How to Read a Book - Part 2

How to Read a Book - Part 2

Introduction

In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Most Compassionate, all praise belongs to Him and we ask Him to send peace and prayers upon our Prophet Muhammad, upon his family and his companions. This is part two of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's lecture on how to read a book. I want to first welcome everyone for coming here to the Zaytuna library or for being with us online or after the fact on YouTube perhaps.

Part one was delivered last Wednesday. If you haven't had a chance to see it I highly encourage that you take a look at it online. One of the many things, one of the many benefits we could take from what Sheikh Hamza mentioned last Wednesday was the importance of being present and active in reading and indeed in everything that we do.

The Importance of Presence and Active Engagement

And so it's here that I emphasize the importance of us all just being present and active in this talk today, whether you're here present or watching it after the fact online or watching it live streamed right now. First of all presence. If there's something else on your mind, if you're working on something else, have homework, have food in front of you or if on your mind is homework or food or a conversation you just had with someone, put it all aside and let us be present in what's about to be said and really engaging with it and thinking about it.

Also being active. If you don't already do so, if you don't already have so in front of you, please take a notebook and write down ideas you have in which you can apply the things that Sheikh Hamza is about to say and ideas that you have in terms of applying these things towards and implementing them in the rest of your life. Also consider being active with Zaytuna.

We couldn't do this, have talks like this, make videos like this if it weren't for your support. So please keep us in your prayers, help us with financial support and then also consider applying or encouraging others to apply to Zaytuna College. And thank you for everyone who's been supporting us throughout our whole time here at Zaytuna.

Opening Remarks

Without further ado, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. All right.

"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."

وَصَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَى سَيِّدِنَا مُحَمَّدٍ وَعَلَى آلِهِ وَصَحْبِهِ وَسَلَّمَ تَسْلِيمًا كَثِيرًا

"All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds."

Background on "How to Read a Book"

Okay, what I'd like to do today, I talked last week about the three types of reading that Dr. Adler describes in his book.

And just to give you a little background on how this book came about, because it's actually, I think, a very important book. A lot of people that I know that I really respect in their abilities as scholars actually said that this was one of the books that really benefited them. So it's a very useful book.

But how it came about, I mentioned last week that he had a course where he had to teach these books. And what happened during the course was he realized that he hadn't really read the books. At least he hadn't read them at a deep level.

The Islamic Tradition of Reading

But he says something very interesting, and I want to show you how the Islamic element comes in. Because our tradition is a tradition of reading. The very first word in the Islamic tradition is:

"Read!"

That's really the starting of the whole thing, is read.

And there is no community in human history, I think, that has been more committed to the word and the idea of the power and presence of language than the Islamic civilization. And the Muslims just left this behind, this incredible legacy of language, this commitment to language. So I want to just, Adler says, he talks about the Middle Ages and how we have this kind of prejudice towards it.

Medieval Reading Excellence

And he says in here, in the late Middle Ages, there were men who could read better than the best readers today.

In the late Middle Ages, there were men who could read better than the best readers today. Of course, it is true that there were fewer men who could read, that they had fewer books to read, and that they depended upon reading more than we do as a source of learning.

The point remains, however, that they mastered the books they valued as we master nothing today. We actually do, I mean, sports is definitely an area of mastery today, and to some degree, entertainment. I mean, there's some really exceptional entertainers, but we tend to be, mastery in our culture has been reduced to amusement.

There's a mastery of those who amuse us and entertain us. But the idea of intellectual mastery is actually really, really relegated to the hard sciences. There's definitely people in the hard sciences that master things, but these were people committed to a whole other different level of mastery.

Learning from Medieval Commentaries

And what he says is, maybe we do not respect any book as they valued the Bible, the Quran, or the Talmud. And he actually had a lot of respect for the Islamic tradition, because I knew him personally, and he was very aware. He knew Averroes, he knew Avicenna, but here's what he says now, which I find very fascinating.

He says, we must get over all our funny prejudices about the Middle Ages and go to the men who wrote exegesis of Scripture. In other words, commentary on Scripture. Glosses on Justinian, or commentaries on Aristotle for the most perfect models of reading.

These glosses and commentaries were not condensations or digests. They were analytical and interpretive readings of a worthy text. In fact, I might as well confess here, I might as well confess here that I have learned much of what I know about reading from examining a medieval commentary.

The Islamic Contribution to Scholarship

So this is where he learned how to read, by looking at how these scholastic church men, and also because he mentions the commentaries on Aristotle, and I actually had one I think I left in the car, but the great commentaries on Aristotle were from Averroes, and they were translated into Latin, and this really changed European tradition when the Islamic language tradition is introduced into European tradition, because the Muslims were the first people that did serious dictionaries. You can find no tradition of dictionaries before the Muslims that is scientific. There's Chinese dictionaries, but if you look at them compared to how the Muslims actually, the first dictionaries emerged already in the late 7th century.

So even the Jewish scholars actually woke up to the idea of writing all the words down and putting them in a book from the Muslims, and it's well known that in Jewish tradition, they actually go to Arabic dictionaries to see root words in their own tradition, and this is something that the great medieval scholastics from the Jewish tradition did. So he says, the rules I am going to prescribe are simply a formulation of the method I have observed in watching a medieval teacher read a book with his students.

The Fourth Level: The Chain of Transmission (Isnad)

Now the beauty of this is this tradition is still alive, because I've read many books with scholars, like literally sit down and read the whole book with a scholar who read the book with a scholar, and this is an element that he won't bring in to this book, but this I think is the fourth level of reading, which is the idea of the chain or the isnad, and the idea of maintaining a certain interpretive consistency because of the chain.

This is really important, and there's a reason. You see one of the secrets of this community that to me is probably one of the most fascinating aspects of the Islamic community is that a normative tradition emerges out of Islam that was not predicated on the Christian or the Jewish tradition of the synods and the councils. The Christians had to get together and really argue out their doctrines.

So you have the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Chalcedon, you have all these different councils where all the church fathers come together and they actually debate about what they're going to believe and what's going to be normative in their practice. There's no historical evidence that any of that ever occurred in Islam, and yet a normative tradition emerges, which is very unusual, and the reason it emerges is because of the isnad. You see this is the secret of this community, and our scholars have said this, that the isnad is the secret of this Ummah, is the idea that you have these chains, and that's why you see the Quran.

The Unity of Quranic Recitation

Why is there no difference of opinion about how the Quran is recited? Why is it that the Shia and all the variants of Shia, the Ibadi, the Khawarij, the Maliki Hanafi Shafi'i, the Zaydi, all of them read the Quran with the same makharij. They all agree. There's 17 makharij.

They agree on the five points of articulation. They agree that on the huruf al-halq, you have Hamza Ha, you have Ha and Ain, and then you have Kha and Ghain. Why do they agree on those points of articulation? Then they agree on the sifat.

