The Internet has had a huge impact on our lives and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Overall it has been a positive impact but clearly there are some downsides – the proliferation of pornography and the access to inappropriate material for our children the most obvious one. Another aspect of course is the availability of a huge amount of information on almost any topic one could imagine – suddenly we can all be instant experts in almost all fields.
And this then leads to one of the more serious repercussions of the w.w.w. when it comes to religions and religious knowledge. From an Islamic perspective, budding students of knowledge sought out specific scholars and, if the scholar consented, learnt by listening and observing the person of knowledge. For attaining religious knowledge was more than just receiving and memorising information – it included the Adab(etiquette) of the student to the teacher (something which is geared to instilling a sense of humility and humbleness to go along with the knowledge); it included the contextualising of discrete pieces of information within the ocean of religious knowledge; but more importantly it represented a personal relationship between student and teacher which could be traced all the way back to the time of the Rasul(saws). It is this last factor which is at the heart of what is now referred to as ‘traditional scholarship’ within the battle that is taking place for the middle ground in both scholarship and Islam generally.
A fundamental part of the Muslim identity is attached to this chain, perpetuated and protected by traditional scholarship, of a direct link with the Rasul(saws) and the immutable and unchanged words of the Holy Quran – the two primary sources of all religious knowledge and principles in Islam. No other of the main world religions can lay claim to having a body of knowledge that has been maintained from the time of the inception of the religion to the present day. That is not to say that the religion is mired in the past, for Allah (swt) tells us:
ٱلۡيَوۡمَ أَكۡمَلۡتُ لَكُمۡ دِينَكُمۡ وَأَتۡمَمۡتُ عَلَيۡكُمۡ نِعۡمَتِى وَرَضِيتُ لَكُمُ ٱلۡإِسۡلَـٰمَ دِينً۬اۚ
This day have I perfected your religion for you and completed My favour unto you, and have chosen for you as religion AL-ISLAM. (5:3)
Obviously this does not mean that every possible development in human history since then has been specifically mentioned by either the Rasul(saws) or is mentioned in the Quran but the principles which will govern all these situations were, and it is the role of the scholar to apply those principles as the times and society change. For the Rasul(saws) has said:
“The scholars are the inheritors of the Prophets. Verily the Prophets did not leave behind dirhams and dinars, rather they left behind knowledge. Thus whoever takes it, takes it as a bountiful share.”
So we can see just how important the role of a scholar is in Islam in both maintaining the link with the Rasul(saws) and in dealing with the changing would in which we live in.
This tradition of students sitting at the feet of scholars (both figuratively and metaphorically) has lasted for over 1400 years – until recent times and the advent of the w.w.w. Suddenly for the first time in Islamic history any individual, regardless of intent or intellect, has access to just about the whole store of Islamic scholarship and information – who needs to spend the time listening to an old man painstakingly talk through one text and not moving on to another until the first is completely understood? Who needs to think about the Usul(principles) of hadith and Quran Tafsir when they can get access to every single hadith transmitted from the Rasul(saws) without worrying about its status?
But all this does is give people information – it does not give them learning; it does not give them analytical skills and it certainly does not give them wisdom. Is it any wonder then that we now have people who have used this little knowledge and twisted it to somehow sanction the killing of innocent civilians? When you remove the scholar from the picture, you do several things:
- You give knowledge without the wisdom to understand or apply that knowledge;
- You give knowledge piecemeal without building solid foundations of understanding; and
- You pander to the nafs (personal desires) rather than learn to control it.
On this last point, it is human nature to believe in our own abilities and intellect and so the attraction of thinking that we have the ability to emulate the scholars of the past is quite compelling. This is even more so in modern society where individualism is such a force. The end result of this is an ever increasing trend to individuals performing their own Ijtihad(religious reasoning) rather than relying on scholars. Every Ahmed, Mohamad and Aisha is now a religious expert and has their ‘opinion’ with the ability to cut and past ahadith and verses of the Quran off the internet to support that ‘opinion’. But this is misguidance, for Islamic knowledge has never and should never be acquired in this way.
There would be no baraka(benefit) in this at all. It is not the fact of it being obtained over the internet per se but the complete dissassociation with any scholar that makes it so. The golden chain back to the Rasul(saws) has been severed in such cases. The Sunnipath site describes the need for this connection best when it states:
2. The executor of the inheritance is the teacher. For a student’s knowledge to be reliable, he must acquire it through direct aural instruction (talaqqi or mushafaha) from a teacher. This has been a self-evident requirement of Islamic pedagogy from the earliest of times. Imam Shatibi, the great Andalusian Maliki scholar of legal methodology and philosophy, said that direct aural instruction is “the most beneficial and reliable way [to acquire knowledge],” explaining that this is because of :
a special quality that God Most High has placed between the teacher and the student, which is witnessed by anyone who interacts with knowledge and scholars. How often it happens that a student reads something in a book, memorizes it, and repeats it to himself, yet does not understand it. Then, when his teacher reads it to him, he suddenly understands it and acquires knowledge of it by being present [with his teacher]. This understanding may come about through conventional means—such as contextual indications or an explanation of the difficult point in a manner that never occurred to the mind of the student—or it may arise not through any conventional means, but through something that God gifts the student with when he presents himself before his teacher in manifest indigence and plain need of what he is being instructed in. (al-Muwafaqat, 1:73)
3. The heir’s lineage is the student’s connection to the Prophet Muhammad (God bless him and give him peace) through an uninterrupted chain of teachers along with an authorization to teach from his own teacher. Through direct aural instruction, the teacher gives birth to the student into the world of religious scholarship, and the student becomes like the teacher’s child. It is in this sense that Imam Nawawi wrote of the great Shafi`i jurist, Ibn Surayj, “He is one of our grandfathers in our chain of transmission of Sacred Law.” (al-Majmu`, 1:214) But merely listening to a teacher deliver a lesson is not sufficient for being born into the world of scholarship. For a student to claim a teacher as his parent, the teacher must approve of the student by authorizing him to convey sacred knowledge to others.
It is this tradition which has in fact provided the integrity of the religion for the last 1400 years – a proces whereby new phenomena and issues are addressed within the framework or a scholarly tradition that has maintained its link to the Rasul (saws) rather than through individual and ad-hoc rationalisation and reasoning.
And if Islam is to assume once again the emminent position that it had previously when it was at the forefront of society and the advancement of civilisation, it is this tradition that will be at the vanguard.
Asalem alaykum Gaith,
I just wanted to thank you for a very clear and concise article of how Islamic education is taught and preserved. Be assured that I’ll be printing and sharing this article to many muslims whom I know that are unaware of such information.
Kind Regards
Mohammed.
Jazakallahu Kheirun Br for the feedback.