So, what is wrong if every now and then Muslims too want a little bit of flavor in their Deen, right? What is wrong if they too like their Deen to be a bit challenging? Just like the Deen of the Hindus, the Christians, the Jews and the Buddhists?
Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi wa Sallam, however, predicted this scenario: Muslims mimicking non-Muslims in everything. He said Muslims would do what the people before them had done. If those earlier people had dived into a lizard’s hole, Muslims would do it too.
So, Muslims too would perhaps like their “religion” of Islam to look a little bit like a “real religion,” the kind of religion everyone else has, complete with priests, holy water and all kinds of intricate rituals that only a selected few have knowledge of or can perform.
They already refer to their Deen of Islam as “religion,” just like those other people do. And they call the Qur’an “their” Holy Book just like some others say the Bible is their Holy Book. Some of them even refer to their Islamic Scholars with Christian titles such as “His Eminence.”
I am holding my breath and waiting for the title of “His Grace” to make its appearance among Muslims. That is the address mode Christians use for the pope.
Muslims and Their Endless Theological Disputations
That is who many Muslims are and on a good day that is what they love to do. But there are fundamental problems associated with it.
First of all, there is no “theology” per se in Islam. Islam is Islam, full stop. Second, Islam abhors wasteful, directionless and meaningless arguments and hairsplitting and gossip – qeel wa qaal.
Finally, abortive and purposeless back-and-forth like this is a nonstarter to begin with. It does not take anyone anywhere. It is wasteful of time and energy. And it is a typical loser trait.
So, when it comes to knowledge, don’t be surprised if Muslims want to know what kind of knowledge we are talking about. They will ask Islamic knowledge of the “holy” kind that will somehow get them a passport to Jannat or secular and worldly knowledge of the ordinary kind that everybody goes to school for?
For, “Islamic knowledge,” they will say, “is the best knowledge and all else is at best a waste of time – Khurafaat – and at worst a pathway to Jahannam.” They will argue that the path to hell is paved with “bad” knowledge.
But what someone should tell the Muslims is this: Knowledge means knowledge. Full stop! And it is knowledge of all things knowable. There is nothing esoteric, mysterious or complicated about it.
Knowledge is simply getting to know things you did not know before. At least that is how the Qur’an defines knowledge. If you think you have a better definition of knowledge, you are welcome to it. In fact, I would like to know it too.
Muslims with shallow understanding of the Deen and only a peripheral acquaintance with the world have wasted a great deal of time and energy debating what knowledge was good knowledge and what knowledge was bad knowledge. They have also raised issues such as whether nice Muslim kids should even go to college to have all that “bad” knowledge stuffed into their heads. Especially, if that nice Muslim kid happens to be a female.
For sure, Akbar Allahabadi – that talented, witty and “college”-educated Urdu poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – was not serious, and he was only using satire and sarcasm, when he described the role of colleges in his days as follows:
Yoon qatl say bacchon kay who badnaam na hota;
Afsos kay Fir’aun ko college ki na soojhi!
Paraphrase:
Pharaoh would not have had to kill all those infants. Too bad he could not come up with the idea of a college.
But somehow all too many Muslims – “good” Muslims in particular – seemed to have gotten the idea that colleges were bad for good Muslim kids. Especially, during the earlier part of the last century and especially if those children happened to be female.
Watching Muslims in Action
As a child I have personally sat, like a fly on the wall, and observed Muslim movers and shakers and Islamic scholars of considerable standing and repute arguing back and forth on some of these same issues. I have seen them debate how it may or may not be such a hot idea for gifted Muslim children to go to college and learn all the dubious stuff colleges teach. Especially for those of them whose characters were not yet properly developed.
At least that is the recollection I have. It was a long time ago. And I may be wrong in the way I recall things now. Sometimes I hope and wish I am.
Maybe they all voted the other way. Or maybe what they were saying was that all too often colleges are a graveyard of personal morality and character for young and impressionable Muslim youth, in which they would not have been completely wrong.
But there is a great big presumption here.
We seem to assume that from a purely “moral” point of view it is far worse for boys and girls to take an open interest in each other than for them to tell lies and steal. And that people who pray extra Namaz and do extra Dhikr of some kind, but who never keep a promise and never show up for anything on time, are somehow better human beings than those who are deficient in the former but meticulous with regard to the latter.
I am not sure that is how Islam works.
Allah bless them all – the people whose discussion I was privileged to observe in person as a child. They were good people. Just misinformed in some ways, I thought, about Allah’s world and somewhat unsure in their practical approach to Allah’s Deen and its role in that world, even though the specialty of many of them was the Deen itself.
In any case, here is what the Qur’an itself has to say on the subject of knowledge. To me, there could not have been, and there indeed is not, a better definition of knowledge anywhere in the world. So, here it is: ‘Allamal insaana maa lam ya’alam.