I mean, why is that? There's no difference of opinion about these things, even in the variant readings, and this is because of the isnad, because the same people taught in each generation, and they assured a consistency of transmission, right? So one of the things about reading books that deal with very, very complicated things, that there's so much room for misinterpretation. So when you bring in the interpretive element, and you see if we look here, right, and this is a book I know pretty well, this is a book interpreting the hadith from an accepted Imam Abd al-Ra'uf, Muhammad Abd al-Ra'uf al-Munawi, right?

Example of Traditional Hadith Commentary

So when we go to a hadith:

إِذَا اسْتَيْقَظَ الرَّجُلُ مِنَ اللَّيْلِ وَأَيْقَظَ أَهْلَهُ وَصَلَّى رَكْعَتَيْنِ كُتِبَ مِنَ الذَّاكِرِينَ وَالذَّاكِرَاتِ كَثِيرًا اللَّهَ )Sunan Abu Dawud 1309, Sunan Ibn Majah 1335)

If a man wakes up at night, and then he gets his wife up, and they pray two rakats, it will be written for them that they're from the people who remember Allah a lot, men and women, all right? And then he tells you who it's from, and that it's from Abu Huraira, and then he tells you, and also Abu Sa'id al-Khudri, and then he tells you that it's a sahih hadith, he gives you an isnad.

Now if you go down, he says:

إِذَا اسْتَيْقَظَ الرَّجُلُ مِنَ اللَّيْلِ أَيْ انْتَبَهَ مِنْ نَوْمِهِ مِنَ اللَّيْلِ أَوْ فِي اللَّيْلِ أَوْ لَيْلًا فَمِنْ تَبْعِيضِيَّةٌ أَوْ بِمَعْنَى فِي قَالَ الْوَلِيُّ الْعِرَاقِيُّ يَحْتَمِلُ أَنَّهَا لِابْتِدَاءِ الْغَايَةِ مِنْ غَيْرِ تَقْدِيرٍ وَهَذَا مَعْنَى التَّهَجُّدِ عُرْفًا فَإِنَّهُ

See, these are, this is a tradition, all those things have been thought through. He's taking you through the linguistic analysis of this hadith.

انْتَبَهَ مِنْ نَوْمِهِ - he woke into consciousness after being unconscious. مِنَ اللَّيْلِ أَوْ فِي اللَّيْلِ أَوْ لَيْلًا - from part of the night or in the night or at night, so he gives all these different possibilities using these adverbs and prepositions, so it could be adverbially, it could be using the preposition for partitive, right, a part of the night, right, and then he says, or it could be بِمَعْنَى فِي so he's saying مِنَ اللَّيْلِ could be it could mean here في it could mean a part of the night, right, so, and then he says الْوَلِيُّ الْعِرَاقِيُّ says that it's for ابْتِدَاءِ الْغَايَةِ because you can have مِنَ الإِبْتِدَاءِ so now he's saying the مِنْ here could mean في it could mean partitive, so it could be adverbial, in the night, it could be partitive, or it could be the from of outset, in other words, I began أَتَيْتُ مِنْ مَكَّةَ I came from Mecca, from the outset, so here he's exhausting the linguistic meanings, he's saying, look, all these meanings are possible in this preposition, he's teaching you how to read with all the ambiguities that language has, he's exhausting the possibilities, this is a type of reading, because he's saying, look, we can't say it's this or it's that, it could be this, it could be this, or it could be this, because the language has all of those possibilities, and this is our tradition, it's a tradition that literally exhausted language.

The Depth of Traditional Islamic Scholarship

And that's why we have so many commentaries on the Quran, because this is what they were doing, but they were masters of language, they were masters of grammar, they were masters of rhetoric, and they were masters of logic, and this is, so this is what he's saying, look, these men knew how to read in a much deeper way than we know how to read, they were exhausting language, because what they were reading was so serious, most of what we read is so frivolous, we don't know, we don't need to think when we read, because we're reading about how Whitney Houston died, you know, was it drowning, or was it from the valium that she took, did she overdose, did she, that's what people are reading about, you don't really have, what's exhaustive about that, it's just titillation, that's all it is, it's just to amuse and titillate people, that's all they're interested in, now they've put her little site on the Hollywood tours now, so the bus goes by that place, that's where so-and-so died, right, this is the culture that has been cultivated, it's a culture of frivolity, where tragedy even becomes amusement and entertainment, and that's why they love to watch these people melt down, right, because it's a really unhealthy culture, it's unwell.

Comparison to Historical Standards

So compared to the brilliance of the 12th and 13th centuries, the present era is much more like the dark ages, and he's writing this in 1940, I mean, what would they think now, you know, he actually lived to be 90, 91 or two, I think, so then he, you know, he talks about the idea of having, you know, he says when you read people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, if you look at the founding fathers of this country and you actually read them, you realize that they're writing at a very sophisticated level, if you read the Federalist Papers, has anybody ever ventured into those, the Federalist Papers, huh, a little bit, you know, the Federalist Papers today are considered extremely hard reading for the average American, right, they were newspaper op-

The Decline of Educational Standards

All you have to do is take a high school textbook from the 1850s and look at the level of reading that they were doing, one of the things, for instance, if you look at McGuffey's readers or Appleton's or any of the 19th century books that they read at grammar, at the grammar school, they never taught words without teaching the accents of words, so they had this idea of elocution, what we would call tajweed, proper pronunciation, knowing the sifat al-huruf, because English also has sifat, like there's mutes and there's liquids, aspirates, right, these are the attributes of the letters, and so to pronounce them properly, you need to learn what their qualities are, they learned those because to them, poetry was very important, and so they wanted young people to be able to identify accents and beats in poetry so that they could hear the rhythms of poetic language and they would be able to see that.

If you ever get a chance, you can hear Lord Alfred Tennyson reciting the Charge of the Light Brigade, which he didn't particularly like as a poem, he wrote it as a poem honoring the veterans of the Crimean War, where the British sided with the Muslims, quite unusual, against the Russians, but he wrote this poem, and if you hear him recite it, he says, cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right, and he does this very dramatic reading, well somebody asked him why, when he did his public readings, he did it like that, he said, well I worked quite considerably to get those numbers, you know, in the accents, and so I want everybody to be aware of them, you know, because it's not easy to do that, to get a proper iamb or a dactyl or a spondee, whatever you're, however you're writing, so that was very important, so these people learn these things.

The Problem with Modern Education

Now what he argues here is that people don't like this idea of uniform education anymore, so we've created an elective system where people choose what they study, and part of the argument for that, he said there's a lot of talk among liberal educators who fear the rise of fascism, because this was a concern in the 1930s and 40s, about the dangers of regimentation and indoctrination, I have already pointed out that many of them confuse discipline with the Prussian drill or the goose step, you know, the Nazis do the goose step, they confuse authority, which is nothing but the voice of reason, with autocracy or tyranny.

