How to Read a Book - Part 1

How to Read a Book - Part 1

Adler's Realization About His Reading

But one of the things that he says in here is that he realized after he'd gotten his degree that he was actually a poor reader. This already, he's got his PhD, and he was put into this class to teach. And he said that he'd read these books again, and he realized he hadn't really read them the first time.

He thought he had. And then he was teaching in this seminar with Van Doren. And what happened was he said he started reading commentaries and encyclopedia articles about the books.

And so he would come like thinking he was really prepared, but he said most of the good students had already done that. So, and he said what would happen is they would end up discussing things about the book, but they weren't discussing the book. And he said what really, and he's very humble in that he mentions that it was a great blessing for him to have been exposed.

He says, fortunately for me, I was found out, or else I might have been satisfied with getting by as a teacher, just as I had got by as a student. If I had succeeded in fooling others, I might soon have deceived myself as well. My first good fortune was in having a colleague in his teaching, Mark Van Doren, the poet.

He led off in the discussion of poetry as I was supposed to do in the case of history, science, and philosophy. He was several years my senior, probably more honest than I am, certainly a better reader. Forced to compare my performance with him, I simply could not fool myself.

I had not found out what the books contained by reading them, but by reading about them.

The Problem with Textbooks

So he realized he really hadn't read these books because, and this is why textbooks, you see the reason that you study textbooks, do you know why you study textbooks? You know why they, other than the money that the textbook industry makes because you can't copyright old books, other than the money they make. And that's why they change them every year.

They have new, even though no new information, they just change them so they make money. But you know why you read textbooks? You don't know, anybody? It's basically so-called experts that have read the original books in that field and they summarize the knowledge for us, digest knowledge. So what they're saying is you're too stupid, you know, to really, to read original source material.

So we're going to give you this dumbed down version. But what's happened consistently over time is they keep having to meet more and more dumb because they've never, they're not challenging people. And so people become lazier and lazier to the point that basically what you're reading is tertiary, you know, thought about something and you're reading it in a prose that is prosaic at best.

It's bad, it's just bad. There's no voice, right? I mean, if you're used to good literature, Rashida, you've read good literature, right? How do you feel about textbooks? It's torture, isn't it? I can't read textbooks. I can't, I'm sorry, I can't read them because they're so, you know, it's like some guy that memorized Strunk and White and practiced every single rule in that book, you know.

And so technically, you know, there's no grammatical mistakes generally because they're well edited and everything. But there's no voice, there's no, whereas if you read, who would you rather read in grammar? You know, Ahmed Foda, some guy from Egypt who was born in 1970. Or would you rather read Ibn Hisham, one of the greatest grammarians that ever lived? I mean, who would you rather read? Seriously, who would you rather read about, you know, the philosophy of history? Some guy who read Ibn Khaldun? Or would you rather read Ibn Khaldun? Because Ibn Khaldun is not that hard.

I've read him. I know he's not that hard, right? So, you know, that's one of the things about having, forcing yourself to read these books and not read what other people say about these books. You read them for yourselves and you learn how to read them.

And so you have to learn certain skills to read these books. And then this is what he goes.

Dead and Living Teachers

Now, the other thing he talks about is dead and living teachers. And he says that in reality, the dead teachers aren't dead teachers. You know, in this culture, they talk about dead white men. You know that phrase?

Which is not really fair to these people because they act as if somehow these dead white men are the reason for all this. You know, there's this kind of, let's get rid of dead white men because all the problems came from these dead white men. The fact is this civilization has consistently ignored most of those dead white men. I mean, this civilization has happened in spite of them because many of them were persecuted, literally killed, right? They weren't popular people.

Spinoza was kicked out, right? They weren't popular people. Locke had to flee England from political persecution, right? Socrates was killed by the noble people of Athens.

Our Tradition of Scholarship

But we have dead brown men, right? That's our tradition. We've got this whole tradition of, I mean, this is largely written. We don't have that many women that wrote. We do have some women that wrote.

In Kitab al-Aghani, there were many female scholars, but the women tended to be, you know, you have to have a certain type of jara'ah in Arabic. Like a bravado to write a book because writing a book is putting, it's really, not only is it putting yourself on the line, but it's also, there's a certain assumption that you're qualified to do something and the women tended to be very humble. Wasn't that they weren't great scholars.

They had a lot of great scholars, but their nature was more humble in that. So it wasn't that there weren't great women scholars. There were, but they tended not to write.

And a lot of them focused on areas like seerah, hadith, great muhaddithat, several of them. But, and some of the fuqaha, Imam al-Tahawi's mother, Umm al-Tahawi, was one of the great fuqaha quoted in the books of fiqh of the Shafi'i school. But generally, you're looking at a tradition that was largely written by men.

And that's something to take into consideration, critically, when you read, because men have a certain view that women don't always have. The Prophet, peace be upon him, used to take counsel from the women, listen to the women. He would have the women come.

They had khatibat al-nisa. She used to come, make declarations on the women's behalf. And the Prophet would force the sahabah to listen to her.

And then he'd ask, what do you think? And they would all be, well, it's amazing, because they weren't used to having that voice.

Reading Books Like Reading Nature

But he talks about dead and living teachers. And one of the things he says is that reading a book is like reading nature.

The questions you ask, you have to answer yourself. When you ask questions of a book, you have to answer them yourself. Whereas in a lecture, you can stop me and say, what did you mean by that? And I can explain it to you.

So a living teacher is very beneficial in that they can really help you to understand some things. And he talks about long before the magazine existed, live teachers earned their living by being reader's digests. In other words, a lot of what teachers and lecturers did is that they learned all these things, and then they were able to transmit them to other students.

But in the end, the work, you have to do the work.

Three Ways of Reading a Book

All right, what time is it? Okay, so what I'm gonna do right now is, this is just part one of this lecture. But I'll go over quickly.

You know, he said that there's three basic ways of reading a book that's worth reading. And he talks about, you know, that you have to read it structurally, which is, he uses the metaphor of architecture, which is a good metaphor. So what you understand is the architecture of the book, because any great book is written with a structure in mind.

If you read Imam al-Ghazali's book, the Ihya, the Ihya has extraordinary structure, and he articulates it early on in the book. If you look at it, he has 40 books. There's a reason why he put, what's book 20 in the Ihya? Do you know? Does anybody know book 20? What's book 20? Nobody? Book 20 is the book of the Prophet's character.

So he puts that right at the heart of the book. And out of 40 books, he puts it right at the heart, because that's the heart of that whole opus. What he's saying is, here's the embodiment of everything that I'm talking about.

All these virtues, all these qualities that I'm telling you to inculcate, this is the one you should emulate in them. But he's got 10, four books. So he does quartet.

