The Essence of Islamic Education - Part 1 of 3 - Abdal Hakim Murad

hamdulillah lady Angela Allah Abdi hooyo thurber all of you I wager hiya MA yonder Robertson Sadie de milodon oh you betcha al mu'minin alladhina amanu sallu haughty and elohim Madren hasana murky tina thehe ibadah rashida la ilaha illa ma wahdahu la sharika lah lah al mulk wa lahul hamdu lillahi are Girolamo color eyeshadow and si Yi Donna moment anna muhammadan abdullah he wore a solo sallallahu alayhi wa ala ali hill at heart Mahalo aah sobbing of yard Amanita virosa nutter who was at all energy healer Yomi Dean may I start by thanking you all for taking the trouble to come I know there are more tasty items on the organizers menu then my own talks but I'm very grateful that you should have taken out the time mat from your busy schedules and nowadays is there anybody who isn't impossibly busy to come to this event it will become eminently clear to you if it is not already that my function is not that of an island I may lay no claim to that dizzying title qualification neither am i here as saintly or a holy person I'm even further from that description and we all know that the only distinction that counts is the distinction between human qualities whose criterion is that of taqwa in the academic or mind Allah he adds to our form Allah subhana WA Ta'ala has distinguished definitively the qualities of human beings by establishing the criterion of taqwa is resonance is a complex and inshallah familiar to us all possibly if Allah permits we will have occasion to look at some of the meanings of the concept of taqwa and if there's anything I know for certain it is that I am NOT at Sparkle certain that there are people here whose quality and fasting and of prayer and of Amuro and Hajj and of love of Allah subhana Allah and His Messenger are categorically superior to my own so if I have any justification for being here and enjoying your your company over the next few days it is that I can claim to be a kind of brick wall uncomprehending from which perhaps some echo of what the automat have to say can be heard that really is my function and I can make no legitimate Islamic claim to be anything more than that perhaps their voice can bounce off me in other distorted a form and there may be Allah willing some benefit now I don't know if you've been told about what I'm planning to speak on there is no I think basis or paradigm in the Sunnah or in the conventional practice of Muslim scholarship for a kind of Deen intensive sudden complete immersion course such as that which we have the privilege to attend these few days so one's approach can I think be relatively flexible one can follow what used to be called the wire it'll what the inspiration of the moment we have a small enough fellowship here to be able to make this a inshaallah on interactive event and inshaallah they all be opportunities for an interaction in the form of questions and discussion but if there's any kind of coherent unifying theme that i'll be trying to address it will be the theme of this quality of taqwa unfolding as a divine bestowal through a process of education and I will be using as a framework on which to hang this principle the idea that it is through instruction the inculcation of knowledge not just Khattab but also hikmah that we are taken out of the state of s fellows ethylene the lowest of the low and brought back to our true divinely purposed status which is that of the ha'la'tha of Ravel's Alamein the representatives lieutenants vice Jarrett's however you wish to translate it and like all the core Islamic Quranic terminology it is given the profanity of English untranslatable then this process comes about through what we might very generally term education because this was the way of rasulullah sallallahu aleyhi wa salem even though his knowledge was cash fee rather than cassabi that is to say it came through a divine disclosure both through his processes of tufa court before the reseller and also through the explicit wahi that came following the overwhelming momentous experience in the cloud of a rock this was through a divine disclosure Wellum taken noble weten mocked si ba followed up a few highly Allah Aqaba february want to read it that prophecy is not acquired it is not mocked s about however high hmm an education educated person might be in terms of his degrees nonetheless there is a way in which the way in which allah subhana wa ta'ala educated his chosen one that can form a son and a precedent and a paradigm for ourselves and he himself has specified this by saying for instance on the lava alayhi wasalam at debonair road before DB My Lord has given me a dub which in Islamic imagination and heritage means really everything that is true because courtesy comes from knowledge adult can mean literature it can mean cultivation it can mean good manners come in a wide variety of things the grab bag of the virtues if you like for Asuna tete DB and he did it well so one of the things we'll be exploring is the way in which we can find in the original archetype and paradigm which is to be found and said no muhammad sallallahu alayhi wasallam some archetype in paradigm which might be applicable to ourselves as we fourteen hundred years down the line seek to drag ourselves out of the swamps of ignorance and to regain our divinely intended natures now one way of understanding this is by looking at human history in a very grandiose way if you like and seeing a large providential engagement with human failings in history in terms of three great and many lesser falls and Reclamation's the fall coming about through a satanic act of ignorant and the reclamation coming about through forms of Education human repentance and clawing back an entitlement to the divine gift of knowledge what are these three big ones individually we know this this happens constantly it's the nature of human beings that we have a state of knowledge and then we fall away from it then we regain it and fall away human the human religious life is a dynamic process of moving forward and then verses our forgetfulness moving backwards and the way to for Laughs is not through some unproblematic triumphant procession to light in the grave it's a good deal more difficult more painful than that as we all know we try at most for every hundred steps we take forward not to take more than 99 steps backwards again and that in our age in particular is hard enough and can only be accomplished through divine aid and the prayers of those who are close to allah subhanaw taala so that's the case in every human individual case but historically also there seem to be three very large collective cases of this which perhaps can frame our discussion of this idea of education and the first and if you like the paradigmatic one is what in the West would be referred to as defaul and this in its Quranic framing is particularly instructive because in fact it's not a form at all but an assent this is the true ascent of man if you look at the tough years particularly the tafseer of an alum or even kathira you'll see that this is a very positive and a hopeful event why because the consequence of the departure of Sigma Adam and say that najara alayhim as-salam from the Paradise Isle state into the arena of good and evil light and darkness knowledge and ignorance that is the world is the positive one the progressive one of gaining potential in the state of Halawa adam alayhis-salam is only truly the khalifa of allah subhanaw taala in dunya in nija island fil ardi Khalifa he says to the Angels in that great prologue in heaven that I am creating in the earth Khalifa this is what he says about Adam and it is this that makes it legitimate for the angels to prostrate to and I'm not because of his state as part of a harmonious world of complete obedience harmony with the divine world in gender but because of the much greater human glory that comes about through being away from Jenna but still being a loss Khalifa fil old so in the Islamic perspective we say that we do not believe in the fall and that word does not exist in our vocabulary what we believe in is the ascent from a kind of angelic condition of complete unquestioning obedience through the accidental moment of ignorance which is eating from the tree surgery to hold to what is objectively a higher condition in most human cases a condition of potentiality because we only potentially Adam it is only a few individuals who truly have the state of knowing all of the names and what is that movement back to this higher state it's a process of tally Minocqua ran itself in those magnificent opening verses of surat al-baqara which really set the framework for its entire anthropology makes this clear clear where our lemma elderman ESMA are called ah and he taught Adam all of the names and the process of of retrieval which was the process of exaltation of men was Vitalik our Adam Emil Ron be he Kelly met and Adam received from his Lord certain words Futaba are they and he relented towards him or according to some