See, we call an author an author, there's a difference between a writer and an author, an author is called an author because they write with authority, they have some, like if we're going to read a book on cardiac surgery, we want to know that the guy that wrote that book has a degree from an accredited medical school in cardiac surgery, we want him to have authority, we don't want to read a book by some hack writer who decided to write a book on cardiac surgery and just got a whole bunch of resources and references, and he's got no degrees and he wrote the book, most people in their right mind would just not take that seriously, because he doesn't write

with authority, he's not an author, all right, so what he says is, you know, they confuse authority with nothing, which is nothing but the voice of reason, right, with autocracy or tyranny.

Understanding Docility

But the error they make about indoctrination is the saddest, they and most of us do not know what docility is, okay, so what's docility, what's a docile person, submissive, good, yeah, what else, docile, yeah, calm, I mean, these are the kind of images that are conjured up with a docile person, anything else, meek personality, right, there's a hadith:

(Musnad Ahmad 7491)

The believer is docile, if he's led, he follows, like this is sahih hadith, docile. If you look in the dictionary, the third meaning is teachable, all right, so docile is from the same root, that we get doctor from, right, it's the ability, and also indoctrinate is related to that also, all right, but the docile person is the teachable person because they're willing to actually listen to an authority and learn from that authority, so to be docile is to be teachable.

The teachable one must have the art of being taught and must practice it actively, so you have to be an active learner, docile doesn't mean you're passive, right, it means that you're teachable, you have to be an active learner, so the more active one is in learning from a teacher, dead or alive, in other words, these are dead teachers, even though they're the, you know, these are the living teachers, I mean, most of the ones walking and talking, we're the dead ones, these are the ones that are alive, but he talks about dead teachers, meaning the teachers who have gone, that we can't really ask them what they meant, and the living teachers where we can, because they're still here to tell us what they meant.

Active Learning vs. Passivity

So he says that the more active one is learning from a teacher, dead or alive, and the more art one uses to master what he has to teach, the more docile one is, docility, in short, is the precise opposite of passivity and gullibility, those who lack docility, the students who fall asleep during a class, are the most likely to be indoctrinated, lacking the art of being taught, whether that skill be in listening or in reading, they do not know how to be active in receiving what is communicated to them, hence, they either receive nothing at all, or what they receive, they absorb uncritically, and it's a really important point.

So slighting the three R's in the beginning, reading, writing, and reckoning, they used to call those the three R's, later they become the trivium and the quadrivium, reading, writing, and reckoning, the three R's, this was the foundation of grammar school in Muslim and Christian and Jewish tradition, and neglecting the liberal arts almost entirely at the end, our present education is essentially illiberal, it's actually not creating free people, it's having the opposite effect, it's creating people that are under the illusion that they're free, but they haven't been trained, their minds aren't free to think, right.

Hence Bob Marley, emancipate your mind from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind, you know, Bob Marley, so they have been, then he says, right, these, our students are indoctrinated with all sorts of local prejudices and pre-digested pap.

The Problem of Relativism

Let me give you an example, if you ask most students today, you know, are there any absolutes in the world, most American students, students in Europe, they'll say, it's just, you know, everything's relative, like, that's your truth, right, it's not my truth, that is a whole philosophical school, they don't know where it came from, they don't know how it entered into the DNA of our culture, but it's actually a philosophical school, and it's been around since the ancient Greeks, Socrates was dealing with these, but it's not new, it's not new, I mean, that's who Socrates is fighting in all the dialogues, in the Socratic dialogue, he's fighting those characters that say, it's all relative.

We've got people all over now saying it's all relative, the irony of that statement is that it's an absolute, you cannot say there are no absolutes without stating an absolute, it's one of the ironies in philosophy, so what he's saying is, they have been fattened and made flabby for the demagogues to prey on, hence people that are standing behind these demagogues with holding up signs saying yay for them, and they're just demagogues, they're not making any sense, they're not making rational arguments.

The Importance of Critical Thinking

I mean, if you want a rational argument about foreign policy, the single most rational argument about foreign policy that I can see is the one that Ron Paul consistently makes, and yet everybody just relegates him to cuckdom, he's just saying, look, if you go around bombing people, they're going to get angry, right, they say no, no, no, it's just because they hate us, they hate our freedoms, well, Scandinavia is freer than America, right, they're not bombing Finland, right, seriously, it's just a kind of rational argument, but people aren't taught to think critically, they're not taught to think critically, it's rah, rah, rah, and so this is what he's talking about.

The resistance to specious authority, authority that's not real authority, even when the doctrine, even when the doctrines they impose are sound democratic ones, the schools fail to cultivate free judgment because they have forsaken discipline, they leave their students open to the opposite indoctrination by more powerful orators, so the sophists come in and they sway people because people aren't taught to think critically, and one of the best ways to learn to think critically is to actually learn the tools of thinking critically, which are not easy, it takes time and effort to learn them, all right, so ours is a demagogic rather than a democratic education, so he's saying we have more demagoguery going on in our schools than a democratic education, there's more indoctrination going on.

Reason and Revelation in Islamic Tradition

The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as the only arbiter of

truth, right, we have reason and revelation, but our tradition has been committed to epistemological realism, to this belief that there are arguments, there's reality out there that can be discernible, that can be argued for, the Qur'an uses rational, there's a book Imam al-Ghazali wrote which is called Qustas al-Mustaqim, which is showing that the Qur'an is using rational arguments, it's giving us arguments and saying here, look, did you think of this, did you think of this, and telling people to use their intellects to reflect, to think, but don't fall back, Qur'an is constantly saying don't fall back on tradition, don't say, oh well this is what we found our fathers doing, no, well what if your fathers were fools, did you ever think of that, so the Qur'an is challenging people constantly to think critically.

The student who has not learned to think critically, who has not come to respect reason as the only arbiter of truth in human generalizations, who has not been lifted out of the blind alleys of local jargons and shibboleths, will not be saved by the order of the classroom from later succumbing to the orator of the platform and the press, to be saved we must follow the precept of the book of common prayer, the high Anglican church, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, right, when you read your scripture, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, understand what's on.

The First Rule: Know What Type of Book You're Reading

So anyway I want to look at, I wanted that as a preface, now I want to look at the idea, going deeper into the idea of the first type of reading, which is a structural reading, understanding the skeleton of a book, now the, one of the things he says you have to do is, the first rule, you have to determine what type of book you're reading, and you would be surprised at how few people can actually do this, like people read books, but they actually don't know what type of book they're reading, now one of the helps in, in modern publishing is they usually classify the book on the back now, all right, so that's a help because it tells you what category, but he says the fundamental, you have to, he, he talks about different types of reading.

One of them is reading for amusement, and most of the opiate, the opiate literature out there, all these magazines and time and newsweek and, and all these things that are out there, that's what people read them for, it's a kind of entertainment, even the news generally is, is become entertainment, right, so that, that type of reading is a very superficial type of reading.

