us with a definition in his rhetoric quote of possessions those rather are useful which bear fruit those liberal which tend to enjoyment by fruitful I mean which yield revenue by enjoyable where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the use thus a liberal education involves the student acquiring the preparation for knowledge and the teacher imparting that knowledge based upon the students preparation at each stage through the mechanism of scaffolding or a perception that is done for its own sake and not for a means of sussan so traditionally the idea that you were educated one of the things that really struck me about Mauritania where I study in West Africa is that these students would study twenty years in in the Mauritania madrasah and then they would just they'd go open up a shop in Senegal I mean they they did not study simply to become they to become a scholar or to teach or they studied for their own edification and intellectual edification that's why they studied and one of the signs of the end of time according to our prophet saw him as he said people will study for other than the sake of God once this is accomplished real learning can begin in other words after a didactic phase the real learning by intellectual midwifery the music approach can begin this way we learn to live a fulfilling purposeful life rather than learn to earn a living in terms of preparation I would like to offer an expression from Imam al Juhani the teacher of Islam's greatest scholastic master Imam al-ghazali who lived in the 11th century and later came to be considered the aquinas of islam we would say that aquinas was the gazali of christianity because there quinces after Imam al-ghazali and influenced by him so imam a jew any states you cannot acquire knowledge without six elements i will explain them with brevity a quick mind zeal a foreign land an immense effort a professor's inspiration and a long life span these couplets which are found in many Muslim works and most of our faculty memorize them because we all heard them several times they appear almost 70 years later in a slightly altered form in Latin by Bernard of chakras who says men's Eumelus stadium core nd Vita quita scrutiny intestine pal Paris Tara Eliana okay I hope I didn't mangle that too bad I actually got the Latin medal in high school but I had I haven't studied it for a long time so this translates to it but I do still remember all those paradigms sumeyye says I'm a citizen this translates to a humble mind zeal for learning a quiet life silent investigation poverty a foreign land civilizations rise out of foundational texts without Homer the assonance of Solon or Pericles may never have existed not to mention the Athens of Socrates Plato and Aristotle it's very interesting how many times he's quoted by these masters the Bible enables a great Jewish tradition of scholarship to emerge and when translated into Latin it gives rise to a unique European Christianity as Christians rediscover Athens and extraordinary synthesis occurs that marries Athens and Jerusalem Christianity and Hellenism are the spiritual basis of Western civilization and centuries later as these two traditions begin to wither from neglect and recede into the background the loss of Reason and revelation takes a greater and greater toll on the generations devoid of them culminating in an evaporation of the immaterial glue that held the fabric of society together beginning in the eighth century the Islamic civilization runs parallel with the Western and in many instances intersects profoundly with it if you look at the the great books collection that the University of Chicago did they they go they they go I think it's a Gustin and then the next book is Saint Thomas Aquinas so there's this gap of 600 years it's it's quite extraordinary it's just suddenly something else happens now there was actually a lot more going on in that period then the Dark Ages is something that the Enlightenment liked to look upon this age of deep religion and deeply dyed face so the Dark Ages weren't as dark as a lot of modern minds would have it but nonetheless during that period something quite stunning was happening in the Muslim world so the Muslims had their friend foundational text the Quran which at its heart is a call to knowledge study and devotion I mean the very first word in the Quran is read opera and the Quran mentions the word knowledge over 100 times the word think or reflect has 68 mentions the first word revealed to the Prophet is read and the prophets ally said I'm said seeking knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman in one tradition he states seek knowledge even unto China the pursuit of knowledge became a major obsession of the Muslim world in his book knowledge triumphant the Jewish historian Franz Rosenthal argues that the Islamic civilization is unique in history in having as its raison d'être the discovery preservation and transmission of knowledge but the concept of knowledge included what a man believed what he considered good or bad and whether he had clear standards he was willing to live by hence the idea of an education included moral intellectual and spiritual training in his book Arabic thought in the Western world Eugene a Myers remarks about Imam al-ghazali that his quote first contribution to Islam was to bring education into an organic relation with a profound ethical system he taught that the the material gains could not bring happiness without a moral and spiritual