of the more faster on Adam repented towards his Lord when he learned these things these Kalamata now we don't need to go into the details what exactly those words were not on a mat have fertile abundance of interpretations but it's clear that this is a process of Education that takes Adam from his original latent almost childlike state in the gender to the more exalted macomb or condition of being a Las Khalifa on the earth so the first fall to use that term it leads to the glorious consummation of the Adamic honey for perfection which is knowing all of the names so education in this sense is not merely the inculcation of knowledge far from it education in the true Islamic sense is the entire religious process which is coming out of the state of disobedience and gaining something that's even higher than the state of the Angels because the angels can bow down to man and vice versa is not possible that's the first of the three Falls which is made good by education and the second of them the second fall or the second expulsion perhaps a better word is the one that specifically relates to our covenant as the umma muhammediye which is the banishment by sigma ibraheem alehissalaam of say death Mahajan and Sedna is muhyul into the southern desert he leaves them in the the harem in Makkah before the construction of the Kaaba the word in Haley these are in a valley with no cultivation no water no cultivation no grass nothing the most arid place in the world the most unpromising place in which an old man could leave his young bride and his baby son and he does this in obedience to allah subhana wa ta'ala skom and because his maqam was the low form of complete acceptance of allows de cream so this is if you like a second descent a second fall a second management from the Verdier of of canaan to the aridity of the arabian desert and this apparent calamity leads to the highest religious state collective state that has ever been accomplished by humanity because Sydnor ismaeel alehissalaam is the forefather i've seen o muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and Sedna Muhammad who is from mecha is made possible by that act of apparent abandonment abandonment by ibrahim khalil alehissalaam so from that second for the second exile comes a still greater still more momentous reclamation a definitive final reclamation of the Adamic possibility and how does this come about it comes about again through an active education because the first word that the angel says to the prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam on jebel and nor is ear cannot recite active education the angel is as it were teaching him and what is he being asked to recite it's being asked to recite in the name of his lord who created created man from a drop of blood ha la colline sana min alaq Yevkurov arabic al Akram recite and your Lord is the most generous and Leddy al-al'ama be a column who taught by the mean by means of the pen unlevel in sir namo namaha allah talks that which he knew not so the first purely prophetic experience of satan at adam alayhis-salam is an experience of education the language of terylene and the first purely prophetic experience have said no muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is again education totally the same route is used on Lemmon in CERN and Melanie alum so American to bid on mineral units and innovation amongst the messengers absolutely not because as the Adamic state being reclaimed through the Ishmaelites covenant through the second exile and the consequences of it the fruits that flow flowed inexhaustibly from that remote desert valley as an exhaustible as well observe them itself has been the island of Almaty muhammediye in all of its endless and perfections they're all norm of the AMA muhammediye which are more exalted more sophisticated more diverse than the uh norm of any previous um but that's what I would refer to and again this is not doctrine as such this is merely my suspicion of what's happening in in history that's the second of my three falls or exile and the third in the midst of which we ourselves live is the third expulsion from the garden which is modernity the expulsion from Beauty into a desert of machines expulsion from a garden of nutritious meaning into the desert of mirages in false gods confusion stress of ignorance of the new jahiliyya and it's the nature of the third fall that it is not yet resolved however and this is a particularly vital for those of us who feel weighed down by the experience of the objective material triumph of modernity and the objective defeat of the sacred civilization of Islam that we should see it in terms of this historic pattern of cycles that allah subhana wa ta'ala x' essential nature is rama katha bar allen FC hare rama and if you attend solitude tear away with a pure hearted imam is as likely to burst into tears following that verse as he is anywhere else because this is the divine nature and he does not say that he is under any other compulsion but he does say cat about alan of seha drama he has prescribed rama for himself because this is his inmost nature the first name which he chooses for himself in his final revelation is the rough man and the second is the Rahim now it is part of the quality of modernity that we have forgotten there and that we have become preoccupied with what is peripheral and we forget that everything in history and everything in geography and everything in the world is merely however thinly we ourselves as fallible human entities may perceive it is an expression of the pure armor of allah subhana wa ta'ala because that is his essence everything else is one of the our odds is contingent fleeting passing necessary given that the diversity of the created order but what is pure and what is lasting is the name of Rahman in the hadith we learn that Allah hasn't as a hundred mercies one of which he is sent down to earth by which human beings and animals other creatures have mercy to one another yet our family behalf and he has stored up 99 mercies by which he will show mercy to his believing bondsman on the yarmulke Jana and the Theia morphic nature of the rasulallah his salat wa salam is shown no more clearly in his quality of rahmatan lil al-amin the name of God to which he is most directly attached is the essential name of God which is the divine Rama former auto Celica illa rahmatan lil al-amin now looking at the Muslim Ummah today you'd have thought that we had somehow I raised that from our copies of the Quran and that we had a raised the verse cat about ala nafsi hare rama from our copies of the Quran and that we have forgotten that the divine nature is purely good because it is pure light light is goodness there is no evil in the divine nature and instead we have turned Islam into something that frequently not just in our eye bad of allah subhanaw taala and in our intuition of his nature but also in our dealings with each other that this Torah home was gone that instead we are abrasive and suspicious and that when we see a brother who is praying in a way that's slightly different to the way we have been taught to prayer pray our first instinct is not a hamdulillah a point of light in a dark universe nope instead we say well if n he was holding his hands a little bit higher or if his toe was a little bit shorter or if so we have turned the pure Rama that is the the practice of the Sharia into a weapon with which to strike one another and this is a very dangerous and subversive inversion of the intention of religion because the Sharia is pure Rama Allah has no desire to impose encumbrances on his slaves everything that he requires is pure Rama because that is his nature and the Sharia is pure Rama occasionally we may not perceive that but what we know for sure is that this comes from a lord who has no interest in us save in bringing us to what is in our best interests Brahma till in our lavigne is the attribute of the one who he sent to us now the modern world which has shaped this Muslim forgetfulness of the principle of Rama and which it is one of the objectives indeed the chief objective of Islamic education to reclaim is all about a preoccupation with the world after the fall of this third fall which I referred to the third four comes about through forgetting meaning or through the growing suspicion that there is no meaning that all that exists is what can be touched and what can be felt on experienced and enjoyed now this process is something that we have to understand if we are to understand what the agenda for an Islamic education that can bring us back to the Adamic possibility might be in our present day admittedly very difficult circumstances one of the great failings I feel of us as Muslims in the West is that we don't really understand the West we come here with some vague belief that yes this is a materialistic civilization but it allows us to practice our religion and the Quran says well I tend some I'll say become in a dunya that forget your portion of dunya so why not get jobs here and