And there's a reason why he has a quartet. I mean, there's a reason why we have four movements in music as well. Four is a very interesting number, and they were very interested in numbers.

The Structure of Imam al-Ghazali's Ihya

There's four amzijah, right? The mizaj. There's four seasons, right? So four is very important in the life of man, because we have four basic seasons in our lives. We have our childhood.

We have our adulthood, maturity. And then we have our fall, right? And then you have your winter, your last period. And so he puts these in the four.

And then he's got, the first is the book of knowledge. That's where he starts, because he's going to define for you, this is ihya uloom ad-din. But before I'm going to show you how to revive these sciences, I have to tell you what ilm is.

Because this is a book about knowledge. So I'm going to define my terms, right? So he's got, it's a very structured book. So you have to look at the structure of a book.

Now, some books are very nice in that they give you what are called analytical chapter summaries. So you have like a chapter heading, and then you have the analytical summary. So the author is telling you here, this is what this chapter is about.

You'll get that. But you should be doing that work. You have to really break down a chapter, right? So looking at the structure of it.

Three Types of Reading

And then you have to look also, the second type is the analytical, the interpretive, where you really have to see what the author is saying, what's going on, right? And then finally, a critical reading, which is where you begin to engage in it. These are the three types that he said, every book has to be read three times. The first is to get the structure.

The second is to understand the book. And the third is to have a conversation with the book. And you can only, he said a lot of people will jump to the third reading.

They'll read it critically without really understanding it. And that's where you get people, oh, that book, it's rubbish. Why? Because the author's full of it, whatever.

But have they really understood the author's positions? Because in a lot of cases, they haven't. You know, there's people that are entrenched in ideological positions. If I'm a Keynesian, any monetarist that I read, I'm just going to disagree with them off the bat.

But if I don't have a position economically, maybe I'm a Keynesian, but I'm open to persuasion. You know, persuade me that monetarist policies are better than Keynesian. Or maybe there's a third way.

Maybe, you know, there's some synthesis out of this dialectic. Or maybe, you know, there's a fourth, a fifth, or a sixth way. Maybe we can think outside of the box, right? But if I'm entrenched in a certain ideological viewpoint, there's no way I'm going to be able to read a book with an open mind.

So that's one of the things, suspending your criticism, charitable reading, all right?

Reading Poetry as Reading a Book in Miniature

So basically, what I want to do now before we end is, I want to look at that poem. So could everybody read, this is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, because reading poems are like reading a book in miniature. You know, a poem is really like a book, all right? Because it's so packed with meaning.

Poets are, you know, you could write, I could write a whole book, and I'm not exaggerating. I could write a book commenting on this poem. I guarantee you, I know I could.

I could write a book just commenting on this poem. That's how much meaning I consider to be in this poem.

The reason I like this poem is the first poem, when I was 12 years old, I was in, 13, I was 13 years old in eighth grade, Mrs. Augustinelli's class.

She was my English teacher. And I read this poem, and it gave me goosebumps. It's the first poem that ever really affected me like that.

So for me, it has a lot of meaning in that way. But anyway, some people, you know, he's from the Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley, famous for marrying the woman that wrote a famous novel, Frankenstein. Anyway, these guys were very critical of a lot of things.

But, so, just read it, and just give you a minute or two, just read it and think about it. Do you have a copy? Yeah.

Analyzing Ozymandias

So, if you had to say in one word what the poem, what kind of, what you felt reading that poem, what would it

The Irony of the Poem

So it's definitely an ironic poem. Now, if you get into what, are there any words that other, Ozymandias is actually a real name, because this was, you know, this was during the British when they were beginning to discover Egypt and they were coming back, they were actually bringing things back as well, but they were discovering and so they were telling, they had these travel logs, it was very popular to read about their experiences going up the Nile and seeing all these incredible Egyptian ruins of the pharaohs and became very, in England it was a big deal, and so he's writing this poem about somebody who's come back and he's telling them about his experience, right, and he's going to tell him about this, he was out in the desert, right, and then he saw this too vast and trunkless legs of stone, right, trunkless legs of stone, amazing, you know, trunkless, like there's no body, just the legs of stone are there, right, stand in the desert, right, they're standing there without a trunk, right, near them and then nearby on the sand half sunk and another really strong and, you know, you can see the trunk sunk, you see these are the internal rhymes of the poem, these are, you know, he could have said other, he could have described half buried, he could have said, right, but he didn't, he said half sunk, a shattered visage lies, and sunk is something we normally think of the sea, right, something sinks in water, but here's sand, another type of water, the water of earth, right, half sunk, a shattered visage, right, what's a visage? It's the face, right, and this is important because, you know, that's an older word we don't know, so you have to know why he's using a visage, right, lies whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, what's he telling us about this guy, his character, right, tell that it's sculptor well those passions read, right, the sculptor really

understood something about this character, right, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command, I mean sneer, it's an interesting word, right, what does sneer mean? What do you do when you sneer at somebody? It's contemptuous, right, arrogance, just sneering, right, sneer of cold command, heartless, we're dealing with a heartless person here, tell that it's sculptor well those passions read, and here we have reading, right, the artist reads also, it's a different type of reading, he's reading into the personality of the character that he's sculpting, he read well those passions because he's put them on that face, and then what's he telling us, passions are when you think of passion, what do you think of, huh, well what do you think though, passions, like somebody's passionate, what are they, huh, yeah, but what, passion, he's got so much passion, huh, I mean I think of life, somebody who's really alive, you know, they're passionate, they're alive, right, so he's, it's interesting, he's juxtaposing here, you know, to tell that it's sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, so here he's juxtaposing passions with lifeless, and yet he's telling us they survive, how have they survived, the sculpture, you see, so this is Shelley's own little, we're getting into his philosophy now, because Shelley was a romantic and believed that in the immortality of art, that art was one way of achieving immortality, and so what he's saying is, look, Ozymandias doesn't really live anymore, except because of this artist, right, so the artist actually outlived Ozymandias, because he's the one that left behind this thing, it wasn't Ozymandias, he paid for it, but it was the artist that produced it, right, so he's tell that it's sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mock them, what do you think he means there, mock them, and the heart that fed, what does he mean the hand that mocked them, what does mocked mean, what's mocked mean, there's another poem, great poem, one of my favorite poems by Yeats, come let us mock at the great, that had such burdens on the mind, and toiled so hard and late, to leave some monument behind, nor thought of the leveling wind, come let us mock at the good, with all those calendars, come let us mock at the good, with all those calendars wear on, they fixed old aching eyes, nor thought of how the seasons run, and now but gape at the sun, come let us mock at the wise, that fancied goodness might be gay, and sick of solitude, might proclaim a holiday, wind shrieked, and where are they, mock mockers after that, who would not lift a hand maybe, to bar that foul storm out, who would not lift a hand maybe, to help the good, wise, or great, to bar that foul storm out, for we traffic in mockery, he's talking about the modern age, it's all mockery, let's just make fun of everybody, make fun of the Prophet Muhammad, it's just an age of mockery, make fun, everybody's open game, make fun of politicians, make fun of everybody's open game for mockery, but is that what he's saying here, the hand that mocked them, see this importance of knowing terms, yeah that's what he means, he means more imitate, because that, you know, in his time, mock also meant to copy, or to imitate, the hand that copied them, because he wasn't mocking, he wasn't mocking Ozymandias, so this is important, you can't understand something unless you know the words that the author is using in it, so here he means the hand that copied them, now what's he mean, the heart that fed, the passions, yeah, he copied those passions, he nailed them, he got them on that face in stone, right, the hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed, fed what, the passion, so it's the heart of Ozymandias, he got his heart, it's a cold heart, it's a contemptuous heart, it's a heart that, you know, it looks down, it frowns on things, not a happy heart, and on the pedestal, these words appear, I mean, what do we put up on pedestals, right, on the pedestal, these words appear, my name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works ye mighty and despair,