reawakening education must then not be limited to imparting knowledge it must stimulate the moral consciousness of the individual in the same book Myers further reveals the immense influence Athens had on early Muslims as the great Greek classics of science mathematics logic and philosophy were translated during the period from 650 to 1,000 of the Christian era this historical translation movement which included translations by many Arab Christians yeah I Bernard Lee is a great example of that who had studied with the Byzantine tradition introduced several texts that would transform the Muslim world considerably and also create many intellect crises in the process at the same time there was also an immense transmission from Persian and Sanskrit ik works so there was also influence into the Muslim world from these and that's why Islam in this very interesting way is is this extraordinary bridge between the East and the West I mean it's very interesting they caught now the Middle East even though that was a British invention because it was middle to them it's not middle to the people in the Middle East so due to an intense reliance on the Quran and the Sunnah the prophetic tradition and emphasis on language studies highlights the overall education direction grammar lexicology and the collection study and preservation of rich and distinctive jahaly pre-islamic poetry become mainstays of the early muslim curricula Avicenna who died in 1037 takes the corpus of aristotle and he has differences with aristotle so he's not a mockolate of aristotle like you find in Aveiro ease he has his his critiques but he does something quite extraordinary muslims of the dependence on a Hellenistic tradition and so he literally creates his own organ on which he calls the Shifa so this is going to heal this community with its own medicine for the mind and so the Shifa becomes an important book not only in the Muslim East but also in Western Europe through its translation into Latin building upon the Shifa Atticus Adi writes his influential aims of the Philosopher's which if today it would be published as philosophy for dummies or for idiots or something he took a very complex book and made it accessible in fact a lot of Muslim scholars very upset with him because he they said he's made this accessible to common people because his his explanation was so clear and this book the the the the former head of Homeland Security Chernov his father did his PhD at Columbia University on the influence of ACCA's Ali's the aims of the Philosopher's on the Jewish medieval scholastic tradition this was he argues it was the most influential book on the Jewish philosophical tradition so it was a very important book that he did but after he wrote that he wrote a to Hamilton philosophy which is an argument not against philosophy but against peripatetic philosophy this is something a lot of Muslims don't understand that what he was really criticizing were the problems he identifies 20 and from that he identifies three really serious problems in their beliefs so he wasn't criticizing the methodology which even hadn't said was the most rigorous and best methodology even though even Adam was not a fan of philosophers so it's really important a lot of Muslims are unaware of that and so attica's Adi has blamed somehow for destroying the philosophical tradition but he wasn't he was he was troubled so it's very interesting when he wrote the aims of philosophers he there's no critique in it and this would be akin to somebody today who writes a beautiful book on biology puts it out there it wins all these awards and all the biologists that say it's great and then he writes a book debunking evolution it's like he wanted to show look I understand this so this is not a criticism coming from an ignoramus which is very often where criticisms come from from people that really don't understand animal 10mb said come in I've been told I'm sorry how I have had two a minute famous up how many people find fault in what's being said and the fault is in their understanding of what's being said so now what happens then is he introduces logic logic existed in Farabi was working with it and others Farabi introduced logic early but as Ali does something very interesting he sneaks logic into the Islamic scholastic tradition if you look at his introduction to the Mustafa he changes terms he does some really sophisticated things so then what happens is there there's the emergence of the instrumental arts these are called illumine ala sometimes they call them an alumina Elya right the ha you have there alumina a lien and the alumina alia the hi sciences Quran and hadith and is and then they're normal alia the instrumental sciences or arts they were also called a sonata ffedith the the three crafts and and this is what we know in the West as the Trivium and they become fully incorporated into Muslim scholastic tradition grammar however was the focus and if you look there's a beautiful wall mural in in the Louvre in Paris that Botticelli did of the seven liberal arts it so it's a wonderful picture but it shows grammar is personified as a beautiful woman leading this young student into the other six liberal arts and then Prudential is there with her arrow like because amar Tia sin is a archery term and in Arabic Capilla is an archery term so the word for sin in Arabic and in Greek is means missing the mark you know the idea that we're trying to do good but we're fooled by a parent goods thinking that