Jummah Khutbah Retreat 2017

Jummah Khutbah - Divine Unity and Islamic Scholarship

Opening

"[Peace be upon you and the mercy of Allah and His blessings]"

"In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful."

In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful.

The Central Verse

The verse that forms the foundation of today's khutbah is characteristic of the way in which Allah's book puts things in order:

"Allah bears witness that there is no deity except Him, and [so do] the angels and those of knowledge - [that He is] maintaining [creation] in justice. There is no deity except Him, the Exalted in Might, the Wise."

The Gravest Sin and Greatest Truth

The most important thing is the divine unity, and the most disastrous thing is to lose sight of the divine unity. Shirk, the only unforgivable sin. Everything else, Allah can just say, oh well, and into Paradise the sinner goes. But that, not quite.

That is where the door slams tightly shut. Everything else, Allah, in his mercy, (أَرْحَمُ الرَّاحِمِين - arham ar-rahimin), anything is possible. So that's the first thing, the unity.

The greatest of all catastrophic human misunderstandings is to look at the many things in the universe and the physical laws and the directions of the compass and the heat and the cold and the colors and the smells and the majesty and the immensity and the complexity and the order of it all, this qist, and to say, well, I don't think that comes from anywhere in particular. Or to say, I think maybe there's two people at work here, or maybe a whole bunch of them, like the ancient Greeks and the Romans with all of their gods and goddesses, fighting it out, competing for bits of the created world. That's a fundamental error.

Divine Witnessing

Allah himself bears witness. He is (عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ شَهِيدٌ - ala kulli shay'in shaheed). He witnesses all things. Not the way we witness some things, not the way we can log on to some webcam somewhere and see what's going on, or the way in which GCHQ perhaps can look at us through our smartphones when we don't know.

No, that's not the shahada, the witnessing, which is related to the divine witnessing, which is beyond any possibility of veiling. He sees everything. At all times, he sees us.

He sees our past. He sees our present. He sees our future. He knows the cancer as it grows within us. He knows the thoughts as they grow within us. He knows (عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ شَهِيدٌ - ala kulli shay'in shaheed), inconceivable, unimaginable, total transparency.

The Uniqueness of Divine Unity

There isn't a whole bunch of things competing to make the world the place that it is. One, only one, sets the constant that is the constant of the law of gravity. Only one determines what the speed of light will be.

Only one determines the mass of the proton. There's nothing else that is determining these things, the fundamental shaping laws of the universe determined by (الْوَاحِدُ - al-wahid). If there were others and it was a fight, well, the world as we see it and understand it and inhabit it and breathe its air would be impossible.

Only one. And the angels also see this because the angels have a particular way of witnessing that also sees the world transparently. They're not capable of sin.

Angelic Testimony

They can't look at things and say, well, maybe there's a whole bunch of things that are the ultimate cause of that. They can't disobey their Lord. And so they also witness.

That's why they say (سُبْحَانَ الله - subhanallah), (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ - alhamdulillah), always. What else can they do when they see only he in the complexity of creation? They have no choice. If they have a choice, they're not angels and we know that once happened, but the angels, the great ones, they witness.

That's what they do. They bear witness to the only thing that is absolute. Everything else contingent, possible.

He alone is absolute. He alone guarantees what is in the world. He is the one who is the living in himself, (الْقَيُّومُ - al-qayyum), self-subsistent, but also the one who upholds everything else.

And there is no outside the cosmos which is beyond the limits of his grasp, (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ ۚ كُلٌّ لَّهُ قَانِتُونَ - kullu lahu qanitun). So the angels bear witness.

People of Knowledge (Ulul Ilm)

And then the verse goes on, and (أُولُو الْعِلْمِ - ulul ilm), people of knowledge. And this is where the mind gets to work and thinks people of knowledge, who is that? Well, you could say some scientists have this perception if they really look deeply, but basically scientists only see part of the picture.

They do some equations and not the others. They don't have the complete divine or angelic overview of it all. They're living in two dimensions on the surface and don't see it from above. But that (أُولُوا الْعِلْمِ - ulul ilm), the people of knowledge, that this beautiful verse refers to are the people of knowledge of the divine.

It's talking about the ulama. So the great imam, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, or Imam al-Haramayn al-Juwayni, or Imam al-Ghazali, or al-Suyuti, or al-Dahlabi, or the great ulama of Islam. As they stand in that mihrab, forgetting those who are behind them, remembering only the one who is before them, who alone will judge the quality of their prayer.