further the education of our children and so on but very rarely do we see any effort on the part of Muslims seriously to think about what this civilization is and the result is in many cases the loss of Islamic identity within a generation or two because we don't know what is the caustic mixture of this melting pot into which we have jumped or at least into which we have happily thrown our children it's a religious obligation that we must know where we are particularly for those of us in mother hip that generally do not accept the legitimacy of such a hitter in the first place the Maliki method for instance doesn't acknowledge it you can't do it you can't leave a land in which the Adan is heard everywhere for a land in which the Adan is tentatively heard inside mosques alone Haram Malika a Lama in Spain when the Christians captured it from the Muslims said anhedral we're due back you have to leave for the dar al-islam the only complexity there of course is that where is the dar al-islam nowadays that's what might render our presence here valid but in any case we are here now in many cases it was not our own decision and we have to understand as a matter of urgency what are the guiding principles of the civilization which shapes the lives of those around us and hence whether we like it or not inevitably shapes our own souls because we are all to a greater or lesser extent westernized you can't escape our environment it's the human temperament and nature to be affected by those with whom we have dealings by the shape of the buildings in which we live by the technologies which we use nothing is neutral everything is culturally and religiously significant and coded and breeds the ethos of a particular worldview and civilization we need to understand what is that ethos what is that civilization is it one that will enable us to create a project for Islamic education and hence for Islam by uncritically importing medieval Islamic paradigms and assuming that the application will still be relevant what do we need some kind of fertile synthesis are there ways in which we can even learn from at least the techniques of modernity in the fundamental Islamic ambition to regain our status as ha'la'tha of Adam and how we're now the quality of the modern world is if you like a preoccupation with signposts that it's best and its worst it's nothing at all individuals wandering through life in a kind of contented warm fog perhaps occasionally having a glimmer of recollection of something higher something more meaningful but essentially wasted lives perhaps most lives are like that but we can also say that because we don't believe in the fall and particularly for the Myrtle Reedy Imams we know that there is a natural knowledge and that human beings can Intuit goodness and truth and the Creator without access to a formal cash fee revelation that there is knowledge around us that is in some sense authentic knowledge the actuaries would have problems with this the metal readers are much more comfortable with it the ashtray raises no doubt you know deny the possibility of natural knowledge and an intuitive knowledge of good and evil before model - Shara before the advent of a revelation the matter really Imams and this is perhaps the biggest distinction between the two suddenly schools of theology say that of course there is natural knowledge if the Quraish didn't have some intuition of what was good what was evil for Fatah the address of the Quran to them could have had no meaning that's a complex debate in Islamic epistemology I don't want to go into it but what it does mean I think is that from the point of view of a man to really perspective that we cannot dismiss out of hand the experience and the practices of any civilization because the fitrah is still there it may be submerged perverted misunderstood but it cannot be entirely erased because it is part of the human composite you can't do away with it you can't have a human being who is wholly ignorant and is wholly evil everybody has some inkling of the falafels now the virtue that we might wish to look at here is the virtue of tefik war or thicker which is one of the pillars of the currents of histology alladhina at coronal maha PM and Wako or than wha I'll urge and all be him we're two factor or nappy pulpits emma.ware t well I'll this is a description of the rule el Bab and no appreciation of Islamic understanding of Education can be complete when we unless we understand this particular piece of Quranic vocabulary the loop is in the Quran vision the essence of man and it's a word that means originally a seed or a core in other words that which is at the center perhaps invisible to outside observers but that which is fruitful and can lead to a posterity and can lead to infinity its potentiality and the oil Al Bab other people who have this potentiality and one of their attributes in these great culminating verses of surah al-e-imran is that they remember allah they have thickened standing sitting and on their sides and they have thicker because they think about the way in which the heavens and the earth are created vicar is a rare commodity in the modern world authentic thicker is almost as rare amongst Muslims as amongst non-muslims because we tend to go through the motions more than experiencing the reality but thicker is something that can be said to be universal the problem of modernity is that our increasing knowledge of the diversity and the brilliance of Allah's creation has distracted us because of its beauty and brilliance and precision from getting the whole picture we can't see the wood for the trees maybe one day they will come up with the equation or the theorem that finally cracks it misses not beyond the bounds of possibility Stephen Hawking's in his brief history of time says if we can finally get the unified theory then we shall know the mind of God and he's not an atheist he's a kind of careful agnostic who's hedging his bets and thinks well nothing that I have discovered in my laboratory on my equations proves that there is no unifying principle behind existence I just haven't cracked the final equation yet my suspicion is that the final equation will not be disclosed to human mind because then it would unfairly privilege a bunch of academics and mathematicians and it's not on Mars will that academics should have privileged access to him it's his will that all human being should equally have access to him one of their intelligent or stupid whatever their race whatever their educational attainment because he is just and Tova has to be available to all human beings but who knows maybe he will come across an equation that enables him to say yep there was one principle one generative principle that brings about all the secondary principles of existence quite possible but for the moment he hasn't got them now we could say using the Islamic vocabulary that their state is that shovel nut nah and Allah Annie Laidlaw Allah all of the pointers have distracted us from what is being pointed to Sedna Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam who is the archetype of to or because this is what he was doing so his to handle on dribble and nor its contemplating the creation of the heavens and the earth how everything is put together superb military beauty balanced murder off you hope did not burn him into fault you don't see any inconsistency in the creation of allah subhanaw taala and the balance of of the universe is one of the great marvels that has been undercut uncovered by modern science we all know apparently that if the energy generated by the Big Bang had been infinitesimally greater then the formation of matter would have been impossible it would have been infinitesimally smaller then the process of expansion would have stopped almost instantaneously so from the point of view of secular science we're living in the great mysterious improbability I think the statistics against it as somewhere in the order of 1 to the power of 50 virtually an impossibility but here we are and they have something called the anthropic principle which they think explains why we should happen to be here we weren't here well then we wouldn't be talking about it sooner since the question is irrelevant here we are too bad from a theologians point of view we would say well this makes it look as if faith blind faith is a much stronger principle for atheists than it is for believers we have a coherent explanation they just have a view of the world as being virtually an impossibility that here it is and we just have to accept it that's blind faith if you like but despite this this marvel that there should be anything at all they are nonetheless preoccupied with looking at the models Hubble Space Telescope with its deep field can look further and further away exploring the mysteries of the first moments of creation the most remote galaxies but what it can't tell us what it hasn't been designed for is why and that can only be known ultimately through cash because there is nothing in the logic of the