Knowledge: The First Foundation

Between a person and Allah's (swt) pleasure stands a barrier called jahālah or jāhiliyyah, ignorance, and nothing else is more than talk until this barrier is broken. The first step for any Muslim — young or old — is therefore to grasp the importance of Islamic education, of al-ʿilm: not information in the general sense, but the pure and simple knowledge of Allah (swt). The very verse already cited, that the jinn and mankind were created only to worship Him, is read by Ibn ʿAbbās, in one report, with li-yaʿrifūn in place of li-yaʿbudūn — that they were created to know Him; ʿarafa meaning to know. Knowing Allah (swt) is itself a gift from Him, made possible by the faculty of reasoning given to human beings and withheld from animals. Animals do not think; even the most reptilian among them are bound entirely to instinct — how to eat, how to hunt, how to accumulate, how to multiply, how to mate — and in that they hold a complete tawakkul, reliance, upon Allah (swt), submitting to Him entirely, by nature. A human being, the sentient one, the one endowed with intellect, is compelled to think precisely because Allah (swt) has given a choice, and it is this choice, this potential, this greatness placed within a person, that can never be realised until the barrier of ignorance is broken. Knowledge — al-ʿilm al-nāfiʿ, beneficial knowledge — is the first step: knowledge that draws a person closer to Allah (swt) and makes plain who one truly is.

This has to happen in every generation. Islam taught and never passed on is lost within a couple of generations, which is why seeking it is farḍ ʿayn, an individual obligation, upon every Muslim. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) is reported to have said that seeking this knowledge is farḍ upon every Muslim man and every Muslim woman^* — an obligation with no exceptions. Someone occupied at present with becoming an engineer — a bashmuhandis — or with any other worldly ambition, is welcome to pursue it; but before anything else, the connection to Allah (swt) must be secured, or the years pass without any real foundation and a person is left, so to speak, a lost sheep, discovering only in the fifties or sixties that a life has gone by without it — lamenting, singing songs and writing poetry about the life that was lost, asking over and over what has been done with it, and going through what amounts to a midlife crisis brought on by simply never having had a ghāyah, an objective. ʿIlm is the first step. After the prophets of Allah (swt), the highest standing belongs to the ʿulamāʾ, the scholars, the seekers of knowledge — a standing worth striving for. Without knowledge — and this is said on oath, wallāhi, billāhi, taʾllāhi, in every one of the three chief forms that oath can take — nobody ever truly, truly draws close to Allah (swt). Īmān means nourishment, and its capital, its raʾs al-māl, is knowledge; without knowledge there is, in truth, no īmān at all — only khurāfah, superstition, whatever has been absorbed uncritically from grandparents or from the surrounding culture rather than drawn from the Qurʾān and the authentic Sunnah. Knowledge means qāla Allāh, qāla Rasūlullāh — what Allah said, what the Messenger of Allah said — and this has to take first priority, for oneself and for the coming generation. An ummah wishing to rise again from the filthy, rotten state it is presently in has to put knowledge first, choosing its most able children for Islamic learning as readily as it chooses them for medicine, however many thousands of dollars that costs in fees, if it wishes to see its glorious past return. Jahl, ignorance, is the greatest enemy to be overcome, and it is the first step of the three.