you'll never be able to achieve what I achieve, despair, mighty, he's talking to the mighty, he's not talking to the peasants, he's talking to other kings, I'm king of kings, look on my works ye mighty, not peasants, you know, they're all shaking in their boots, I'm talking about the mighty should look at me and who I am, look on my works ye mighty and despair, and then boom, he's got the exclamation mark, right, and then what, nothing beside remains, just such a beautiful turn of phrase to come right after that, you know, nothing beside remains, that's it, right, round the decay of that colossal wreck, right, this giant Ozymandias, nothing beside remains, round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the level sands, the lone and level sands stretch far away, so what's he mean, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away, what are the sands referring to, it's the desert, right, but what do you think, what do we think of sands also, the sands of time, right, so it's time, it levels everything, everything we build, it's all going to be leveled, time is the great leveler, so you know, he's basically just saying, look, nothing beside remains, it's all boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away, there's just this little half sunk visage in the midst of a massive ocean called time, that no matter what we do, it's always going to be this half sunk shattered visage in the ocean of time, the sands of time, right, in the end, pretty bleak, unless (وَالْعَصْرِ إِنَّ الْإِنسَانَ لَفِي خُسْرٍ إِلَّا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا وَعَمِلُوا الصَّالِحَاتِ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالْحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوْا بِالصَّبْرِ - Wa al-asr inna al-insana lafi khusr, illa allatheena amanoo wa 'amilu as-salihat wa tawasaw bil-haqq wa tawasaw bis-sabr) - "By time, indeed, mankind is in loss, except for those who have believed and done righteous deeds and advised each other to truth and advised each other to patience." (Quran 103:1-3) This world, because all these things that you do here become meanings in the next world, everything you do here is meaningful in the next world, that's another view, anyway, so any questions, any answers on that? Okay, let's hear it, yeah, yeah.

Mohammed Rizal asks, can you ask Sheikh Hamza what he thinks of speed reading? Yeah, speed reading is like trying to read on methamphetamines, I don't believe in speed reading, I think you can speed read a blog, not my blog, but you can speed read a blog, you can speed read an article in Time or Newsweek, something like that, you know, there's things you could read, there's skimming and then there's superficial reading, skimming is just scrolling down a page and, you know, trying to see do I really want to read this or not, and then superficial reading is to read it without really thinking about it, right, whereas real reading takes time, I mean, real readers are, you know, if you're going to read something in the way he's talking about, Adler recommends not reading more than 20 pages an hour and taking a break, I mean, that's, you know, that's slow reading, so, you know, but I mean, you know, my teachers, like Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, he reads all the time, amazing, he always takes books with him and Marab Tarhaj, I brought him once a three-volume book of Al-Wazani as a gift, it was a book of fatwas that he didn't have and it's a famous one that's quoted, he just, for the next three weeks, that's all he read when he had free time and he finished it in like three weeks, mind you, he's reading something that he knows a lot about, so it depends on also what you're reading, Adler talks about, you know, original communication which are our primary texts because there's authors that are giving you original thought and most books don't have a lot of original thought in them because it's just not, very few humans have really

original things to say and a lot of them are actually just rehashing things that have already been said but because people don't know tradition, you know, Mark Twain said, the ancients stole all their best ideas from us, right, and there's a lot of of truth to that statement, you know, because people don't know where things come from and so

Question About Speed Reading

they read something and, wow, that's amazing, but then you read Aristotle and you'll see like, oh, that's where he got it from, you know, so that happens, anyway, so I mean, I'm not a, I took a speed reading course in school that I had to take and I was in school and maybe I didn't have to take it but I think I did actually because it was in a, it was part of for, because I was a tutor when I was in school in the reading lab but I wouldn't recommend speed reading, I'm not a fast reader, I usually read really slow, I look up words too, like, I don't, if I don't know a word, I'll look it up, which slows you down, you know, I mean, I have a pretty good vocabulary but, you know, there's words, I still come across words all the time that I either don't know or I'm not quite sure or I can't remember, you know, it's like, because you have passive and active vocabulary, active vocabulary is what you use, passive is what you can recognize and understand when you hear it or read it and our passive vocabularies are much larger than our active vocabularies, I mean, our active, our passive ones, you know, you're talking a lot of words, people know a lot of words, surprisingly, I mean, even, you know, relatively uneducated people know a lot of words and also a lot of nuances and, I mean, what the average person knows is just phenomenal, that's why people are brilliant, humans are, we're not stupid, we're very smart, you know, and memory, people say, I don't have a good memory, rubbish, you remember so many things, it's amazing, you can all leave this room and I can ask you to tell me basically what's in this room and you remember it, I mean, how did that happen? It's from being in a room to know, you know, where the podium was, you know, where the books were, approximately how many of those shelves are in here, you know, where the table was, where, you know, we can describe those kiosks, those little cubicles in the thing, right, and there's a little guest book on the thing, right, and then I saw a little poster, you can go there now if it's still there, you know, a little poster about building Zaytuna brick by brick, I mean, I was just walking into a room and I noticed all these things, I mean, how did that get stuck in there? People have phenomenal memories, we just don't know how to utilize our memories, like we don't know how to read, these things are trained, you know, memory is a, you train your memory, it's a skill, so anyway, any other questions?

Question About Prerequisites for Difficult Texts

One of our students who's joining us online says, in regards to reading higher level books and primary sources, isn't it helpful to rely on something that is a little easier to understand as a means of gaining familiarity with the material and then heading into more difficult original texts, otherwise it would seem to be a barrier to learning if an individual becomes overwhelmed or give up, thanks.