creative world that can irrefutably point to beyond its own nature philosophical arguments higher mathematics Hubble Space Telescope cannot reach beyond themselves that's not what they're for they are part of of Arlt they're part of the physical world and it's one of the greatest errors in religion to think that you can come up with it with a an argument a rational argument on the level of meditation level of argumentation of logic that proves anything can't do that the system is closed and it's circular you can point to the coherence of theism and this is traditionally what I'd milk Allen in Islam has done you can show how it is the best possible best available explanation but you cannot prove anything definitively because the physical and human argumentation is in the realm of the physical its nozzle cannot reach the metaphysical metaphysical reaches the physical not by subversive because it's higher to the rakul absurd will for you that equal of saw says in so little baccarat that absurd or perceptions on czar if you like in the language of motor can Amin cannot attain him how can a fallible human brain cannot attain the the reality of the minds that created everything the Hubble Space Telescope can see categorically different but that mind certainly sees what we see in what we know he is al Raheem The Watcher is a Shaheed the witness so when we talk about Islamic education we are not talking about a purely Fitri derivation of metaphysical knowledge from empirical data we've always been clear about this this was imam al-ghazali's realization but the eye McCallum or any discursive knowledge cannot reach beyond itself we need revelation and we need that revelation which is mediated to after the Allah map not just the revelation of Lazar here and the Afghan the do's and don'ts of religion as infallibly preach to us by the founder of a great religious tradition but also more subtly less expressively something of the inner greatness of the Sahib early Raj of the man of the Maharaj because we are required to make to look of the rasulallah he slept alone to acquire his properties following of the Sunda is no following at all if it is merely looking at his outward being educated by his outward and not experiencing anything of his inward properly speaking that is of course impossible because we believe in the unity of the human composite that which is done to the soul has an effect on the body than the mind that which is done to the mind has an effect on the body and the soul that which is done to the body has an effect on the mind and the soul these three aspects of man reflected in the hadith language in terms of Islam Iman and Sam what to do with your body or to do with your mind what you do with your soul are closely linked we don't believe in any dualism this is why the modern world is so aberrantly and tragically wrong when it says for instance that sexual relations before marriage just fine why not it's just recreation like any other recreation now we would say that's because historically you have inherited a dualism between body and spirit we believe however that these three aspects of humanity are closely linked and that just as if the spirit is sick the body can fall sick as well modern doctors will acknowledge this that many physical illnesses originating what they call psychological states that's not controversial but the opposite is true as well if you do something momentous to the body that's going to have an effect on the spirit but they can't see that the idea that you can be spiritually transformed by something that happens to the body is very alien to the Christian tradition certainly alien to the Western post-keynesian dualistic mentality it's not just a question of morality here it's a question of spirituality what you do to the body affects the spirit and hence affects your salvation we link the three our forms of I bear debts are all to do with the body as well as the mind in the spirit the soul an obvious example Ramadhan obvious example the Hajj certainly an obvious example of these reminders that we must serve allah subhana wa ta'ala with everything not just with the spirit and the body is just a fallen piece of flesh that goes its own way in the world turns up occasionally in church no with the whole body with everything we look here at the human cone so to get back to the story we can say that the predicament of modernity is that we have lost sight of the fact that everything in existence is not just vested with a meaning which we attribute to it but it's significant as a signpost now what is hopeful and what I suppose justifies the matter reading expectation here is that they are not pure materialists and pure atheists that's an extremely unusual position even if they may say I don't believe in God they may say well I have a spiritual dimension then I believe there is something beyond the physical world that's normal because pure atheism is so alien to the human creature such a denial of what we ourselves into it but what the modern world does still have is an attraction to beauty because if you like as Plato about beauty as the splendor of the truth where there is beauty there is truth we may not be able to articulate it but it's there this is why Islamic civilization is always when it has been healthy and inevitably produced Beauty truth produces beauty it can't help that do so and the primordial symbols of our religion are all expressions of pure beauty the Kaaba beautiful so beautiful that the Sun were is to look at it when you're in the harem rather than to look down in prayer all but a sucker are the first Muslim building if you like is superbly beautiful built in the time of the Sahaba they black or bad even a Samet shed dead been else another great Saints from the Sahaba buried within 100 yards of the Dome of the rock clearly knew what they were doing the beautiful soul of the soul that is illuminated by truth produces beauty it cannot produce ugliness and the greatest beauty in the early days of Islam was the face of signo Muhammad sallallahu alayhe wassallam you look at the shimmer in Liberty remedy and any of the early works that indicate how one man was able to transform the most fractious abrasive difficult divided people on the planet you will see that people used to love looking at him so many descriptions of his face and why did the girls have been on that jarrah sing when he arrived with with a walker of the hit Attalla al Boudreau Elena best known song in the AMA that's because everybody compared him to the full moon stock Arabian image for great physical beauty and there are hadith which indicate how the Sahaba would just look and look and look on the prophetic Beauty they could not tire of it so yeah we can say with Plato beauty is the splendour of the truth and the modern world insofar as it still recognizes beauty it's not completely lost to us and it's still a context in which we can have some authentic responsive existence and the corollary of this is that however apparently fine the practices of an individual Muslim or his or her community or nation or city where beauty is not being produced we can say that there is something radically wrong the word Muslim is getting up for Tahajjud and fasting for months in a year but his house is ugly and garish with tacky overwrought furniture there's something wrong there was an imbalance because the Muslim soul has to be at ease with its environment that is how Muslims have always been and if you go to the most tastefully decorated houses in the West you will often see that some of the most precious artifacts the people have spent millions on the Islamic artifacts ceramics from Persia most likes from Egypt carpets world's most beautiful carpets all this variably come from the Islamic world they have those artifacts because they still have this Fitri perception of what is beautiful and harmonious and serene we don't have those artifacts we can spend a lot on decorating our houses usually too much but beauty well somehow we've lost it the bossy era somehow has has passed us by so the modern world should I let her and ilnur onion mcglone that the signposts have distracted us away from what they are pointing to the modern world sees beauty and appreciates beauty and loves beauty because of some vaguely apprehended sense that here is al-haq but there is no moral context and there's no theological context so often the appreciation of beauty is abusive for instance the city of Fort Lauderdale built in a beautiful place nature surrounds us with all of its evocative splendor speaking of al-haq the sea is beautiful and yet people can't say al-haq they've forgotten what it means although their souls are telling them this is true they'd like to forget their worries by sitting and looking out but see and they don't know why but they feel at ease when they do so the obsessive appreciation of the human body particular characteristic of the modern world is we might say despite its complete absence of a moral context and the human tragedies that flow