Types of Literature

And then you have also, you have a, a type of reading that is for enjoyment, which is related to the amusement, but less so, but you can read like literature, now there's different types of literature, you have high literature and low literature, a lot of people don't like those distinctions anymore because we're in an age of leveling, but there actually is high literature and low literature, high literature was once open to anybody, it wasn't an aristocratic thing, like anybody who could read or write read good literature, and generally good literature, we forget that Charles Dickens was a popular writer, most of the elite looked down on him, right, and we forget that, that he was actually, he was serialized in magazines, whereas now he's considered high literature, but at the time he was

not, A. Conan Doyle, he was a, a writer for magazines, and now it's considered kind of a high literature, because the writing was so much better at that time.

So if you look, you can read a book, like for instance, you, Moby Dick is, you know, you're just not going to read that for, I mean, some people will enjoy it, but it's a hard read, so there are books, even when it came out, people had a hard time with it, but there are books that are narrative works of imagination, like for instance, Anthony Trollope, you know, he's a famous British writer, he actually outsold Dickens, but he's less known than him today, but he wrote a, a book called As We Live Now, I think, yeah, As We Live Now, and that, it, that book is about the modern age emerging, and how it was affecting Britain, so it's kind of a sociological work.

Literature as Social Commentary

I mean, it's interesting that Steinbeck, who wrote The Grapes of Wrath, about when they had the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, and then the, the, the Dust Bowl Okies came out here, we still have remnants of that, if you go inland to Stockton, in California, you will find people that trace their roots back to Oklahoma, because they came here during the Dust Bowl to work in, in picking things, Steinbeck wrote a book called The Grapes of Wrath, that book is used in sociology classes, so even though it's a work of quote-unquote imaginative literature, it has a lot to do with sociological circumstances that he was living and watching and seeing, because he was in California at that time, and, and other books of his also reflect that, so imaginative literature is often a literature, literature that reflects a time and a place, and you can learn a lot about Victorian working conditions from the books of Charles Dickens, you can learn about child labor, and you can learn about child abuse.

Reading "Catcher in the Rye" at Different Ages

I mean, what, I, I would argue, who's read Catcher in the Rye, put way up, I want to see, okay, not everybody, but almost everybody, did you read it, yeah, I can't believe that, really, but you didn't have to read that, wow, okay, that was an assigned book for me, how many was it assigned for, okay, how many read it a second time, okay, two people, why did you read it a second time, okay, good, that's a great reason to read it a second time, yeah, so you wanted to read it again, okay, because I did that, I read that, I read it a second time about five years ago, yeah, so what did you think the second time, was it the same book, exactly, yeah, it wasn't the same book, was it, now, how did it affect you, yeah, yeah, Holden Caulfield, right, okay, great, interesting, yeah, no, that's fantastic, yeah, okay.

So when I read that, I think I was 16, I totally related to it, like, everything was phony to me, I just got, I got Holden, like, I literally, you know, I felt we could have been best friends, I went to prep school, so I know that world that he was in very well, okay, now, the second time I read it, which was about five years ago, okay, my brother reads it about every year, he loves that book, but the second time I read it, I actually thought it was about child abuse, like pedophilia, and I saw a whole subtext there that I hadn't seen before, because he talks about the perverts and the teacher that tries to seduce him in the, or he thinks he is, maybe not, it's kind of ambiguous, we don't know, but he's out there, he wants to protect children from the horrors of the world.

Understanding Your Purpose in Reading

So, you know, there's different reasons that we read, but you have to first categorize the book, and then understand why you're reading it, some people just want a good yarn, I mean, there's a whole slew of, of, of books out there that are like romance novels, poorly written, and, and they're just the same plots over and over, like Indian films, like, I don't understand Indian films, because if you've seen one, you've seen every single one, right, but people like them, they watch them over and over again, right, it's always the same thing, really, really rich girl, really poor guy, sees the rich girl, falls in love with the rich girl, but there's no way he can marry, but then in the end, find out he's actually a prince that was, you know, kidnapped when he was a little kid, and so he's actually, can marry her, and something like that, I mean, they're all around those things, but there's a lot of books that follow those, in fact, every, really, romance is about that, boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, there's all these obstacles to getting to girl, in the end, boy gets girl, I mean, that's a common motif, and that's why some, you know, there's writers that have written books about, there's only 36 plots, narrative plots.

I'm just kidding, I haven't seen, I've only seen two Indian films, I, see, that's called hasty generalization, that's actually a logical fallacy, right, it's a material fallacy in logic, yeah, I have no right to talk about Bollywood films, because I've only seen two, right, but they were exactly the same, so I assume they were all the same, you know, so I admit that, so you caught me out, right, see, a critical thinker here.

Learning from the Structure of Books

So, now, then, see, once he, you know, in this book, if we look at how he's set his book up, the structure of the book, the first is the activity, so you can learn a lot from the table of contents, a lot of people, oddly enough, don't read tables of contents, they don't even read the preface, or an introduction, in an expository book, I mean, novels don't have preface or introduction, unless it's a classic, and then, later on, somebody, some scholar writes some introductory article of why you should read that book, but when they're first published, they don't, but usually, a good writer will tell you why he's writing the book in the preface, and usually, in the introduction,

often, the first chapter, he's gonna give you some kind of structure of what he's going about, not always, but oftentimes.

So, you know, he's got, basically, the book's divided in three parts, the first part is the activity of reading, so he talks about the reading of reading, reading is learning, teacher's dead or alive, and then he differentiates between what he calls original communications, which are books that are written with something that's really never been put into writing before, so Copernicus is an example of a totally original communication, even though some Aristarchus and others did hold a heliocentric view in ancient Greece, but Copernicus lays down a hypothetical foundation for a heliocentric universe, it was a revolutionary book, it's original communication, Don Quixote, even though it's an imaginative literature, it's really the first novel, I mean, we just don't have a novel like that, there's nothing like that before Don Quixote's book, and he somehow was aware, because it's very clear in the book that he knows this book is gonna be read till the end of time, that's one of the interesting things about some of these books, like the Iliad's like that, there's an awareness of that.

The Failure of Modern Schools

So if we look, and then he says the defeat of the schools, so what he shows here is that our schools aren't teaching people how to read, basically, he says they do up to the sixth grade level, and they do a good job, after the sixth grade, people don't learn how to read, you know, reading is, it takes a lot of work, and this is what he's arguing, is that they're poor readers, one of the things in grad school that they're really testing you for is your ability to read, to analyze, but that's just a small, they just give you like a few paragraphs, right, how do you analyze a whole book, it's a lot different from analyzing a paragraph or a sentence, and this is what he's saying, that our schools have failed us, because we can go through these schools, spend all this time, and yet we really don't know how to read at a deep level, and so he's, what he says is he's going to give us some really useful tools.