You know, I would say it depends on what you're reading, I mean, for instance, you know, I'm reading a book right now that I've read before, but I'm reading it with somebody and it's a book by Imam al-Bayjuri, and Imam al-Bayjuri assumes in that book, and it's really a secondary book because he's drawing from a lot of different books, but, and it's a textbook, it was used in Al-Azhar for Aqidah, but in that book he's assuming that you know logic, rhetoric, grammar, philology, al-ma'raba, he's assuming that you know theology, because it's an intermediate theology book, so he's assuming you've had basic theology, so he makes all these assumptions on his reader. Now, if you knew Arabic pretty well, you could actually read the book, but you would be missing a lot of his nuances. You just would, because, and then you'll miss things like he'll use a word that you won't know that he's using it to refer to something else, a science as a technical term, because that's one of the things about knowing terms.

Understanding Terms, Propositions, and Arguments

Now, one of the things that he's going to argue in here is that you have to also, in the second level of reading, you have to be able to identify terms and propositions and arguments, and these are basically the three subjects of logic, understanding, judgment, and reasoning. Those are the three subjects that logic deals with. Understanding is what are called simple apprehensions, knowing terms, what's called in Arabic logic being able to conceptualize something, and the Arabs say that in order to judge something, judging a thing is a branch of its conceptualization.

You have to conceptualize something before you can make a proposition, so you have to know if I say all men are created equal, okay, I have to know what men, all men, that's a universal statement, so I mean every man. Does that include black people? At a certain time, maybe people wouldn't have agreed that, but now most people would include that. Does that include Arabs? Does that include, so when we say all men, we're talking

about everybody, irrespective of what people went 200 years ago when they declared that, and they didn't think that that was a universal statement.

Jefferson did, and Benjamin Rush and others, but not all of them. I mean, I'm sure that they didn't, but you make that statement. You have to know what they mean by all men, and then what do they mean created equal? Equal is a mathematical term, and they're using it in a philosophical statement, so I mean are we equal? Like you're taller than me, aren't you? Stand up.

He's taller than me, isn't he? So we're not equal, so all men are not created equal. He's taller than me, right? So what do I mean by equal here? What am I talking about? You know, you have to understand the terms before you can make the proposition. So is it a mathematical metaphor? Am I saying created is assuming God, too, right? Because created means it's a passive form that assumes a creator, right? Because created means to be made, so something that was made has to have a maker.

That's an assumption, and they believed it, and are endowed by their creator. They mentioned the creator right after that, right? So that's a proposition. All men are created equal.

Is it a true proposition? In modal logic, you have what are called modalities, so it depends on what you're talking about, you know, because people aren't creating. Some people are faster than others, taller than others, smarter than others. We're not all created equal, so what are we talking about? Are we talking about with our basic human dignity? That's so there's a proposition.

Is that what he meant? Maybe. We need to discuss it. So you have to know the terms and then the proposition.

Now he's making an argument. That's a proposition. It's a categorical statement, right? It's a declarative statement.

All men are created equal. He's not saying maybe all men are created equal. I think all men are created equal.

In my opinion, all men are created equal. Those are different ways of saying it. He's saying all men are created equal.

Categorical, declarative, universal statement. We have to know what those terms are and then we have to know, okay, what's his reasoning? What's his reasoning? So now that's the third level. So that's a science that inshallah you guys are going to learn before you get out of here because it's very important.

The Importance of Logic

You know, one of the things about logic is no longer taught generally and it's created a lot of havoc because people can't think anymore clearly and our tradition is very committed to logic. I mean, the Shamsiyah was almost a universal, you know, the sulam in North Africa. I mean, one of the things about Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah that makes him distinct amongst a lot of scholars I've seen is he really knows logic really well.

So when he reasons, he's just, it's like knowing chess. Logic's like knowing chess, but you don't just know the rules because everybody, we can all reason and we're humans. You can make an argument, you can make an argument.

People make arguments all the time, but there's a difference between knowing the rules of chess and knowing the strategies of chess, right? Because if you know the strategies of chess, you can end a chess match in about three or four moves with somebody who doesn't know the strategies of chess. And logic is not simply to win arguments. It's really a means, a tool to pursue the truth and that's why, you know, that's one of the things he says that you should not ever want to read a book critically just to win an argument with the author.

No, you should be open to being convinced. Imam Shafi'i said, I never debated anybody, but I hoped and prayed that the truth would manifest on his tongue, so I would have to submit to it. And that's a whole other way of looking at this thing.

Prerequisites for Understanding Classical Texts

But he's assuming that, you know, traditionally people study grammar, rhetoric, logic. They understood conditional sentences. They understood universals, particulars.

They understood definitions, amphiboles, equivocations. All these type things are really important in language. And they're all things, they're tools of learning that you need to acquire.

And the better you get at them, the better you'll be at reading and the better you'll be at critical reading. Because one of the things about all these men, that one of the things that they share, if you go into any of these books, like Imam Sawi, you know, wrote this book as a commentary on his Sheikh's book.

You know, he is going to assume that you understand, you know, logic. I mean, he's just going to assume it. And he's going to assume that you understand, you know, So now he's defining what's he mean by So these are all terms that you have to understand. He's talking about jayyid of foodstuff, the good of a foodstuff, right? And the radee is the lower quality.

So you can also use what's between the two. And then he goes further into the commentary. According to Ibn Farhoun, it means the same.

And some say it means It's the gharib of the jayyid only. So, you know, these are like, this is like a telegraph. I mean, he's using, you know, it's like texting. He's using minimal language there. And that's the way the later writers are. The earlier writers are much easier to read.

The Evolution of Islamic Scholarship

But they're just, they kept distilling it, distilling it, distilling it, right? Because here, see, when he wrote this book, this is a six volume. When he wrote this book, it was assumed that you memorized the text. This is a

commentary on a text that's about 150 pages.

And he assumed you memorized the text. And then what the commentary is, is those are for the text to be memory pegs for the meanings. But this book is a condensation of another book, which is called the Mudawwana, right? Which should be here somewhere.

Anyway, the Mudawwana is like about this size. So they took the Mudawwana and took it down to about this size. So they took a book like this and summarized it to this and then had to write this to explain it.

So you're back where you started. But the reason they did that was because in the old days, they actually memorized this. And they couldn't do that anymore.

So they started writing these abridgments to keep the memory, you know, to simplify it. So even though it was much smaller, it was actually a lot harder than this, but the memory was easier. And so this was just to explain what you had memorized, because people couldn't memorize that anymore.

So that's the way the Muslim tradition kind of got into these summaries and glosses and glosses on glosses and went like that. But they're assuming at this level, he's writing in the 200 years ago, he's assuming that you have mastered a certain set of sciences. And he's not writing for some guy that's got a secondary degree from, you know, a high school or even a college degree now at Ayn Shams or at Damascus University.