from the lack of that morality nonetheless rooted in an authentic instinct which is to perceive the the most beautiful thing in all creation is humanity so in a sense despite the the baseness and the pornographic regard of the human body nonetheless the underlying instinct if you pair away all of the layers of distraction and sin and selfishness and self regard at the root of that there is the fitrah because of Benny Adam has been created in the surah allah created adam allah saw a team but that's no little thing this is part of the perky laugher so the fit is still operative but the context has been lost people are so dazzled by the beauty of the signpost that they spend their entire lives hanging around the signposts and adoring and embracing and caressing the signposts but without being able to open their eyes to see where those signposts are pointing towards but at least they are at the signpost and that's a good point of departure this is what I refer to as the third fall the fact that we are out of the garden that presumably Florida 300 years ago was a kind of eidetic possibility inhabited by peoples who certainly knew to hide the Great Spirit Native Americans the Seminoles who lived around here knew of the one although their original Rossella whatever it might have been clearly had become distorted but nonetheless they knew it and they revered the natural order they perceived Huk in the hulk that's been replaced by a very very degraded mechanized vision of the human condition now the fact that this is another fall should suggest and this perhaps links up with what I was trying to say earlier that we should be optimistic that we should have hope and that our solar law sallallahu alayhi wa sallam who was no be a rama claim on your head bald felon you like optimism he knew that allah wishes the best for his slaves for his servants and that just as the superficial calamity of the departure of signa adam from the garden turned into a mercy and the superficial calamity of the solitude of hydra and a smile and the desert valley valley turned into the blessing that was rahmatan lil al-amin so too we must and should hope that this third fall will lead to another great episode of divine mercy and salvation now we don't know that hey we don't know the future and there seems to be a species of Islamic futurologists around now that I think that we can safely discount that nothing is predictable and human history least of all in religious history but we must be optimistic and we must recognize that Allah has not departed from the human experience from the human condition he is still alpar Eve he hasn't said I'm not going to call myself by that name any longer he hasn't become aldehyde he's never unburied we can be bide but he is not by it he is not far he's still closer to us than Hubble worried than the jugular vein and Tova is an easy thing because Toba is yearned for by the fitrah we have a thirst in our hearts for that authentic Tober toe burton Nassau ha which brings us back into harmony into peace our souls all tell us that this is what we desperately need and when we feel some glimmerings of an authentic turning back towards the light we experience a joy that makes everything else disappear from our memories and perception true Talbott is the greatest Rama the greatest blessing that Allah can confer upon us because it comes from one of his names which is a toweb which is the name that was operative when Sydnor adam acquired his status as as khalifa Toba and Khilafah are inseparable it's a divine gift and tell about because it is in the hands of allah subhanaw taala is not a difficult thing Allah if he once can make anybody repent even although it was too late for him philm repented in need to bloom and now I repent when he was about to be drowned but according to the majority of the Allah not that was just too late but even if Iran can repent and that repentance really is if you like the essence of Islamic education everything we learn about our Deen is part of a program of repentance talib are properly speaking means turning around the semitic tradition this has always been understood and it's a better word then repentance which has the sense of sinfulness penitence and is essentially within a Christian framework the Old Testament Hebrew attestation var which is cognate with our table just means turning around and the human condition since I talked a bit about astronomy can perhaps be likened through an astronomical metaphor to series of particles created by thrown out from the one there's also light at the center of the system and as time goes by we darken and some of us even look away from the light we still dimly into it all of us that that light is there at our backs shining from behind us even the most decadent drug dealer in Miami knows that on some level that there is some light there somewhere but dunya is lot more interesting but that awareness of the fitara is never completely gone and as we move away from the lights the light seems to become dimmer and dimmer but it never disappears because light is ubiquitous and all eyes Norrell Samoa tea will addled nowhere where there is pure darkness there's pure darkness is pure absolute nothingness and there is anyone absolute - is Allah the thing else's is relative so the process of talbert is detecting ah there is a light and I have a nostalgia for that light and I want to return to that light and be bathed and cleansed and purified by that light and the talbert is the turning-around maybe as much as 180 degrees depending on our state and once again seeing the light and then through processes known to Islamists who look moving back towards that light now that process by which these celestial bodies turn around is in the hands of allah subhanaw taala he controls the strings of the cosmos but for some mystery which it has not been given to the prophets to disclose we do have some volitional share in this process we're not automata and what we can do is not to repent through this great thing that we call education understood in the broadest sense it's not to repent but at least for ourselves on the divine mercy and say Amnon Elena be Toba bless us with a repentance tough still nerve in Qin Li Hao BA that will wash us clean of every evil evil act while cinnamon shudder leo Burr and protect us from the evil of returning to what we were doing well they thought automatic upon and the reins of your Rama never stopped just a moment hunderd so we pray for it and we throw ourselves helplessly at the door of the Ruffman petitioning for this great blessing of Tober and for the conditions of tawba but repentance is not our act he is it to Webber Rahim so this is the condition of humanity and we must pray not just for our own tawba and for the table of our community so that we may rediscover the overwhelming Rama that is in allah subhanaw taala but also a toll before the entire planet because we are all are Beadle law everybody is a laws creature the miracle of the creation of the inside is there in the basest human being the miracle of the human body is astonishing marbles unfolds day by day the hands of the scientists that again preoccupation with the signposts and forgetting where they point the complexity of the human body which only our generation really understands and appreciates we can do to fat core in a sense much better than earlier generations we are beginning to figure out exactly how complicated the human brain is for instance earlier generations didn't really have a clue but the or is there that should inspire a kind of Toba but those gifts the divine technology jalapeno in Serna other ass Anita Queen the president everybody and we should be praying for the Talbot of everybody because allows hundra his capacity is known as great in the power of in the case of the drug dealer or the pimp from yeah me then it is in the case of someone who is close to the Prophet Allah so far Hillfolk our body his power is infinite which means absolute unimaginable and it's not relativized by the diverse states of human beings but our Lord Li may you read he does what he wants so it must be praying for the repentance not just of our communities but also of other communities as well that they may recognize that this lights that they did me discern when they perceive beauty is true light and that light must come from somewhere and that it is only light that gives meaning through differentiation to creation and this process of Education and of tawba is expressed in concrete very beautiful qur'anic language where allah subhanho wa taala says allah waliyan ladina hermano Allah is the wali the guardian of protecting friend the patron of those who have Eman your holiday home Minho's Illuminati a landlord he takes them out of the shadows into the light there you have a perfect expression of the process of repentance the process of Education where it comes from where we are where we should be going note Allah is the active agent here not human beings are doing it Allah is the wali and what is