they're real goods and so they understood that grammar was so essential and that's why for the first six or seven years in our tradition you went to what was called grammar school which is a problem because grammar has largely been eliminated there was a war on grammar in the 1960s by linguist who and this gets to essentialism and nominalism because linguists are is their nominalist and grammarians are essentialists so this really goes back to a deep philosophical problem that continues to vex our civilization because we've never resolved this and right now the nominalist are definitely ahead you know my father told me a joke when I was about 12 and I didn't get it till I was about 40 like I I laughed at around 40 but but but but he he he said you know that the he said there was a if you have essentialist Empire and a an empiricist and a nominalist right so the the the essentialist like he calls him as they are and and and the empiricists he calls him as he sees him and the novelist's they ain't nothing till he calls him it took me a while to get that joke but I finally got it so so muslim' developed these incredible grammar schools similarly to the ones that emerged in the Western tradition so that for the first six or seven years of study students memorize the Quran and learn grammar and diction folk abadeer acquisition was done through highly ornate fictional stories called the mahkumat they memorized these Muhammad which are all vocabulary so it was like learning the whole SAT vocabulary through a little fictional vignette students often memorize by rote the entire story and the explanatory notes on word definitions now just to show you how how much rote memorization went in I once I've somebody sent me a poem of 1,000 lines on a science called a diminished epoch which is the relationship of words and derivations and it had all the ish teapots in this poem and it was written by a more Italian scholar mohamed mohamed mohamed satinwood shane who was the teacher the grammar teacher of chef abdullah bin baya so i was i thought i'd found something whose you know I go showing and so I went and I brought it to sheikh abdullah and he looked at he said in a hum did i he said i memorize that and then he started reciting it from heart he knew all thousand lines just in on this poem on vocabulary and that's on top of 4,000 lines of arabic grammar and then lines of poetry as examples of each one of these so people don't realize modern people have a really hard time understanding how much study went into these people and these people were they they were definitely elite but they were trained not to be elitists they were trained to be people that recognized that they were guardians of something they were protectors of something and they needed to do this for the good of the community to protect them in Islam the Prophet Salla I am said if a scholar dies there's a thora there there's an opening in the in the borders of Islam in other words for enemies to get in and the only thing that will will close that border is ask another scholar he has to be replaced so it was an understanding these people were protectors they were guardians of the good of the society and so the Muslim and Western traditions clearly shared this commitment to the liberal arts however as Muslims developed greater emphasis on the religious sciences the liberal arts elements necessary for a fully developed individual begin to recede grammar studies still relied heavily on literature poetry but logic lost its edge because one of the things I have a Sena did was very interesting and and and it took me a while to understand this because he he divorced material logic from the study of logic he considered material logic to be a to be treated under philosophy he did not see it as part of logic and so he had formal logic and so the Sunnis studied formal logic without material logic which is a major problem and anybody who studied both will understand why so the the so the abandonment of material logic traditionally understood to be essential for a robust training in philosophy theology and critical thinking rhetoric continued to be taught to a high degree and it still is I mean there's still some pretty serious writer issues in the Muslim world but the spatial arts of the quadrivium languished and eventually disappeared from religious training until very recently in the Deobandi school they still studied euclid so euclid the muslims were obsessed with euclid and this is why you see all these mosaics and tessellations and these extraordinary geometrical patterns everywhere in the Muslim world because they saw what they saw in geometry was one I mean they argued not was saying the fifth book they argued that if you went through Euclid you would be convinced of God that that the the the the beauty of proportion in nature is so stunning that that one would only conclude that this must have been designed and so that was so why this dissolution identified by even how doing in the fourteenth century began and continued is unclear but one interesting theories presented by George mock to see in his rise of colleges institutions of learning in the Islamic in Islam and the West very important book I think after making a cogent argument that much of the scholastic method of inquiry emerged as a result of the Christian European tradition coming into direct contact with the then dynamic Muslim scholastic tradition Makdissi raises the issue of why after the Middle Ages the Christian West