Skills vs. Knowledge of Rules

Now there's, what's really interesting, and I want to show you something that I thought was to me one of the most interesting, well there's a couple things here, one of the things that he says is that he talks about skills, that you have to, there's a certain set of skills that you have to acquire, and there's a difference between knowing rules, and then knowing how those rules operate, like to be able to operate something, so the operation is very different from just knowledge of the rules, we can learn all the rules of driving, like you can memorize that book, and know all the rules, but you don't know how to drive, you have to practice driving, that's how you learn how to drive, so he argues that, look I'm going to give you some rules, you have to practice the rules, these rules are not going to make you a better reader, just by knowing the rules, until you actually practice the rules, and become skilled at the rules, you're not going to be able to do that, and he's primarily writing for expository reading, knowledge-based reading, reading, and this is what a lot of what you're going to be doing here, and what you have been doing, is expository reading, reading where you're reading to learn something, grammar, fiqh, theology, history, whatever it is, that's what you're reading, and that's why this book is incredibly useful to

get better at that, better at the retention, because when you do this work, people say, oh I read, but I don't remember what I read, because they didn't read, if you actually read a book like he's suggesting, trust me, you will remember the structure of the book, you'll remember what the book was about, alright.

The Nature of Habits

So he says that any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules, in fact, the artist or craftsman in any field differs thus from those who lack his skill, he has a habit they lack, you know what I mean by habit here, I do not mean drug addiction, your skill in playing golf or tennis, your technique in driving a car, cooking soup, is a habit, right, and habits, I mean he's an Aristotelian at root, Adler, he loved Aristotle and he knew him very well, and Aristotle talks about the habits that are inculcated, like virtue is a habit, you habituate yourself, and the Prophet, this is also our school, because the Prophet said:

(Reported in various sources attributed to the Prophet)

Knowledge comes through the hard work of acquiring knowledge. تَعَلُّم in Arabic is from the تَفَعَّل root, which is for difficulty يَتَكَلَّف when you use that I mean it could be other things, it could be to avoid somethingيَتَجَنَّب but تَفَعَّل in Arabic that form is the form of doing something with difficultyتَحَمَّل see means he carried butتَحَمَّل he bore something, like it was difficult تَحَمَّه that's different from حَمَلَهُ, حَمَلَهُ could be easy, he carried, but when you say تَحَمَّل he carried with difficulty, so the Prophet said, knowledge is acquired through difficulty, you have to learn, and learning is not easy, it's not an easy thing, but it's incredibly rewarding.

The Pleasure of Knowledge

I mean this is the beauty of knowledge, it's a rewarding thing to learn, Abu Hanifa said, if the kings knew the pleasure we were in, they would come with their armies to steal it from us, right, really, the pleasure of discovery وَجَدَ to find something in Arabic means to become ecstatic, and to discover something and to learn something is an incredibly enriching experience.

And so there's, he says there's no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating, that is what it means to say one learns to do by doing, the difference between your activity before and after you formed a habit, is a difference in facility and readiness, so you can do something in the beginning with difficulty, and you're not really prepared to do it, but as you acquire the habit, it becomes easier and easier, anything you learn, most of you probably learned some sport, in the beginning it's very difficult, it's hard to throw a football, it's hard to learn to catch a baseball, but once you learn it, it just becomes second nature.

Practice and Consistency

Sports, intelligence, spirituality, they're all the same, the basic rules are the same, practice, you have to practice, people say, oh you know, I'm doing my wird, I'm reading my book, I don't experience anything, because this is consistent practice over time, and then you have to learn to do it right, because practice makes permanent, not

perfect, it only makes perfect when you're practicing it properly, right, that's how practice makes perfect, when you when you actually learn to do it properly.

So then he says, so that is what it means to say practice makes perfect, what you do imperfectly at first, you gradually come to do with a kind of almost automatic perfection, that an instinctive performance has, so you see somebody, I mean you see somebody who can play an instrument like a piano, and you just, it's amazing what they can do, but you didn't see the, you know, twinkle twinkle little star, the chopsticks, you didn't see that whole process to where they got to that point, and the same with the salihun, you didn't see them struggling with their nafs when they were younger, you see somebody who's old and he's conquered himself, or somebody who's educated, you didn't see all the hard work they put in, you didn't see the nights that they stayed up, you didn't see all the work that they put in, so you, you just, it looks easy, they make it look easy, the Arabs call it the easy impossible, right, but but that comes through hard work.

Applying Skills to Reading

So everything that I've said so far about the acquisition of skill applies to the art of reading, there's only one difference between reading and certain other skills, to acquire any art, you must know the rules in order to follow them, but need not in every case understand the rules, so for instance, you, if you drive a car, you don't have to understand how the car works to be able to drive it, you just know that you have to put a key in, you turn the key, or now they have different things, you just get and push the button, but you have to know these things, but you don't have to know how that electricity goes, and the computer inside, all those things, whereas he's saying with reading it's not true, to understand the rules is to know more than the rules, right, you have to know the principles underlying those rules, all right.

The Trivium: Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic

So now, to understand the rules of reading perfectly, you would have to know the sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, with consummate adequacy, and this is where the biggest failure of our schools has come, they don't teach people grammar, rhetoric, or logic, this is the trivium, because the art of reading can only really be mastered if you have some skill in these essential arts of learning how to read, right, power, art comes from a root word, army is from the same root word, right, it's power, the liberal arts are the arts that free you up to use your mind without the obstacles that are naturally there.

So grammar, we don't teach grammar, people don't know what conditional sentences are, they don't know what adverbs really do, right, so they, you know, they have, people can speak, and they can read, but because they don't know these in any deep way, they'll never be able to read difficult works with any seriousness, and that's why this is what they knew, this, all of this incredible legacy is based on mastery of these fundamental skills, these were called al-ulum al-aliya in our tradition, the instrumental sciences, they were the sciences of instrument, they enabled you to do something, and the most important thing was understanding.

The Importance of Understanding Reasoning

So he says it would take a book 10 times long to expound the sciences which make the rules of reading and writing intelligible, now most of you, you know, I would say everybody in this room has some level of grammar, because you can read, and you can write, and do these things, and you also have some level of logic, because to be human is to be logical, I mean, that's, humans do things based on reason, there's a reason why, you know, I clip my nails because it's sunnah, but I would clip them anyway, because, you know, I don't want my nails to catch on things, I don't want, so there's a reasoning behind most of what we do, right, we reason things through, so humans by nature reason, it's part of our nature, but learning the rules of reasoning is a whole other level, because when you learn the rules of reasoning, and then also you learn how sloppy reasoning works, how fallacies work, right, how, you know, I mean, if you learn like poisoning the well, you know, that's a type, that's a material fallacy, if you know how that works, you know, when you see a politician throwing mud at another politician, you don't believe him just because he's saying that, because that's poisoning the well, it's a type of fallacy just to simply believe that so-and-so is wrong, because Newt Gingrich said he's wrong, because he has an agenda when he speaks ill of that other person, so a critical thinker is just not going to believe that, he's going to find out for himself whether this is true or not, right, so it helps, you know, you can protect yourself from these things.