his will ayah his governance his patronage he takes people of Eman out of the shadows into the light pure tawheed solo mat always plural in the Quran because there always has to be more than one shadow Noor is always singular in the Quran it's one of his name's there is only one light and life is indivisible perfect metaphor for the divine so the presence of towel bar and the presence of Education and the presence of becoming Muslim truly Muslim with a small M if you like submitted is the process of recognizing the shadows for what they are and of celebrating the shadows not because of the darkness but because of the light that gives them form because without the light were the shadows everything in the world of support else is its shadows on the mat huh only has being because of the light take the light away and where are the shadows without the divine in the system where is manifestation disappears as soon as you turn the light off shadows are gone nothing absolute Adam void but there is not void we see multiplicity around us and these are the shadows cast by and law Norris mo what you will old well the inner cover all those who cover up those who deny I will yet Muhammad are wolves and here the register speaks in the plural they're all yeah they're protecting friends of the tar wart very broad Quranic term meaning any anything to which absolute power is falsely attributed false gods full centers of food are usually drawn a home min and Laurie in Lhasa all that they take them out of the light into the shadows so it's a dynamic picture of the cosmos that we have and that dynamic functions endlessly there is no moment when any individual human soul is not being brought closer to the light or taken further away from it we are all in a state of constant vibration allies Macaulay belanov he is the one who turns the heart that's why the color is called calm because the cathartica Luba he kept a lube which is the root of cult the heart means to vibrate to move to oscillate that's our condition there's nothing that is that is there bit about the essence of the the human pilot we are always moving forwards or backwards every moment is better or worse than the one before it so we need to acknowledge that this process that we call this Islamic education is not just about teaching our little ones about the values of our community when we speak of Islamic education we are talking really about humanity and about the cosmos and about taking humanity out of the shadows and into the light and that Allah is the one who does that that's why the Prophet our latest electricity lab did not attribute his education to himself but to his Lord at debonair Rabi My Lord gave me education and did it well because education is the inculcation of what is true it has to come from the truth which means a disclosure of the divine it partakes however remotely an equality of revelation knowledge of reality in the unseen world could not be achieved through human beings working things out for themselves and teaching each other they can set the stage for that they can understand the mechanisms of the cosmos but what we can't do is read reliably where the signposts are appointed to so that's the context these three falls of humanity the prologue in heaven the Ishmaelite episode and now the modern world the time for prayer has come what I'm going to say next will take me about half an hour so perhaps I could be guided as to whether I should continue or whether we should break therefore the other okay fine sure fly through the Hornet and it humbly like rub it on I mean smilla hamdulillah so loud - slo-mo I let us all Inlet for early he was soft beat woman where that I suppose this is rather an untidy sort of footnote to some of the things I was saying earlier today I just speak for about half an hour trying to draw our attention to the only significant alternative to Islamic education which is that of the modern secular Western paradigm looking at some of its roots and exploring ways in which it might resemble or might rival the Islamic model I suppose one should start by observing that the West is of course a composite civilization much more so than Islamic civilization ever was there was always the method of the Greeks present in for instance Islamic medicine certain aspects of Islamic theology Islamic logic but nonetheless the if you like Semitic ingredient was always far more central and significant for Muslim civilization than it was for christened 'm and classical Christian that is to say pre 18th century writers on the subject of Education the people who laid the very distant foundations for what education has now become in in the modern world acknowledged that really they were stirring into this particular recipe three different ingredients firstly there was Greece particularly its theory of knowledge the pistil mala G of Aristotle in particular also Aristotle's thoughts and Plato's thoughts on systemic education on aesthetics the theory of beauty and also ethics all of these things came together and were integrated by early medieval Western thinkers into what became the the curriculum in the West second ingredient was the legacy of ancient Rome particularly ideas of statecraft and law and good government and the third ingredient in some respects the least prominent was religion the judeo-christian story of morality and of faith ostensibly the the most significant ingredient but often in practice somewhat secondary in this synthesis of Greece and Rome and the Hebrews continued to inform classicizing models of Western education or listen to our own day so the traditional British public school for instance would invoke these three dimensions in creating the educated Englishman now around about one hundred and twenty years ago all of this started to change and it might be interesting to reflect here on the stages in which this transformation in the West's vision of Education has has unfolded because it seems to have undertaken a sea change every hundred years historians have noted how inconvenient this is for the perspective of those use the Gregorian calendar in that usually the sea change gathers momentum about twenty years before the turn of each century now from our point of view it's actually very convenient because it mirrors very closely the Hillary calendar we might say that at the dawn of the twelfth century of the thirteenth century beginning of the 13th century really start to see that the beginnings of the decline of the classic medieval Christian synthesis in education course mirroring larger transformations in society and philosophy and religion as well so that roundabout via 1200 in our calendar we start to get the first voices raised explicitly against classical forms of religion and also against a kind of classicizing Hellenistic tendency Edmund Burke would be one example of this on the European continent the most clear expression of this at around the beginning of the 13th century was the French River version with its radical denial of the traditional European Christian story in England and in America by extension another key figure here was given with his decline informal fall of the Roman Empire which was one of the first works really to challenge the educative value of Christianity his question was did Christianity actually contribute to the collapse of that great unified civilization was it in fact an educative force at all so the beginning of the 13th century can say this is the change that was happening in the West at the beginning of the 14th century around the 1880s we find another major transformation taking place and here Darwinism is really gaining momentum for the first time Freud is beginning to articulate his very secular deconstruction of the human spirit as being basically a product of the basest passional forces in the human subconscious we find the development of forms of modernism in art and the beginnings of the impressionist movement and move away from the idea that art has to be a celebration of beauty and symmetry because that's the nature of the world given its divine origin and towards a more chaotic revised pessimistic view of the natural order and of the human form culminating with people like Suzanne for instance the high impressionist period also at the beginning of the 1300s we find communism Karl Marx writing does capital and communism and hardline forms of socialism are really covering strength in the West this is the time of Leonard Shores first writings the time of William Morris's conversion to socialism the Fabian movement getting underway not as communism but also socialism in the real read traditional sense and that goes on for a hundred years and then all of that falls apart as well those are skepticism about the skepticism and we find that at the beginning of the 1400s : ISM suddenly collapses well then war comes down in well 1989 but the rot has been clear for at least 10 years following the Soviet debauch and Afghanistan and Gorbachev's reforms perestroika glasnost and the rest we find post-modernism