was able to spring forward in its development and them and the Muslim world lingered he says the factors involved are no doubt many and complex but a most important factor to my mind was the provision made for perpetuity in the legal systems the the two legal systems of the civilization of the two civilizations concerned Islam had only one form of perpetuity the walk or Charitable Trusts the Christian West came out of the night thirteenth century with two forms of perpetuity the corporation as well as the charitable trust and even it's terrible trust was in that century capped with the corporation Islam's form of perpetuity was static it's very interesting getting back to the dynamic clinging that I began with that of the Christian West was dynamic Islam labored under the heavy dead hand of mortmain whereas the West was able to make use of all the benefits of the walk and make even this form of perpetuity dynamic through incorporation the divergence and the parallel courses of both civilizations began to take place in the 13th century a great century of corporations for the Christian West the other major factor of Makdessi argues was the government cooperation of the office of mufti which would be akin to a Juris consult in the Western tradition a source of legal opinion prior to the emergence in the 13th century of this government position lawyers were independent and received their salaries from their clients and from patronage and also from al-kahf Makdissi concludes quote the Scholastic method became an emasculated pro forma exercise and even eventually disappeared from the scene as a dynamic element in education and the process of determining orthodoxy on the other hand the Scholastic method was kept alive in the West long after it had disappeared from the land in which it originally developed the Renaissance of the 15th century did not put an end to the practice of disputation in western institutions of learning this practice was continued in college universities of colonial America long after the American Revolution from borrower in the Middle Ages the West became lender in modern times this is George mekdeci who was not a Muslim lending to Islam what the latter had long forgotten as its own homegrown product when it developed the university system replete when it borrowed the university system replete with Islamic elements thus not only have East & West met they have acted reacted and interacted in the past as in the present and with mutual understanding and goodwill may and with mutual understanding and goodwill may well continue to do so far in the future with benefit to both sides which is what this is about so I'm gonna I'm gonna go just because I'm I've been going on I was at Zaytuna College we've set out to do our best you know so the divorce between Athena and Medina explains much of what went wrong in the Muslim world a restoration of this relationship which was so vibrant in the early period and did so much to nurture Europe out of its intellectual malaise is essential for a renewal of the intellectual tradition of Islam which can enable Muslims to grab well intelligently with the challenges of the civilizational crises that currently confronts our entire species how then do we mend the severance just to point out the importance of this what ghazali understood is that within the methodology of this tradition there are important tools for grappling with problems with especially with new problems you cannot deal with the crises of like for instance today we're dealing with gender and the fluidity of gender and this idea somehow that that I can be trapped in the wrong body and and and people do have these experiences but if you don't understand what a human person is if you don't have a philosophical foundation for do we have essences is there something essential to our nature again this gets back to nominalism and essentialism these are philosophical problems if you don't understand them you will not be able to grapple you can just say oh well that's Co far and they're gonna go to hell or whatever that is not a convincing argument for somebody that you want as an interlocutor you have to have a persuasive argument and so this ultimately is is where where the importance of this tradition comes so we've set out to do our best at restoring this holistic tradition which in the West was called the liberal arts and in the Muslim civilization it was known as ad Aristotle jamia the comprehensive studies which lead one to become an Adeeb which approximate the English concept of an erudite gentleman I mean we forget that the Muslim civilization was a civilization of erudition we were committed to learning learning was very important not to become a pedant not you yeah you know like Ogden Nash is you know I introduced to you professor twist you know a conscientious scientists trustees exclaimed he never bungles and sent him off to distant jungles camped along a Riverside one day he lost his loving bride she had the guide exclaimed later than eaten by an alligator professor twist could not but smile you mean he said a crocodile I mean that kind of pedantic which many many people have made fun of in history Butler is one of them also the great poet Alexander Pope you know the Blockheads the bookish Blockheads who fill their minds with lumber you know read so so that is not the point to become somebody who just shows off his erudition or something like that no it's it's to really understand the world is not just matter without