The Paradox of Grammarians and Logicians

And then he says, but what happens to many logicians and grammarians, they spent their life studying the sciences, but they can't read or write, so you can learn the sciences really well, but you still don't really know how to apply them, so it's like reading, learning the rules, but not how to operate with those rules, all right, so now he said, you know, you can't learn to read by just reading this book any more than you can learn to drive a car by perusing the manual, so you have to really put into, implement what he says, all right.

Charitable Reading

So, and now one really nice thing that he says here, he says, we should assume that the author is intelligible until he's shown otherwise, not that he is guilty of nonsense and must prove his innocence, and the only way you can determine an author's guilt is to make the very best effort you can to understand him, so that's important, charitable reading, that we should assume that a writer is telling the truth before we assume that it's just false, but we have to understand him to make that judgment.

Reading Three Times

Now he talks about the second part, part two is called the rules, and this is where he gets into the rules, and the first, this is really important, he says, if something is worth reading at all, it is worth reading at least three times, all right, now for me personally, just to let you know, there's books that I've read just several times, there's books that I go back again and again, and a great book is a book that is inexhaustible, and the one, obviously,

for us, the greatest book is the Quran, and that's why the best thing that you can do, the best of actions, beginning the Quran, ending it, and then beginning it again, it's continually reading the Quran, because it's always going to open you up to new insights, the Quran, I mean, you know, I've been reading Surah Al-Waqi'ah for just years, you know, you read it every day, I still find stuff in there, and it's just like, whoa, I never thought of that, you know, so you can read something that has a lot of meaning again and again.

But he says, lest you become unduly alarmed at the demands that are going to be made on you, let me hasten to say that an expert reader can do these three readings at the same time, all right, now, but they are, strictly speaking, three in manner, to be well read, each book should be read in these three ways each time it is read, all right.

Learning Complex Skills: The Three Types of Learners

So now, then he talks, and this is really important for you as students, he talks about something that experimental psychologists know about learning a complex skill, because learning how to read is a complex skill, learning how to play tennis is a complex skill, learning how to play a musical instrument is a complex skill, right, you learn piano, you have melody, right, you have melody, you have bass, right, then you have chords, you have harmony, right, and then you've got rhythm, you have to learn all these things, and initially, you can only learn one at a time, but once you master that skill, the skills become one.

Now, this is really important, and I, so hear what he says, there's a beautiful book called Mastery, which I read years ago by George Leonard, and he talks about the same thing, and it really helped me, he talks about three types of people, of learners, what he calls the dabblers, the hackers, and the masters, and the dabblers, he says, are people that, they find out about something, and they get really excited about it, so like, they just discovered tennis, and so they go, and if they're wealthy, they buy the best tennis racket, they get the, or you see these kind of guys on the bikes with all this, I mean, they think they're like, you know, who's the biker, famous guy, what's his name? Lance Armstrong, yeah, you see them all over, these guys, you know, Lance Armstrong wannabes, you know, like, they've got the shirt, even with the corporate sponsors, you know, and, you know, he's out there with his pot belly, just on the weekend, but he's like, it's, you know.

So you have dabblers that get into something, they get really excited, oh, you can't believe what I discovered, and oh, I'm taking lessons, I did it, and then a couple weeks into it, maybe a couple months, they just, it's not happening, so you say, hey, how's that, how's that tennis going, how are those lessons, they say, yeah, no, I gave it up, but I can't wait to tell you about the latest thing I'm, you know, and then he's into another thing, right, so that's the kind of, you know, the dabbler.

And then there's the hackers, and these are people that learn to do something to a certain degree of skill, right, so they get reasonably good at something, different levels of it, amateur people that just, you know, they have the same game, they go out and they play, they enjoy it, and they've learned a certain level, like a golfer who golfs about 90 every time, it's just, you know, they're hackers.

Then he says there's the masters, and he said the master is not somebody who's mastered something, he's somebody that's committed to continual improvement, you see, now many of us are dabblers in spirituality, many of us are hackers in our prayer, we're hackers, we've gotten to a certain level, you know, we know how to pray, we go through, but the master is somebody who wants more presence every time they pray, they're committed to constant improvement in their practice, when they read, they want to become better readers, they want to have more understanding, and this is, you know, this is the path of mastery.

The Learning Plateau

So he talks about the learning plateau, so what happens when you first begin to do something that you haven't done before, initially you're going to see improvement, like when I learned to type, you know, you get to a certain level, and you get really, you know, you increase pretty quick, but then you hit what's called a learning plateau, and then things just stop, and it becomes, actually it's difficult, because you're just not improving, and so you feel like a lot of people will give up, the dabbler will give up at that point, the hacker will wade it through, and then they'll move to the next plateau, now what they discover about learning plateaus is these are actually the periods when you're learning, this is the most, even though it's the most difficult time, you're learning during this time, and that's where the jump comes from, do you see, so it, and exercise is like that, you know, you'll start exercising, initially you'll start seeing changes in your body, but then it stops, and then it's like a couple months, and nothing, and then something changes, right, it's the same thing, everything's like that, these are the sunan in creation.

And so every, the rule that every bit of practice makes a little more perfect, appears to break down in these learning plateaus, the learner gets off the plateau and starts to climb again, the curve which records his achievements again shows steady progress from day to day, plateaus are not found in all learning curves, but only in those which record progress in gaining a complex skill, all right.

The Critical Insight About Learning Plateaus

So now here's, this is, this is, I mean, I just really think this is so amazing, because there's so much in this statement, so I really want you to think deeply about this here, knowing that the plateaus in learning are periods of hidden progress may prevent discouragement, so when you're feeling like, now I'm not going anywhere, knowing this, that you're on a learning plateau, will keep you going, persevere, keep pressing on, just keep going, because you're going to have that jump again, like in your Arabic, you know, I'm just doing this thing, and it's just not, and then one day, suddenly something clicks, and, and let me tell you something, I, this is the God's honest truth, I read certain books for years, and it just suddenly something clicked with it, you know, I would just read them, and sometimes I actually thought I was understanding them, and, but certain books, they just clicked for me, writers, they just, you know, there's certain writers that are really difficult in the Arabic tradition, that I just found easy to read, but it wasn't, it didn't come immediate, it was hard work, and, and that's what you have to remember, that this really is hard stuff.