They can't read these books. You know, you have to study people, you have to study with people who have studied the books. And that's why the ulama say, and he talks about that, he said some books you need a teacher.

They're just not going to work without a teacher. He says, if it's a great book, generally it should be understandable. It's a lot harder with a teacher, without a teacher, but he said you can do it if you put the work in it.

And that's true.

Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi's Warning About Self-Study

But I'll conclude, sorry about, I know there's a lot of questions, but I'll conclude. Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi, one of the great scholars of Islam, he said, that simple people think, you know, inexperienced people think that books will lead the one of intellect to understanding.

You'll come to know these knowledges, right? But the ignoramus doesn't know that in these books are ambiguities that will confuse even the most intelligent of people. If you try to learn this knowledge, you know, revelation and the knowledges that go with it, you try to learn this without a teacher, you will go astray. And affairs will become so confusing to you that you'll be more astray than Thoma the physician.

And it's referring to a famous Arabic tradition of Thoma al-Hakim. He was a man who inherited books from his father. His father was a physician who died. He inherited his library. So he read and learned medicine through

books. And he had a book that said, al-habbatu al-sawda, the black seed is a cure for every disease.

But there were two dots. The scrivener put two dots instead of one on habba. So it said, al-hayyatu al-sawda, the black snake is a cure for every disease.

So he went to find a black snake. And they call black mamba, it's very poisonous snake. And he tried to catch it and it bit him and he died.

So that's their metaphor. So I'm going to do the next one. It'll be a continuation on this, but I'm going to go into more detail.

And we'll do some more poems and also I'm going to read with you a speech to analyze as well. All right. Sorry, it's just, it's very hard, obviously, to follow that.

Closing Remarks

For the amazing intellectual journey we just went on. Everyone for being here. Please, everyone consider joining us here at Zaytuna for the intellectual journeys that happen here and for supporting this.

And please see the website and the Facebook page for information about the next lecture. Zaytuna.org. Register today. Welcome and Introduction to Zaytuna College

I wanted to say hello and welcome to everyone. Welcome to everyone here and then everyone listening or watching online. Welcome to Zaytuna College for the second lecture in our faculty lecture series.

(اقْرَأْ - Iqra') was the first word revealed to our Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. Iqra' meaning read or recite established the centrality of reading in particular and seeking knowledge in general in our tradition.

Therefore, it's imperative that in our community when we think of the place we are as Muslims in America right now, it's imperative for us to be conscious about our relationship to knowledge and our pursuit of knowledge.

Supporting Zaytuna College

Towards that end, Zaytuna College is an important part of this story of Islam in America. And so we're asking for everyone's support. First, with your prayers, please keep us in your du'as.

Second, with your financial support, such as joining us on February 18th for the benefit dinner with all three co- founders in San Jose. And third, by spreading the word about Zaytuna, considering applying or telling others about applying. And although the application deadline has passed, we're still accepting late applications.

Today's Lecture Topic

As for today, the title of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's lecture is How to Read a Book, which alludes to a book written in 1940 by Mortimer Adler. The suggestion for this lecture came from students, and so we'd like to thank them for that suggestion. And we'd like to say to everyone else, we hope that this can provide a step for allowing us to

work together as Muslims in America, thinking consciously about our relationship to knowledge and building institutions of knowledge here in America.

And finally, may God allow all of us to benefit from everything that is going to take place following this talk. Without further ado, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.

Opening Remarks

Alhamdulillah, it's good to see everybody.

And I've been absent. I've actually haven't been well either, so I request everybody's du'a, inshallah. The topic, inshallah, I'm going to discuss tonight is actually taken from a book, which I was fortunate enough to actually have studied with Dr. Adler in seminars, and he was a friend of my father's.

The Origins of the Great Books Program

And my father had studied with one of his mentors who actually taught him how to read a book, and that was Mark Van Doren, who was my father's teacher at Columbia for my father's duration at that university. And Van Doren used to teach a course using great books or classic literature. And out of that came a group of intellectuals in the United States that adopted a certain program that they believed would help revive liberal arts colleges.

But one of the things that they recognized, and Adler wrote this book for this reason, is that most people do not really know how to read very well. We learn Abbasidarian reading, which is basically how to read letters on a book. We can open up a book and read words.

But to actually become a really good reader, a solid reader, is a set of skills that are acquired over actually a long period of time. And one of the things about our tradition in particular, it really is a tradition that is rooted in reading. The Prophet's first revelation was (اقْرَأْ - Iqra'), is read

The First Revelation and the Nature of Reading

And he was told, (اقْرَأْ بِاسْمِ رَبِّكَ الَّذِي خَلَقَ - Iqra' bismi rabbika allathee khalaq) - "Read in the name of your Lord who created." (Quran 96:1) And the ba there, bismi, in the name of, is what the Arab grammarians term ba al-isti'ana. It's the ba that you use, the instrumental ba.

In other words, it's the means by which you read. And so there's really a mystical component to reading that is hinted or alluded to in the first revelation of Islam. That there is a type of reading that is done that is not the reading that the Prophet was referring to when he said (مَا أَنَا بِقَارِئٍ - ma ana biqari') - "I am not a reader."

So the Prophet was talking about this type of just reading a book, Abbasidarian reading. And what Adler refers to in this book as really plumbing the depths of a book, he talks about comprehensive reading. He talks about elementary reading is one type of reading and then informational reading.

Types of Reading for Understanding

And then he talks about comprehensive reading, which is reading for insight, for understanding. And that is really at the root of Islam. It's really getting to insight and understanding.

And so this book actually, I think, is really one of the most important books that I've seen in the English language because it's a key to other books. It really can help you read other books. And it was written by somebody who learned how to read from a master reader.

Adler's Discovery of Great Books

And Adler talks about when he first started teaching at Columbia, he took a course with John Erskine, who was a very famous philosopher. And it was a really extraordinary course. It was an honors course.

They read two years. They read 60 great books in two years. So they'd read a book a week, and then they would come together and discuss it.

And these were all really advanced students. And he was convinced that this was, he said, it wasn't that I discovered gold, it's that I actually owned the mine. That he really felt that he had just taken possession of this incredible treasure, which was all of this knowledge that had been passed down through the ages.

And this radically changed his perspective on learning. And he felt that the best way to really learn at the college level was through discussion. It was through reading texts and really discussing them.

The Revelation of Re-Reading

But what happens is he became, when he graduated, he actually became a teacher of that course. And he thought, oh, I've done this course. I know all these books, and I'm ready to go.

But being, he said, the diligent teacher that he was, he decided to read each of the books again a second time, even though he was convinced that he knew them. And he said he was dumbstruck because when he read them again, it felt like he'd never read them before. And this is one of the hallmarks of a really, really good book, is that the more you read it, the more you get out of it.