purpose but through this matrix of causes the material the efficient the form of the final that placed purpose at the highest level of the inquiry this is the lens through which we can have can view Muslim efforts to help restore this lost tradition beginning with the final cause which answers the question what is the purpose of Education the purpose of Education from our perspective and for Zaytuna College is to aid students in their pursuit and discovery of the truth so we actually do believe that truth is discoverable the Islamic of histological framework remains rooted in the three laws of thought we believe in the law of identity a thing is what it is we believe in the excluded middle and and we also we believe in the law of non-contradiction student you can't deny these laws without affirming them this is one of the ironies of and the paradoxes of these laws in the most important theological Creed in Islamic history the nesaf er written in Central Asia in the 12th century Imam nesaf II and his commentator Imam Hassan II right the people of truth assert that reality is judgment that corresponds with the actual fact it is applied in a general sense to propositions to articles of belief to religions in two different schools of practice with reverent with reference to their inclusion of reality its opposite is the unreal but as for the term truth it is especially applied to propositions its opposition is falsehood the distinction that may be made between these two pairs of contrasts is that in the case of reality the correspondence is seen from the standpoint of the actual fact and in the case of truth from the standpoint of judgment and the meaning of the expression the truth of a judgment is the agreement of the judgment with the actual fact this this is our tradition I mean this was the most studied Creed in the later period so Muslims are committed in the normative tradition to a moderate realism not dissimilar to the Catholic tradition an undeniable mystical dimension exists alongside this approach that has a heavy influence upon the tradition and I may consider it analogous to Newtonian and quantum physics while appearing mutually exclusive they nonetheless operate on different planes something the Islamic tradition referred to as Moradabad was you with varying degrees of existence so Muslims believe that truth can be found supported by reason and actually realized in a sanctified soul these three degrees of existence are known as knowledge of certainty enemity obtained truth of certainty how could be obtained and finally the essence of certainty energy obtained imam al-ghazali likens the stages respectively to the hearing of fire seeing the fire and then actually being burnt by the fire alongside this pursuit of a discoverable truth education must inculcate fallibilism this idea that i could be wrong and this this extremely important hence intellectual humility commands a central position in the hierarchy of virtues in fact Imam al Junaid argued it was the first obligation of the human being as knowledge was unattainable without it so I'll just conclude here I go through these causes the material cause involves the curriculum itself the intellectual mature of the education the tools and subjects for instance that's a tuner we place a strong emphasis upon the acquisition of the tools especially grammar and these tools that were traditionally the foundation of Muslim education the rigour of the Arabic language demands a high level of grammatical understanding to avoid egregious misunderstandings Arabic you cannot really know Arabic any more without understanding grammar and this is it's a difficult language and it's a profoundly all languages have a grammar but without grammar you it's very easy to make major mistakes with Arabic so and then also the vastness of the pre-modern vocabulary so a scholarly Arabic dictionary contains close to 20,000 roots from each route several words can be formed the key was to learn the roots and the meaning patterns I mean to just give you an example Shakespeare uses about 28,000 words 40% he only uses once and he's probably got them the vastest vocabulary in in our English tradition so Arabic you're looking at just an incredible number of words and surprisingly they're used in anybody who spends a lot of time in classical Arabic tradition knows that the words are used and and they're very fortunately the Arabs are humble enough to know that most people don't know a lot of these words so they'll put at the bottom they have no shame in explaining the words in the text we have to look them up generally in English writing so and then the efficient cause involves questions of pedagogy how do we impart knowledge involves both the art and science of teaching all of teaching is either inductive or deductive teaching can also be didactic or dialectical the highest form being dialectical at Zaytuna we seek to revive the didactic element of teaching because it was characteristic of the Scholastic methods of both the Arabic and Latin traditions as a prerequisite to the dialectical element and also because it enriches discussion some liberal arts college is no longer used the didactic method but the lecture ought to be revered as much as rigorous discussion a good lecture is the only way in which nature in which mature master the acts of reasoning can be exemplified for student for this to happen one must attend not only to what is said but the what is of extreme importance but how one unfolds