The Nature of True Witnessing

A rock might overcoat the sun and the moon. Everything that has a physical existence that doesn't have aql, mind, bears witness through its (لِسَانُ الْحَالِ - lisan al-haal), its own beingness in the world, to the unity of the creator. But what it can't do is to bear witness by speaking of this, the way Allah and his angels and the ulama can.

They can't do that. It is mute eloquence. They're just there testifying to the divine qualities, but they can't make us hear their testimony.

We can only observe it for ourselves. So there's something strange about Bani Adam. And the strangeness is encapsulated in the Qur'anic vision by the fact that we can speak (عَلَّمَهُ الْبَيَانَ - allamahu bayan), the fact that we can have categories, the fact that we can do ethics, the fact that we can perceive what is beautiful and what is ugly, the fact that we can do things that aren't in our immediate hedonistic interest, the fact that we can theorize out so many things, the fact that we can have great universities, the fact that we can do mathematics.

The Warning to Scholars

The Qur'an is saying it's about bearing witness, testifying to the unity. Now, the great ulama of this ummah have always striven to encourage us to see the unity of all of the parts of religion. Imam Al-Ghazali in his Ihyaa' Ulum al-Din has a section of a list of 10 things which the student has to be aware of. And the first one, as you'd expect, is self-knowledge and self-purification.

Be aware of your intentions. (إِنَّمَا الْأَعْمَالُ بِالنِّيَّاتِ - innama al-a'malu binniyat).

Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1

But one of them is an awareness of the mutual interlinking of the (العُلومِ الشَّرْعِيَّةِ - uloom shar'iyya).

The Comprehensive Vision

You don't just learn a lot of tafsir and you don't really know your fiqh, and you don't know the hadith, and you don't know your kalam, and you can't prove the existence of God, and you don't really know the akhlaq. No, that's not how to bear witness. That's not a scholar who is (شَاهِدٌ - shahida), who is bearing witness.

That's just somebody who knows a whole bunch of stuff. Even if it's full of light and luminosity and blessings and he can recite the prophetic words and the divine words, it's not the same as bearing witness. So we have to have this (رُؤْيَةٌ مُتَكَامِلَةٌ - ruqya mutakamila), this comprehensive vision.

Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani's Example

So again, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, whose amazing commentary on Bukhari is one of the great monuments of Islamic literature, Fath al-Bari, Sharh Sahih al-Bukhari, which took him years and years to complete, and he went into a kind of retreat in Cairo at the khanqah of Sultan Baybars in order to write this astounding encyclopaedic thing, which is in 30, 40 volumes, depending on who's printing it.

An immense ocean of knowledge, the wellspring of the ulama's understandings of what they can find in the prophetic hadith of Bukhari, a monument. That even though he's known as a hadith scholar, in the commentary you can see that he knows the other things as well.

The Quranic Promise and Warning

He knows the meaning of Allah saying:

"Allah will raise those who have believed among you and those who were given knowledge, by degrees."

The alternative is to be something potentially very subversive, and the ulama have always warned us against that.

Imam al-Bukhari's Wisdom

Imam al-Bukhari, right at the beginning of this amazing collection of hadiths, which has hypnotized, and entranced, and delighted the scholars for so many centuries, for 12 centuries, begins with the book of the beginning of revelation, Kitab al-Bada' al-Wahi. That's a logical place to start, the collection of prophetic hadiths. But right at the beginning of that, he surprises us by giving us a hadith that doesn't seem to be about the beginning of revelation.

Before that, you get the hadith:

(Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1)

"Actions are only by intentions, and every person will have only what they intended. So whoever's emigration was for Allah and His Messenger, then his emigration was for Allah and His Messenger. And whoever's emigration was for worldly gain or to marry a woman, then his emigration was for that which he emigrated."

The Danger of Scholarship

Why does he start the book of the beginning of revelation with a hadith that's not about the beginning of revelation? He puts it there as a warning to himself. He's saying, don't be proud, don't be proud, Bukhari. You're writing this amazing thing that's going to change the world and is the core of the ummah ever since, but don't boast because only Allah knows if your intention is a good one.

The Prophet says in another hadith:

(Sunan al-Darimi, Hadith 280)

"Everything has a weakness, and the weakness of knowledge is pride."

We're thinking about that. The weakness, the vice of doing business is to tell lies. (آفَةُ التِّجَارَةِ الْكَذِبُ - afat al-tijara al-kadhib).

And he warns us against that. And then he says (وَآفَةُ الْعِلْمِ الْخُتِلَاءُ - wa afat al-ilm al-khuyalaa). And the weakness, the pitfall, the Achilles heel of knowledge is pride, vain glory, which is serious because that's actually worse than lying.

The Quranic Warning About Corrupt Scholars

Quran 62:5