It's not, you don't just read a really great book one time. And Adler argues, really, that any book worth reading has to be read three times. But he does say that the book can be, by a master reader, they can learn how to do all three readings in one reading.

The Danger of Intellectual Laziness

But generally, it's going to take one or two readings. Now, one of the things that I think a lot of students just assume is, one, if they don't understand something, they'll just ask the teacher. Right? So if I don't understand

something, I can just ask the teacher, what does that mean? And that's a type of intellectual laziness when you are grappling with something, because the fact that you don't understand it is either one of two things.

It's so beyond your grasp that you just don't have access to it. So for instance, if you're not trained in mathematics and you pick up a book on physics, it's just not going to benefit you because you don't have the prerequisites for studying that book. But the other possibility is that you haven't given it enough thought.

You haven't put the time in. Now, I'll give you an example. The metaphysics, which is considered one of the more difficult books, probably the most difficult book in Aristotle's companion of writings.

Ibn Sina's Story: The Importance of Prerequisites

The metaphysics in Arabic was translated into Arabic. Ibn Sina, the great scholar, philosopher, said that he had read the book 50 times and still couldn't get it. And he had pretty much given up hope on it.

And he said he went to a store and this scholar, this bookseller said, I have a book that I think you'll really like. And it was an introduction to the terms that Aristotle was using in the metaphysics. And Ibn Sina just told him, no, no, I don't want that book.

I've spent enough time on that book. He said, no, no, you should read this amazing book. And he said, no, no, I don't want it.

And so the man said, look, you can have it as a gift. So he gave the man the book. Well, Ibn Sina went home and he decided to read the book.

And that book was the key that unlocked the metaphysics for him. So sometimes a book needs prerequisites to get to it, right? He had tried to understand it, but he didn't have the tools necessary to understand the book.

Understanding the Prophet's Hadith

Most of the books that you see in our tradition, if you take a book, for instance, like Tuhfat al-Ahwadhi, which is a commentary on Imam al-Tirmidhi, if you take a book like that, the hadith pretty much assumes one thing.

The Prophet assumes one thing when he's speaking, that you understand the Arabic of the 7th century. Because he was speaking to the most intelligent, literate people, and he was speaking to the most common people of his peninsula. And he said, (نَحْنُ أُمَّةٌ أُمِّيَّةٌ لَا نَكْتُبُ وَلَا نَحْسُبُ - nahnu ummatun ummiyyatun la naktubu wa la nahsubu) - "We're an unlettered community, we don't read and we don't calculate." (Sahih al-Bukhari 1913, Sahih Muslim 1080) So everything that he said, according to Imam al-Shatabi, was meant to be understood by the average Arab of that time, who was illiterate.

The Pinnacle of Language

Now, when we look at the language, we can see how far we've fallen as a species.

And very often, it's the poets, because I just mentioned three poets that represent the pinnacle of the English language. Very often, it's the poets that achieve that supremacy over other generations in terms of language. And certainly in Islam, it was no different, because in the 7th century, Arabic had reached its pinnacle with the Jahili poets.

And that's when revelation comes as a crown on that vast body of language that existed. But it was because they had such extraordinary language skills, and they were able to understand poetry. And if you can understand poetry in any language, you can understand anything written in that language.

The Importance of Poetry

I'm talking about good poetry. And that's why poetry is so important to study. Because one of the things that poets do, poets, people that have very literal-type minds, they say, why doesn't he just say what he means? Why is the poet, why does he talk in metaphors? Why does he talk in this ambiguous language? Because when you study poems, like Two Roads Diverged in a Wood and I, what does he mean, Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood? Like, what's he mean, Two Roads Diverged in a Wood? Is he really talking about being on a path, walking down a Vermont bucolic scene, and he comes on two roads in a yellow wood? And there he is, sorry, I could not travel both.

So he's there kind of wishing he could go down both. Is that really what he's talking about? Or is he talking about something deeper, right? And there's different ways that you can read things. You can read them at a literal level, and that would be he just came on two paths in a wood, and it's fall, probably, because everything's yellow, and the leaves are falling because he talks about the leaves on the path.

So maybe that's one level. That's a level of reading called the literal level.

Prerequisites for Understanding Islamic Texts

So basically, when you look at this incredible tradition of scholarship, and I was using the example of that book, authors, the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, when he spoke, his prerequisite is that you understand 7th century Arabic well.

And if you do, you can understand what he's saying, (الدِّينُ النَّصِيحَةُ - ad-dinu an-nasihah) - "The religion is sincere advice." (Sahih Muslim 55) There's a reason why he said ad-din as opposed to dinun. Or there's a reason why he said ad-dinu.

He didn't say nasihah-tun. He could have said ad-dinu nasiha, ad-dinun nasiha. But he used an article of definition for both the mubtada and the khabar, right, for the subject and the predicate in that sentence.

Why? There's a reason. And if you know, you don't have to know grammar to understand that. If you know Arabic in the way that the 7th century jahili Arabs knew it, because they would know exactly what it meant.

The Complexity of Language

That was their language. And so language, the prerequisite for understanding oral communication is simply the skills that we have in language. But they're very complicated.

I mean, even the most aboriginal languages are incredibly complex. Doesn't matter how simple language gets. It's always complex.

And it's a miracle that children learn how to speak, just syntax, and how they work out, and then generative grammar, how they generate grammar. Because children will say things that they've never heard said before. They'll start formulating sentences at three, four years old, and they've never heard those sentences before.

But they're generating language. So humans are language generators. We naturally generate language.

Writing and the Preserved Tablet

Now, at a certain point, people started writing down. Allah says, we taught by the pen. And because the lawh al-mahfudh is one of the really profound images in the Islamic tradition.

This idea of the lawh, the qalam, that God made this tablet, and then he made a pen, and he told the pen to write on the tablet. So everything that is, was, and ever will be, was actually written down according to this narrative. So there's a reading.

And then on Yawm al-Qiyamah, what do you do? You read your sahifa. You're given your book. And you're told to read it.

You have to read your actions. Everything that you did, it's all recorded. In some kind of, who knows what, I mean, you know, the modern language marqum means digital.

Ruqm is digit, but it could also mean written. A written book or a digital book, allahu a'lam. But it's a book that recorded everything.

The Centrality of Reading in Islam

And we know that we've got scriveners, angelic scriveners, that are writing things down, right? Taking notes. So reading is central to the Islamic tradition. It's all about reading.

And then reading signs in the self and on the horizon. So if you look, when the Prophet was told to read, and he said, I don't know how to read. He said, no, read again.

I don't know how to read. Read. This is a different type of reading.

It's a deeper type of reading. And then we're told, and this is very interesting, because even though semiotics, it's an ancient concept, the idea of the simos, you know, the symbols. It's an ancient concept.