meaning in time in making ideas manifest for others by the artful use of words the orderly acts of the intellect and the clarity and arrangement of discourse the lecturer bids the student to follow a way of thinking that originates in the content and spirit of the Canon of text furthermore when reading the texts in their original language lecturers ought to be compelled as it were by an intellectual law of gravity to keep close to the firm ground of the text the grammatical possibilities and the Mantic fields created by the richness of Arabic etymology the same is true for Latin and Greek the lecture proceeds to practice the exegetical skills necessary to events the unity of a passage or of a number of passages in a text considered in this light lectures can be understood as living commentaries and the students who follow them collaborators in an ancient scholarly are finally we have the formal cause which gets to the essence of education given the formal causes profound relationship to the efficient cause as the formal causes is first an exemplary cause hence the formal cause involves both the pedagogy and the curriculum the curriculum must consistently be informed by the language arts of grammar logic and rhetoric books are approached with an understanding language allows multiple possibilities and one must strive to determine the author's intent in didactic works while more freedom exists in works of literature and poetry logic enables us to determine the soundness of the reasoning and rhetoric to assess the merit of the craft or the artifice the ultimate aim of education is the invocation of love and of the love of beauty truth and goodness in a human being these are the great trends and dentals that are shared by both our traditions Muslims call the highest truth iman or a firm conviction of God's existence and Providence we call goodness Islam or submission and resignation to God's will and action in accordance with it so we do good we we believe true what is true and we do what is good and on earth in accordance with God's will on earth as it is in heaven and we turn beauty it's an which literally can mean to make beautiful yoshino or you Haseeno shaitaan to reflect beauty and to perceive beauty each of these is reflected in the arts of freedom grammar is man's greatest good this is what enables us to communicate and separates us from the animals Adam animo al rahman animal Karanja defense and alimony by anne he taught the human being how to articulate logic makes him capable of recognizing truth and seeing also in its absence and rhetoric enables him to transmit beauty in all he does with mastery of these arts we can embark on the discovery of the absolute by light of reason only free of the constraints of our senses resulting in the perception madatha of reality where at last we find peace and understanding so that I I skipped a few pages but if you want to read the essays in the Renovatio that is in essence I think what we're trying to do here where we're really trying to understand our tradition with the tools that produce the tradition without which it's very difficult to penetrate them but we're also trying to understand the immense tradition that we we're seeing in some ways a dissolution of and Berkeley I think is ground zero in some ways for that we have we have something what Jacques Barzun called primitivism which is this it's a Rousseau e'en desire to get to some kind of primitive state of nature but our tradition is is in in the Quran one of the the gifts in surah-e-yusuf is is that he says one of the blessings of God is that he brought us out of the the body of the bed do because bed to the Bedouins are the first peoples the Aboriginal peoples and their lives are very hard and and they're often they're often cultures that are very rich undeniably but the richness of a literate culture for us is is the great gift of the book and key tab and this is why we honor the Christians and the Jews as a little key tab the people of the book which literally means el Biblio is the Bible so and you could translate as the people of the Bible so we are the people of the Quran and they are the people of the Bible of Khattab and and that's why these three Abrahamic traditions I believe and this is our commitment despite all of the horrors that have been perpetrated by members of all three of these traditions these are beautiful traditions and if they're understood correctly their traditions that bring immense p purpose and meaning to our lives and ultimately we believe salvation of the soul itself according to our prophets Eliza damned who said that anybody who says that you know Allah there is no god but the one true Living God sustainer of the heavens the earth creator of all things seen and unseen then anybody believes in that God will ultimately be saved thank you [Applause] thank you for that shaking that um it's getting a little late but I'd like to see that people have any questions we if you have a couple of questions we might make some time for it if she comes us willing you can line up at this microphone and any of you have any questions please step up and ask them come on over here to the microphone so you can all hear you Chicago thank you very much I'm inspired not only to explore more richly the Trivium and quadrivium in the Western tradition but also its instantiation in the Islamic tradition as well my question perhaps concerns material in the pages that you skipped over it would be too broad to ask you