starts to replace modernism with a more categoric rejection of the idea of the intrinsic meaning of any talk about anything the idea that everything that we perceive in the world is not authentic but is simply our own perception of something that is objectively unmeasurable we also find again following the post modernist the decline of the modernist idea of returning 2.0 each of these earlier transformations that coincided with the beginnings of different Muslim centuries had represented for the European consciousness as it moved away from God and away from truth the extension of the Protestant model of returning to the source away from a biblical text and towards history itself so that everything had to redefine itself in terms of point 0 Communists and the French Revolution ists and the artists and the architects all wanted to go back before civilization and to reinvent everything from scratch in the case of architecture this was manifested in the mid twentieth century I suppose mid 14th century with people like Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus movement and the complete rejection of the traditional forms of Western architecture an attempt to return to pure form as facilitated to the first time by the invention of modern materials with the beginning of the 15th century our 15th century we find and modernism has been discredited partly because there seemed to be something too programmatic and idealistic about return 2.0 and the fact that people found its derivative uncongenial and there was an attempt to open what one architect which is Merkin has called the big closet that is to say we can learn from the past and the past and all of its forms whether the Romanesque or the Byzantine or the Moorish or the Hispanic or whatever all there in the big closet of human civilization we can take out of that closet those things that happen to amuse us so with Robert venturi and Richard Rogers and a number of xsplit more explicitly postmodern architects we find that the Western city which shapes the Western soul inevitably influencing our souls as well known on the modernist but post modern but that much further away from tradition because these forms have been stripped of any sacred meaning that they might once have had similarly with the end of the 1300s we find the collapse of socialism in the West motivated in part by the disillusionment with the Communists and hardline socialist project Sultanate since Gulag Archipelago published in 1980 1973 and now of a complete collapse of any serious socialism anywhere in the Western world Tony Blair's new labor is not socialist at all its labor was out for socialism it's very postmodern kind of concept in fact is a kind of straightforward social democracy so these are the stages through which the West's culture has evolved and the West's education has reflected this in the post Burkean world we find that no longer was education explicitly dictated by purely sacred or Christian concerns but it was more about personal growth and though a rediscovery of the Greek idea of greatness of soul of human completeness as being the function and purpose of education there was still a certain transcendentalism attached to it it was believed that human beings through education can become Noble as well as useful so Alfred North Whitehead said that education is the transmission of culture to enable individuals and society to attain a quality of life which is always beyond the mere fact of life there's still despite is very vague theism and process metaphysics that he espoused an idea that this was about making us more than mere cogs in a cosmic or social machine however we can say that in the fifteenth century secular education lists have become unhappy even with this increasingly the approach now is is to regard education as if anything a vehicle for social progress not so much towards class equality something that has been tried and simply has not succeeded but towards other forms of equality such as gender equality and also the Equality of people of different races different sexual orientations so modern education can be defined very simply as an acculturation against tradition it's an explicitly political transformational model of social engineering despite the it's expressed opposition to all forms of totalitarian interference with the minds of the young in fact it is very programmatic and its intention is explicitly to deconstruct tradition to venture into the unknown now this was fine when it was still assumed that we could have an objective definition of men modernist opposed to the postmodern definition that that definition might well be rooted in psychoanalysis or it might be rooted in some form of biology zhim it might for residual Marxists be rooted in ideas of class consciousness but that idea that modern education has succeeded in framing an objective conception of man now can be seen to have largely receded creating serious problems for those who advocate programmatic models of social engineering there is of course a great tension between modern epistemology on the one hand and ideologies such as traditional difference feminism on the other hand or the gay liberation movement there's a tension there that they're constantly arguing about so we find in this new period that the idea that life has meaning and the purpose of education is to help us discern and live by that meaning has been progressively abandoned despite the importance of compulsory education in modern societies the objective of education that have been more vague and more negotiable more relative so for instance Peters and his famous book education as initiation almost a Bible for many education lists nowadays says the great teacher is he who can convey a sense of quality of life to another so that it hopes is every endeavor and make some sweat and yearn to fix what he thinks and feels in a fitting form for life has no one purpose man imprints purposes upon it classic modern post modernist or Heidegger Ian epistemology now the problem with this is that it still uses words like quality of life and that presupposes some consensus or at least clarity about what a good life might consist in can the modern world really define that what are we here for well religion has stepped away from answering that question so we have to divide the good life perhaps in Aristotelian terms but what is a good life and who is a good person are their virtues do we still speak of virtues in the modern world as opposed to relative values clearly there's a diminishing consensus hence we can speak of the most profound crisis that the West has ever known in the theory of education since the 1960s and certainly since the beginning of the new wasallam century there has been a progressive apparently unstoppable disintegration of values there is an increasingly mechanistic image of human beings and we might say that the the Promethean project of Western education which began in the 18th century with people like Burke as a resistance to the certainties of Christianity has now reached its logical and destructive conclusion so that the schools are no longer producing men and women of virtue they no longer claim to do that because nobody knows what a virtuous person is all they can claim to do is to produce people who are not socially destabilizing that's what they hope to do in reality they often don't succeed in doing even that the idea of the delinquent so unimaginable tradition traditional societies which assume that once teenage years were a time of slightly uncertain quietness and submissiveness to one's parents nowadays we have an idea of the delinquents who is paradigmatically in revolt against his parents against religion against Authority perhaps against the State against community so the traditional ideas have been completely inverted in the new type of product is emerging from mass education systems of the modern world the only certainty we do have is of course the body the mind well philosophy doesn't really help us to define any certainties so the mind isn't very helpful the spirit abandon almost completely except in residually christian schools and except in new-age circles which redefine spirit so radically as to make it almost a different concept because they have no concept of of the ego or nafs there's no idea that the Spirit is something that is held back by the nurse in New Age spirituality it's all about self discovery self Proclamation in fact the inversion of traditional spirituality but the certainty that they do still have is the body and it's all about the body it's all about excelling in sports that coming ultimately out of the ancient Greeks the body beautiful young people figuring out what cosmetic surgery they're going to pay for even before the relevant body parts have actually formed see young young kids in England now logging on to web sites when they're 10 or 11 to work out what shape they want to have for their bodies even before their bodies have begun to grow this is increasingly common and will become