Signs and Symbols in the Quran

And the Greeks talked about it. But the fact that one of the most important areas of philosophical pursuit is in this whole area of semiotics and signs and symbols and meanings. And the fact that the Quran identifies itself as a book of signs.

And signs are to be interpreted. You have to know what a sign, you have to be able to read a sign in order for that sign to be meaningful for you. If you don't read the sign, it's of no benefit.

If you come and there's a sign that says, danger, cliff ahead, sharp turn, and you speak Russian and the sign's in Arabic and you go off the cliff, it's because you couldn't read that sign. But if you saw the sign, you read the sign in a language you understood, you'd save yourself from the danger of possible destruction or destruction itself. So reading is, it's just foundational.

Three Fundamental Reasons People Read

Now, if you look, one of the things he points out, if you look, one of the first and most important things, there are many types of reading. But basically, there are three fundamental things that people read for. One is amusement.

Less so today than ever before. Traditionally, people read for amusement as a pastime. And you would often see people just on trains or before that, even just sitting with a book.

Henry David Thoreau talks about meeting a farmer in Massachusetts out near Concord, where he was staying near Walden Pond, who was plowing a field and he had Homer's Iliad in his pocket in Greek. And then when he would take time to rest, he would sit down and he would read Homer's Iliad. And Thoreau said, you know, I started discussing it with him because at that time, Massachusetts had about a 98% literacy rate.

They've never achieved that before. And one of the things they studied in grammar schools was Latin and Greek. So here's a farmer, peasant farmer, who's reading Homeric Greek, which is, it's difficult Greek.

Different Types of Greek

It's, you know, there's three, there's four Greeks. There's Homeric, there's Attic Greek, which is the Greek of Plato. And then you have Koine Greek, which is New Testament Greek.

And now you have modern Greek. And each one is a very distinct language. The Homeric is really the most vast in terms of vocabulary, just like Jahili Arabic.

It's much vaster than what comes after. And the Quran reduces the vocabulary considerably because the Quran was meant to be understood by lots and lots of people. So the actual number of words in the Quran are far less than exist in the Arabic language.

And there's no really difficult words in the Quran. And it's very interesting. The Quran uses very easy-to-grasp terms.

There's what they call Gharib al-Quran, but generally it's not difficult Arabic in that way. So he meets this and he said, you know, when he started discussing it, he really didn't have an idea of the themes of the book, but he just thought it was the greatest yarn he'd ever read. This yeoman, you know, he's reading it for amusement.

Reading for Edification vs. Amusement

Now, Socrates quotes Homer a lot for edification, like he uses him as a source of wisdom. And it could be argued that the whole foundation of Greek civilization is Homer, is the Iliad and the Odyssey, right? But you could read the Iliad purely for amusement. It's just a great yarn for somebody.

Now that people read like People magazine, you know, you see people reading people and self and us, right? All these, you know, it used to be life. Now it's self, right? So they read these and these are kind of these opiate magazines out there. Just everybody just reads them and they're kind of meaningless tripe and there's nothing really in them.

They're not going to be edified to find out that so-and-so's got bulimia or so-and-so's getting a divorce or, you know, Angelina is upset with, what's the other one? No, the girl that, Jennifer, there you go. See, we know all these things because it's in your face everywhere, right? You can't go to the supermarket. My mom's 90 and she was at the supermarket.

There's an old lady with her. I mean, she's not old for my mom because she was probably only around 75. My mom says old is 10 years, whatever you are older than whatever you are.

The Decline of Cultural Standards

So for my mom, 100 is old now. But, you know, this older lady looks at my mom. They're looking at all the magazines on that rack, you know, National Enquirer and Spectator, whatever they are, people.

She just looked at my mom and she said, aren't you glad we're on the way out? So what's interesting is if you look at somebody like, you know, like Dorothy Sayers, I mean, she was lamenting how bad it was in the 1940s. I mean, they could only, I mean, I think they would just drop dead by what they see now. But that's one type of reading.

Then you have informational reading like Time or Newsweek, just to get some information like what's happening in Iraq, you know, or what's happening with the Republican race, things like that. So you get type of information. And that is readily, it's easy to read.

The Dumbing Down of Language

It's not that hard if you're educated. They're writing probably at about 7th or 8th grade level. I mean, that's it.

Most books now, according to, you know, a friend of mine who was asked to write a book for a major publisher was asked at what level do you want? He said, generally, the books that we publish now are at a 6th grade level. If you look at, according to, you know, studies of the language of debates, Kennedy's and Nixon's debates were at about 11th grade level. Of understanding, high school.

Lincoln-Douglas debates were at graduate school level. If you just analyze the language and the type of level that they were speaking, now it's about 5th to 6th grade level. That's what they're talking at.

So this is a kind of dumbing down. But people, you know, that's the level that information is being written on.

Reading for Understanding

The last reason to read is to learn something.

For understanding. What he calls comprehensive reading. It's actually to illuminate, you know, your understanding.

Now what's interesting is one of the things that Adler argues is he says that, you know, people will say, oh, I can't read that book. It's over my head. And he said that is the very reason why you should read it.

Because if you always read things that are at your level, you will never improve yourself. You won't get anything. But when you read something that's over your head, it forces you to, like, pull-ups, right? The bar's over your head.

And so as you pull up, right, it's really hard at first. But if you keep trying, it gets easier and easier. You can do more and more.

Augustine on the Liberal Arts

Now one of the things St. Augustine said about his education, and he was educated in what are called now, in our tradition, the liberal arts. Even though most liberal arts majors cannot, if you ask them what are the liberal arts, they won't be able to tell you. Even though they have a bachelor's in the liberal arts or a master's in the liberal arts, they won't be able to tell you actually what they refer to.

But Augustine wrote a book called, it's not really a book, but it's an essay on Christian doctrine, in which he argues it was essential for people to know these language arts before they went into the Bible to understand it.

And he identifies them as grammar, rhetoric, and logic. And what he said, by mastering these arts, he said he was able to read, that he was able to understand anything that he read and to articulate anything he thought.

I mean, that's the definition of a literate person, that they can understand what they read and they can articulate what they think. Because a lot of people can't articulate their thoughts. You know, I wish I could put it into words, what I'm trying to say.

But they don't have that. That's a skill. Some people have it more naturally than others, but it is a skill that can be acquired.

It's not magic. You have to have words. You have to know how words are put together.

The Purpose of Adler's Book

And so, basically, what he says is, he wrote this book for that third type of reading. He didn't write it for those first two. He said, if you're interested in those types of reading, don't bother with this book.

You're just wasting your time. And so what he says is, the first thing, he talks about reading, the word itself. You have to know words.