how astronomy and music have shown themselves in in the Islamic traditions down through the ages maybe it would be suffice to ask how you're seeing them instantiated and explored here as I tuna and the role that you see in human formation are those two in particular I you know I would argue thank you for that question it's it's a really wonderful point I would argue that the reason new atheism is around is purely artificial light I really mean that if we would just turn off all the electricity just once a month for people to see the heavens again they would come back to believing in in something bigger than themselves because I personally many times many nights and the Sahara Desert is the darkest place in the world in terms of artificial light there's almost no artificial light where I was many nights in in the Western Sahara I literally was reduced to tea I mean really crying just because it was just so over whelming to see the beauty of the heavens and people have been deprived of this for so long I mean we see Orion which is stunning I love Orion but just to see the multitude of stars the heavens declare your glory Plato said that God put the heavens there for us to see the order and want to bring the order of the heavens down to the earth and and just astronomy is so important and modern astronomy has killed astronomy it has killed it so many people take courses in astronomy at college they're the worst courses that you can take they will kill any love that inspired you to take that course in the first place and so we do a lot of natural based astronomy of literally going out observing the moon we have an incredible teacher dr. Yusuf who's been watching the moon every month for I don't know 25 years or something he's really probably one of the world's leading experts on moon sighting and if you've ever seen a new moon born you will know exactly where I'm talking about I've only seen it once literally come like I saw it birthed and and it was just such a stunning experience to see that but everybody we go out moon sighting and everybody who's done it knows the joy that you get when you first spot the moon it's such a joyous experience and the word for seeing the moon is the same word for the the cry of the child in Arabic is the hell out when it first comes into the world it's it's a shout for the child what am I doing here but for us it's like what is God doing with us this is so amazing so astronomy is really important they learn to do Sun dials they learn to to identify stars we do real phenomenological astronomy just understanding because we are in the geocentric world whether we like it or not the heliocentric and the geocentric are both true one is true from experience and the other is true from just very complicated mathematical conceptual conceptualizations but geocentrism nobody talks about what a beautiful earth turn that is you know because we just don't I mean I always like Paul McCartney said the fool on the hill sees the Sun going down and the eyes in his head see the earth spinning round I mean that's a stunning piece of poetry inspired clearly because that's the modern person where were so conflicted existentially worse and so astronomy is really important music traditionally music harmony it was at ammonia was was the the liberal art it was it was actually far more theoretical than what's what we would consider music today but music the Mohammed were very important the Islamic civilization and we have great masters still alive in that tradition which the Mohammed are closer to what we would call the modes than they are to the modern music but they do I mean they do in Schad and things like that so but we haven't done any formal training in that I really want to get more quadrivium based it's tough a lot of students just shy away from it one of the things that most impresses me about st. John's College is that they really do the quadrivium and they love it the students love it if you if you've never done the in book one I think it's the forty-seventh proposition if you've never done it and you CLE just do it one time it's actually quite stunning experience to prove the Pythagorean theorem moat and in high schools they teach you how to use it it's a utilitarian function of of it but Euclid was much more in showing you why these things are true not what you can do with them hello thank you for your very interesting lecture I have a question kind of about bringing forward the synthesis of the traditions I know often in the Christian tradition you know in our you know theological journals and things like that I mean we really often working in Latin sources or translations thereof I'm wondering is anyone discussing possibly doing additions possibly of original languages and translations of the Scholastic the Latin and the Arabic scholastic writers I mean in one book facing pages or or inter interlaced works so that scholars can have that all in one place right well I mean that's definitely what the curriculum series is about so for instance we're producing in in in in the next couple of months I think hopefully it'll be done by December a book on Matuidi theology with a critical Arabic Edition and a really good english translation by one of our professors fotos Khan we're also working now on it we're editing ghazzal e's book on logic which is an amazing textbook for logic in we have a critical Arabic Edition so it's going to be side by side so what we hope to do is bring out you know I don't know if people know