The Beginner's Mind

So now, the beauty of the beginner's mind in Zen, you know, the Zen have a tradition about the beginner's mind, the beauty of the beginner's mind is that the beginner is very conscious of everything, when they're first learning something, and that's why a lot of people are self-conscious, and that's why you'll never learn to speak a language if you're self-conscious, I mean, when I first learned Arabic, I would talk to any Arab, and I didn't care how I sounded, I really wanted to learn the language, you have to be willing to make those mistakes, but if you've got that, you know, I don't want to look silly, or I don't want to make those mistakes, you just won't learn, so you have, being willing to make mistakes, when you read, you're going to make mistakes in, in, in, in reading Arabic, you can't care, you just, just read, it doesn't matter, that's how you're going to learn.

The Unity of Habits

So now listen to this, knowing, so, higher units of activity are getting formed even if they do not increase one's efficiency all at once, the multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not the plurality of distinct habits, did you get that? Okay, the, the, the multiplicity of the rules, right, the fact you've got a lot of rules, the multiplicity of rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not the plurality of distinct habits, all right, so in other words, he uses the analogy of tennis, if you're learning tennis, you have to learn how to serve, so that's one thing you have to learn, and you have to do that separate from learning how to work a baseline, or learning how to do a fore, a forehand or a backhand, right, so the backhand, there's a certain thing they'll teach you, how, how to hold the racket properly, and then each one of those are separate things, but the act of playing tennis is one habit, a tennis player knows one thing, and that thing is tennis, do you see, even though it's made up of these different things, but those different things are not separate habits, they're all part of one habit, all right.

When Everything Comes Together

So now, this is really interesting to me, the parts acts coalesce and telescope as each reaches the stage of automatic execution, in other words, it all starts to come together and telescope when you begin to master this thing, it becomes one thing, right, when all the subordinate acts can be done more or less automatically, you have formed the habit of the whole performance, then you can think about beating your opponent in tennis or driving your car to the country, because when you drive, you're doing all these separate things that when you first were learning to drive, they were all separate things that you had to think about, you know, the car behind or at the side and the brake pedal and the clutch and it's all these, but once you learn how to drive, you don't think about these things, it's coalesced into one thing.

This to me is the most significant thing in this whole book, this is an important point at the beginning, the learner pays attention to himself and his skill in the separate acts, when the acts have lost their separateness in the skill of the whole performance, the learner can at last pay attention to the goal which the technique he has acquired enables him to reach.

Everything Points to Divine Unity (Tawheed)

It's Tawheed, you see, everything is indicating Tawheed, Allah has made a world where everything you do appears to be separate, but the reality of it is there's nothing separate:

وَفِي كُلِّ شَيْءٍ لَهُ آيَةٌ تَدْلُّ عَلَىٰ أَنَّهُ وَاحِدٌ )Classical Islamic poem(

In everything is a sign indicating divine unity, you see, these are signs, it's all moving to unity, everything we're doing is moving towards a unity of understanding, a perception until you can see everything is, this whole thing is being held together by one unified power, the whole thing, all at once, Allah has this whole thing being held together by one unified power, His Qudra, His Ilm, and His Irada, that's the whole thing, and so everything that you're learning in life is all moving towards this understanding when things coalesce, when you enter in, you know, one of the things, I mean, sports is an interesting metaphor, I read a beautiful book called All Things Shining, where they really use sports as a metaphor for this, because one of the few things our culture really acknowledges is excellence in sports.

The State of Flow

But one of the things about a great moment in sports is, you know, when a pitcher is having a perfect game in baseball, you know what happens to the team, you know, nobody talks to him, they completely, everybody just stays away, because he's entered into a completely different zone, they call it the flow in sports psychology, they're in the flow, right, and great athletes know this, you see, and it's when everything becomes unified, they're not experiencing separateness, they're in a total state of, everything's perfect, and that's when he pitches a perfect game, you know, shutout, no hitter, just strikeout after strikeout, and nothing goes wrong, it's a perfect flow, this is the state of the saints all the time, right, this is where they're at, this is where the aulia are at, it's perfect flow, and that's why they don't get disrupted, they don't get disturbed, because it's, they're aware.

Now reading at the highest level is that, you're in a state of flow, that's why he's saying if you learn these rules, the more you work at them, you will begin to read in a state of flow, where all of these things are making sense, they've coalesced and telescoped for you, but it's hard work.

On Critical Reading

Yeah, to defend himself, you know, look, the critical reading is a third level, it's a very high level of reading, because, you know, and Mutanabbi, one of my favorite quotes of Mutanabbi is:

(Al-Mutanabbi) كَمْ مِنْ عَائِبٍ قَوْلًا صَحِيحًا وَآفَتُهُ مِنَ الْفَهْمِ السَّقِيمِ

How many people find fault in what they're reading, and the fault is in their own understanding. You can't read at a critical level until you really have a solid understanding of what the author is saying, and that takes a level of proficiency in these skills, because people make grammatical mistakes, I mean, they literally read things wrong, in Arabic it happens all the time, they think something is Mansub and it's Marfua, it changes the

meaning completely, or they think the Min is for Tabid and it's for Ibtida, that happens all the time, that's why our scholars exhausted these possibilities.

Analyzing Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night"

What time, how long we've been going, okay, so let's do the poem, because I really want you to get this stuff, so I don't mind taking time with it, I was going to show you a couple books, but let's do the poem, okay, what I want you to do, this is a Robert Frost poem, and I want you to, again, just read the poem, can we put it up on the, okay, so Robert Frost is probably one of the most famous American poets of the 20th century, he wrote, he's unusual in that he wrote in traditional meter, right, he used a tetrameter and pentameter usually, and trimeter sometimes he did, but he does it in a very, it's very subtle, like you really don't feel the verse that you do in others, but if you actually do the work to scan the poem, you'll see by the rules of prosody, that he's actually very strict, he said writing poetry without a meter was like playing tennis with the net down, so he just didn't really like that kind of modern school.

But this poem is one of his famous poems, it's called Acquainted with the Night, so are there any words that nobody understands in there, is everybody, it's a pretty simple, he liked to use the Anglo-Saxon words, he has one, well he's got a couple, but the one, that word there that is clearly a, you know, luminary, right, what's luminary mean, what's luminous, yeah, shining, right, luminous, bright, from lumina, right, okay, so that's pretty much it.

First Impressions of the Poem

So let's look at this poem, first of all, what was your feeling when you read it, right, sha'ir in Arabic means the one who feels, and sha'ir is hair, you know, because it's that tactile, so the poet feels things, and feeling is very important with poetry, how it gets you, you know, Mauritanian, one thing I really liked when I lived with Mauritanians, is that when you, if you quote a line of poetry that they like, they go, you know, like they hit, like they got hit in the gut, you know, because it's kind of a cultural thing, so it's a funny thing, because they do it, because they heard their teachers doing it, and things, but it's very real, you know, it's, they feel poetry, so what did you feel when you read it, Veronica, yeah, there's definitely a melancholic feeling to this poem, isn't there, and he uses some words there that are, that evoke a melancholy state, a sad state, right, like walking out in rain, that doesn't, he doesn't, it doesn't sound like singing in the rain, because he walks out, and he walks back in rain, and there's kind of a, you know, it didn't get bright, and the sun didn't come out, so there's definitely, yeah, and he's got sad in there, drop my eyes, that's what we do when we're sad or depressed, we kind of drop our eyes, and then he actually looks down the saddest city lane, right, so what else?