The Problem of Ambiguous Language

Because one of the things, one of the real problems with language is that we simply assume, because we learn language as children, you know, we heard our parents say things in context, and we worked it out. We worked out what words mean in context. But words are very, many words are ambiguous.

You have in logic something called an amphibole, which is where you have double entendres, things, syntax that can actually mean different things, even though it's said the same way. Sometimes it's written, and sometimes it's how you speak it, right? Like, you know, in America, you have the right to bear arms, right? What does that mean? You can have a weapon. Some people could think what you meant was you have the right to take off your shirt and show your arms, right? Because in some cultures, women don't have the right to bear arms.

Like in Saudi Arabia, it's illegal for a woman to bear her arms, right? So there's an example, you know, of something that's just, the language is not clear.

Fallacies of Equivocation

Now, that's a kind of humorous example. But people actually misunderstand language all the time for that reason.

And you have a whole set of fallacies in logic called the fallacies of equivocation, which is where things can mean more than one thing. We're using a term to mean different things. You know, to give me an example, you

could say that, you know, only men are rational animals, right? Does everybody agree with that statement?

Generally, I mean, jinn are rational and angels are rational.

But we'll just, you know, some people don't really accept those other categories. So we'll just say all men are rational animals. You accept that, Mahasin? Yeah.

Okay. Women are not men. Therefore, women are not rational animals, right? Does that sound reasoning? Yeah, okay, good.

See, the equivocal term there is man. Because in the first term, it's a universal term that includes women. But in the conclusion, I'm basically excluding women from men.

So I'm using a term, right, ambiguously, which is one of the rules in logic that you cannot do. Terms have to be unambiguous. So what he says is, you have to know the words that the author is using and how he's using them.

Understanding Terms in Context

And that's very important. So reading. What does reading mean? Like reading.

What does it mean? I'm not reading you, Fatima. You know, I don't—what does that mean? I'm not reading you. I don't know what you mean, right? Exactly.

I don't know where you're coming from. I'm not reading you, right? Or, you know what, Mahasin? You're reading between the lines here, right? I mean, we can use the word in a lot of different ways, right? And so there's a basic meaning, which is just to read. But if you actually look, one of the meanings in Old English for read is the fourth stomach of a ruminant, right? Because ruminants have four stomachs.

And what do ruminants do? They chew the cud, right? And they swallow it, and then what do they do? They spit it back up, chew it some more, swallow it, spit it back up, chew it some more. So isn't it interesting that our word to read and to ruminate, to ponder things, has to do with this idea of chewing? You know, Bacon said that some books are to be tasted, some books are to be swallowed, and some books are to be chewed and digested, right? So the idea that reading is something that's— it's not just this superficial thing here, even in our language.

Language as the House of Being

And that's one of the beauties of a dictionary of etymology, you see, because you can really get— you know, Heidegger, who's a German philosopher, said, language is the house of being.

What do you think he meant by that? Language is the house of being. I mean, first of all, what's being? How's he using that term? Being is a term. What is being? Existence, right? Everything that is, right, has existence, that's being.

So metaphysics is the study of being, right? So when he says language is the house of being, what does he mean? What happens in a house? You live in it, right? You know, you live in your house. It's where you spend your time. So for us, as conscientious beings, right, because we're really, out of all these other animals that are out there, we're the ones that are thinking about what's going to happen to, you know, my retirement plan, you know? There's no birds worrying about their 401ks.

They're not. They're not out there. There's no lizards that are like, oh my god, the economy is so depressed, you know, what am I going to do, you know, right? They're not out there.

But because we can actually think about things, you know, cogitate, think about the future, worry about the future, like language is where all this experience is residing. And it's residing in our language. And he felt that if you could get back, he believed Greek was the, you know, the essential language.

Understanding Different Types of Love

If you could get back to these ancient terms from the Greeks, you could really understand the name, like if you could really get to the meaning of philos and agape and eros, terms that dealt with love, because there's different types of love. The Greeks distinguished. The Arabs distinguished.

We don't really distinguish. We have to use adjectives to differentiate between our types of love. But other languages actually have different words for different types of love because they recognize they're not the same.

Great Writers and Their Use of Words

So one of the really important things to have when you're reading seriously is if you're reading a great writer, because great writers, they differ from other writers in that they're very specific about the words they use, you know. And when you get into poetry, it's even more so because poets are not only using words based on their meanings, but they're using words based on their sounds. Like in English, we have mutes and liquids, you know, mutes and liquids.

Like ka is a mute, because a mute sound, you have to have a vowel to complete it, right? So you have a word like stop, you know, the P is a mute sound.

So, you know, if a poet uses a mute as opposed to a liquid, he's doing it for effect, or she's doing it for effect. So just learning the sounds of words, of why we would choose stone over rock.

They're very different sounds, aren't they? Stones, stepping stone. We don't say stepping rocks, right? But a stone is a rock, and a rock is a type of stone, right? But when we think of rock, it's a very different thing of stone, right? So poets will even be more specific. But great writers always use words very specifically.

Ancients vs. Moderns

They're not sloppy in that way. And that's why modern writers, you know, I had a teacher, a Mauritanian, who

said the difference between the ancients and the moderns is ancients wrote a sentence that could be commented on in a book. He said moderns write books that could be summed up in a sentence, right? It's very different, and I found that to be very true.

Most of the books that I read by modern writers, they really could be summed up very briefly. Whereas if you read a book like Qawa'id at-Tasawwuf, you can't sum that book up by Ahmed Zarruq. Couldn't sum it up? Very difficult to do that.

So it's important to have a dictionary, and then a good etymological dictionary to deal with terms.

Tools for Reading

So now let me just look at some of the things that he says in here. And then I'm going to do a poem with you.

I'm going to actually do this in two classes, because the book can't be, you know, it's, there's a lot in here. And I want you all to read this if you haven't already read it. And if you can, I would get the first edition.

You have to buy it used. Problem is, if you all buy it at once, it shoots up in price, because used books, now they've got the computers, so they're very aware of movement with a book. Suddenly it's like $7, and it shoots up to $99, because they're limited.

But the 1940, the first edition is, I think, much better. I've read both of them. I had to read the Van Doren version in college.

But this one, I think, is a much better edition. But one of the things that he argues in here, at the outset, he talks about reading. And then he talks about reading as learning.

Reading as Active Engagement

And he says that there's no such thing as passive reading. You can't read passively. There's only more active reading.

But reading is an activity. Watching a film can be completely passive, because you're just, you're receptive. And it can stimulate you, you know, you can, at the emotional level.

Some films can stimulate you intellectually. I mean, some films, a film like Red Beard by Kurosawa is, I think, as edifying as a lot of books, you know, in just terms of, and great film directors are, you know, they have a purpose in making their films. They're not making their films simply to entertain, although that's one level that the film could be taken on.