like Loubs classics right like some people know I all the teachers are going but but lobes clap I'll tell you about lobes classics as anybody ever heard of the Kuhn Loeb family okay this is one of the biggest banking families of New York they were billionaires in today's money so over a hundred years ago one of their sons went to Harvard and studied Latin and Greek and had a really hard time and so he convinced his dad one of the richest men in America to fund the translation of all these Greek and Latin classics so I'm looking for that character to help us so if you know this somebody like that right one of the students we have has a billionaire student that comes and can convince their dad to fund but this does take a lot of work and to free people up to do these translations but and then the Scholastic version I would love to see some of the translations of Ghazali and these that are in Latin you know really bringing those back into I think they'll probably be pretty good translations because they were they were such rigorous scholars so that would be fascinating but Latin and Greek will come back they will have their revival and already we see the seeds of it Arabic is to me just it is such a stunning ocean and if you you know I wanted to study other languages but there's always something more to learn in Arabic so it's one of those languages that where you fall into it it's just really difficult to get out and that's the reason why the Arabs call a dictionary is called a mousse which means ocean right so Arabic is literally it's just vast and it's it's extraordinary and there's great gifts in it and and we believe the wisdom of the you know Mark Twain once said that the ancients stole all their best ideas from us one of the best reasons for studying the classics is that you realize one we're all still human the problems of yesterday were around if you want to read a wonderful study on women fed up with with men governing everything just read Aristophanes the assembly women you know I mean it's it's like they were dealing with the same problems or read Lysistrata you know fed up with wars and sending young men to war I mean there's so much the mess now he is filled with incredible psychological insights into the nature he Rumi has a great story of a man who goes to have a lion tattooed on his back and so the tattoo artist starts and he's like what's that what's that he said it's it's it's the tail it's the tail he said they're gonna start with the head and so he goes to the head and they said what's that he said it's the head he said I don't do the body and then and then he's same thing happens with the body and finally room he just says that you know you have to suffer if you want to be aligned if you want to be great if you want to be virtuous you have to suffer you have to but people want everything without the pain of getting it so he uses that there are many examples of that in in both the traditions I mean if if you read Livy said that the study of history is medicine for a sick mind because when you study history you will you'll feel a lot better about the time you're living in I mean we're actually living and global warming is it's uncomfortable but pestilence and plague that was uncomfortable to like 25 million people died you know I mean we tend to forget like how good things are and that's why these people are really worth reading if you want to understand what happened in Syria you can I guarantee you can find out by reading and maca DZ and ma crazy wrote a book on the causes of the collapse of states and and everything that he identified I I saw the correspondence or read book 5 of Aristotle's politics on revolutions and and you'll see why Aristotle talks about the 99% and the 1% he talks about this problem that then ham brunt right the German back in the 1970s people are too young in here to remember this guy he wrote a book called north and south basically predicting what's happening in Europe right now he said if we don't do something about this incredible equality gap of wealth we're gonna have a disaster on the horizon and you will have these people flooding in desiring what we have because they're so deprived so it's very important these are ways of understanding our world that having understanding you know knowing a diagnosis is a great gift just to know what's going on with you there's a relief that comes even when the doctor gives you a terminal there's a relief that comes with having a diagnosis of knowing what's wrong but you cannot work to make something better until you make a sound diagnosis of what's wrong and so we believe at Zaytuna that what's wrong with the world is very simple it's ignorant and the the cure is education that it's a very simple equation it doesn't mean that there aren't evil educated people gurbles was real he was the only PhD in the higher hierarchy of the Nazi government he you know is a smart guy he studied one of our great social psychologists his book on propaganda so he learned a lot from the Americans but education is not necessarily going to protect you from being evil or crafty but ignorant there's a real problem so thank you [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: Zaytuna College

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Keywords: islam, hamza yusuf, zaytuna college, medina, athena, liberal arts

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Length: 88min 37sec (5317 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 08 2019