increasingly common the body is the only certainty no man is regarded as an extremely sophisticated biological machine metaphysics has become myth so what this tangential has become central and what was sensual has become forgotten altogether and modern education can do nothing whatsoever to stand against that there may be a few Catholic schools that are fighting a rearguard action but basically the battle has been lost and overwhelmingly the model of education in the modern world is about the inculcation of vocational training that will enable us to be useful in the world and also perhaps give us some insight into the aesthetic and cultural conditions of the past although even that is becoming difficult and young people increasingly find it unimaginable to impossible to imagine what life would have been like even twenty or thirty years ago a sense of continuity of empathy with the past with one's ancestors has been lost almost entirely so this is the alternative system and we can say in today's world without fear of exaggeration that there are basically just two systems surviving because the only two civilizations transnational global civilizations that still claim to exist are the Islamic civilization the civilization of secular modernity everything else has more or less surrendered to the latter the other two civilizations that worth taking seriously were so they in Hindu civilization and Chinese civilization both of those have now adopted styles of education apart from certain small ghettos that are virtually indistinguishable from the Western norm and may even be more Western than the Western norm insofar as they ideologized progress and material gain even more substantially than is the case in most Western school mix of the ideology of development so this is what we're up against if you like and this is also what has shaped us because most of us have been through those schools whether we've been brought up in the West or in the Islamic world the mere fact of speaking the English language means that one willy nearly speaks in those categories and this has to be said against the Islamic understanding of Education which is rooted as we saw before in the Islamic understanding of man as being potentially the lowest of the low as philosophy lean but through education through a remembrance becoming potentially higher than the Angels certainly there is no common ground between the Western and for policy and that of Islam because we can never view the totality of the human creature as being essentially defined by the biological what is the human creature again we could use the Quranic definition and say man is that creature before whom the Angels just leave out down in worship could be a definition now he beliefs are leahy lana saw only the clay we were created of cleaning lazy clinging clay apparently the basest matter in creation and Iblees could only see the clay he sees the physical stuff of our being and he says that is men and not really worth bowing down to so at least if you like is the paradigm of the modern educational theorist because if Lee Saleh here Lana is saying precisely what the modern education is to say which is that man is just a lump of clay so right again at the very beginning of us for mo Kareem we see this differentiation between the angelic and the best deal of definition of the human condition a definition and a battle which has been lost in the West in which we are struggling to continue to win in the Muslim Ummah again to go back to the first of our three Falls or three explosions the image of men is that then is the one who has been taught he's the one who on Lema adamant less merkel aha he taught Adam all of the names and this is what made him the person laughs oh we've seen this already and so Jalal Adina Rumi God the salon cetera who actually has a name for Adam and he calls him unlamented smart big kind of Turkish a composite phrase he is the Lord of he taught the names that is what makes us lordly in the world because we have the names what are these names we could say that a name these objects of the first act act of Education in human history a name here means the discursive conceptualized knowledge of a thing and that is what no other order of creation has a cow or a dog or a tree has no names for anything occasionally certain higher forms of creation can engage in certain primitive forms of speech but there's no indication that they have names in other words they cannot conceptualize they cannot have an abstract understanding of the meaning or essence of another phenomenon in existence so this is the knowledge of the shadows of the Salah map and it's not the knowledge of both that but it is the knowledge of the divine names because the true names of phenomena in existence are not the names that human beings have conventionally dreamed up for those phenomena that are the names that Allah Himself has applied to them sometimes we can know these through revelation and our ability to give names to be educated to give names to the phenomena of manifest world originates in the first moment of our existence as conscious naming beings which is indicated in the Quran this great verse where Allah takes before their engendering in the world the children of Adam the thoria the souls before their being in flesh and ash had a home Allah and him made them their witness upon themselves testified to themselves and he said unless to be a lot be corn am I not your Lord koala bear Shahid nur they said we said yes indeed we bear witness you are our Lord and this was lest you should say on the young will permit that this we were unaware who know on Heather guava lean so that is the kind of primordial proto education if you like that even predates the the talam that Satan Adam received of the the Kelly met none of the names and we can say that from that point we are educated human beings and hence all education in the world is a re-education it's a reclamation of what we already know now we knew it Jim Letten globally general we didn't know it Tufts Leland we didn't know all of the details but it's the the big picture that counts now adam alayhis-salam is in this the prototype of all humanity in the processes of education inculcation because in him we were present at that primordial covenant the day of alastu bureau of Bickle so Adam becomes the repository of all knowledge and to the extent that we know to the extent that we say Shahid nur we can be said to be Adamic to have reclaimed our Adamic form so to learn in the qur'anic perspective is not about progress at all it's all about moving forwards of discovering the unknown it's about moving back religion is reactionary we like to go back because we know that goodness is at our source not at the periphery and our Adamic nature is the nature to which we wish to wish to return because it's the fitara the fitrah with which we were born let me just finish this contrasting of the Western and the traditional Islamic understanding of man in the presence of education with some further verses vibe signal gelatine Rumi greatest of all of our poets where he says the father of mankind who is the master of he taught the names as hundreds of thousands of knowledge 'as in his every vein his soul was taught the name of every single thing exactly as that thing is until its end whatever title God gave never changed he whom God called nimble did not become slow whoever will be a believer in the end was seen by Adam at the beginning whoever will become an unbeliever at the end appeared to him for us the name of each thing is its outward form for the Creator the name of each thing is it's inward mystery for Musa the name of his rod was us our staff for the Creator it's name was serpent that's why in Islam learning column is a form of ibeda of worshipful slave hood to our maker because it's no different to any other of the I buy dirt it proclaims our Oba Diah to learn it's not in a different category from to prostrate or to fast because all of them are processes of returning of regaining what we have lost reminding ourselves as we learn we regain Adams status of Noah of the knowledge is of the world I think at this point it's time for lunch I'll stop there but there is much more that could be said because the subject of Education of course relates to every other aspect of our religion most profoundly it relates to our understanding of who and what we are but it also relates to our understanding of where we are and when we are issues that we often tend to forget if we are truly to frame an Islamic education for ourselves for our communities for the world data of course form of Education and we really have to understand what is this civilization that we are up against how profound are the differences that separate our very exalted view of the human condition and the false humanism of modernity garuda wanna and alhamdulillah he probably al-amin

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Length: 98min 31sec (5911 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2011