Every Obligation Rests on the Same Three Foundations

As set out in the part before this, no obligation in Islam — this one included — can be built without three foundations: knowledge, ʿilm; practice, ʿamal; and sincerity, ikhlāṣ. Without all three established, there is no delivering a sound heart, qalbun salīm, before Allah (swt) at all. No house is raised on ground that has not been tested. Before building a house, engineers carry out a soil test, checking that the ground is strong enough to carry the structure and that nothing runs beneath it — an easement, a pipeline — that the council's own standards have not cleared. A house built without listening to the council, on ground with no proper foundation, collapses within a year, two years, six months, and its builder is answerable for that neglect as though it were murder. Islam is no different. Without ʿilm, a person is in a state of jahālah, ignorance; and whoever invents practice without reference to what the Qurʾān and Sunnah actually say is a mubtadiʿ, an innovator in Allah's (swt) religion — a dangerous position to be in. And if practice does not rest on sound knowledge, no degree of sincerity will save it either: the three are interlinked, and everything in Islam rests upon them together.

Knowledge is the first step. What, then, does Allah (swt) want done? These commands are called farāʾiḍ, plural of farḍ — the things Allah (swt), the Creator, commands of those He created to worship and obey Him, whose task is to seek His good pleasure, riḍā, and to avoid His wrath, in this world and the next. And where does one find out what these are? By asking the ʿulamāʾ, since Allah (swt) says in the Qurʾān to ask the people who know, if one does not know oneself. Nobody is born with knowledge coded into them; it has to be learned, and it has to be passed from one generation to the next — an obligation upon every Muslim — because Islamic tradition not handed down in this way disappears within two or three generations. Allah (swt) has taken it upon Himself to preserve the Book, and the ḥikmah, understood as the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him); but the transmission and protection of that preservation at the human level is carried out through the ʿulamāʾ al-kirām, the honoured, erudite scholars who stand as the true inheritors and representatives of the Prophet (peace be upon him).