Okay, there's a, there's, there's a wandering going on, yeah, he's walking out, and we don't really know where he's going, he just tells us he kind of goes to the, past the city lights, it's dark there, and he's not really telling us why, and he's walking around, and the watchman's kind of wondering, what are you doing out here, you know, it's kind of a meandering, anything else? Yeah, that's, yeah, there's definitely, there's definitely a point to all this,

yeah, he's, he's learning something, right, now what is acquainted, what does that evoke, the word, like, he doesn't know the knight, huh, do you think intimacy, acquainted? Familiar is closer, like I'm acquainted with him, I mean, when we talk about an acquaintance, there's not really a friend, there's somebody we're familiar with, you're not a stranger, but he's not a friend either, so there's a kind of ambiguity there, right, anything else?

Line by Line Analysis

What's, what do you, okay, let's look at, let's, now let's look at it line by line, so we've kind of looked at the whole poem, now let's look, I have been one acquainted with the knight, so right off the bat, I have been one, he doesn't say I am acquainted with the knight, I have been one, one out of what? Many, yeah, okay, so I'm an individual, like he's declaring his individuality here, I am one, I have been one, like I'm an individual, and my experience of the knight is my own experience, right, so he's right at the outset, he's letting us know, this is my experience, I, I, I, I, I, right, I mean, he's letting you know, this is my experience, I earned this knowledge that I have of the knight, and how did I do it?

I have walked out in rain and back in rain, well, what does that mean? I mean, going out at night in rain, do people do that? Sometimes, but why would they do that, seriously, why would they do that? How, generally, you know, what would you think about going out at night in rain, why would you do that? Well, no, I'm talking about just normal, don't think of what he's saying, I'm just talking about when you, somebody goes out at night in rain, what do you usually think about going out at night in rain? You have to, right, there's some kind of emergency or something, but that's not why he's going out at night, right, he's going out for another reason, but normally, when we think about, oh, I had to go out last night and it was raining, right, so he's, he's saying, look, I, I know the knight, like, I've gone out even when it's raining, I'm acquainted with different types of knights, even when it's raining, when other people wouldn't go out, right, so I have walked out in rain and then, and back in rain, right.

I have out walked the furthest city light. What does that mean, hmm? Yeah, but what's, I have out walked the furthest city light, he's gone into the darkness, I wasn't content to experience the night when there was still light, I've out, I've gone out into the dark, I've out walked the, the, the farthest, the furthest city light, right, now I have looked down the saddest city lane, and what is that, what, first of all, what is that saddest city lane, can city lanes be sad, can they be sad? For the poet, right, he's sad, so lanes can evoke sadness, right, but he's personifying now, so he's giving the city lane the personification, right, he's anthropomorphizing a city lane by telling us it was a sad city lane, not only sad, he's using the superlative, I have looked down the saddest city lane, like, like a ghetto, right, what does that evoke, some horrible, desolate place, derelict houses, right, we, and all of our cities have this, don't they, and you can go right down the road, right down here, and you can see the saddest city lane, and there's people living on that lane.

The Watchman and Collective Shame

I have passed by the watchman on his beat, all right, well, what does that mean, first of all, why do we have

watchman, I mean, watchman's a nighttime job, isn't it, really, right, why do we have watchman, yeah, security, but why, yeah, why do you feel insecure in the night? huh, it's dark, right, what do people do in the dark, yeah, things they wouldn't do in the light, right, so I passed by the watchman on his beat, his beat, and it's interesting, you know, his beat, you know, because he's on his beat, right, but he'll also beat you if you try to do something, you know, in what he's watching, so, and drop my eyes unwilling to explain, what is that, shame, exactly, yeah, shame, isn't it, like he dropped his eyes, like the watchman shows up, and he dropped his eyes, why did he drop his eyes, because he's unwilling to explain, why is he unwilling to explain, guilt would be one, but why is he unwilling to explain, hmm, he doesn't want to talk about why he's out there, yeah, but what's he thinking about the watchman, okay, yeah, the watchman's gonna suspect him, like what are you doing out here at night, because you should be at home in your bed, right.

So the fact that there's a watchman is because people do nefarious things at night, and he drops his eyes, unwilling to explain, because what is that thing that happens when the policeman shows up, and suddenly, you know, like every time I come in through the border, they make me feel guilty, I don't know why, I'm just like, I haven't done anything, but that guy scares me, because he makes me feel like I've done something wrong, because he suspects, where have you been, he starts questioning me, like, where have you been, who did you see, was it business, like, why are you asking me all these questions, I feel like I'm being interrogated, and when somebody's interrogating you, you start getting self conscious, because he's suspecting me, he thinks, now, why is he suspecting me, because I'm Muslim maybe, but I mean, why is he suspecting me, that's his job, right, that's the border patrol, but why does he suspect me, it's his job, but why, why does he have that job, because people do things, right, humans do things, they smuggle, right, they do illegal things.

So what he's saying there, right, is like, we're all condemned by the acts of some of us, we have some collective shame here, right, you know, because some people do these heinous things, and because some people do it, everybody becomes suspect, and so I'm dropping my eyes, like, feeling this shame, and I'm unwilling to explain that it's this kind of collective guilt that we all have, because some of us do these things, I might not be doing it, but I still feel that, I don't want him to suspect me, I drop my eyes, right, I don't want him to suspect me, but because people do these things, I'm feeling that, right.

The Interrupted Cry

And then I have stood still, right, so he's walking along, I have stood still, and stopped the sound of feet, right, his own feet, right, why, when far away an interrupted cry, right, what does that mean, interrupted cry, what's an interrupted cry, I mean, a cry is interrupt us, but what's an interrupted cry, hmm, how is a cry interrupted, it's stopped, isn't it, so like somebody's, and then suddenly it stops, that's a little spooky, isn't it, have you heard somebody screaming, and suddenly the screaming just stopped, you know, you stop, and you're like, what just happened, and he's going to tell us, but not to call me back, or say goodbye, it wasn't that kind of cry, goodbye, Robert, or Robert, come home, uh-uh, it was a blood curdling cry, because dark things happen at night, people are killed at night, right, murders happen, robberies, all these things happen at night, okay.

Looking to the Heavens

Now he's on the terrestrial plane, now what's he do, and further still, at an unearthly height, something now is changing, right, what's he doing now, he's looking up, right, so he looks up, and what does he see, right, what does he see, yeah, he doesn't really tell us, he gives us some hints, it's luminary, it's, it's one, but it, so it could be the moon, but it's one what, a clock, it's one clock, and a clock has many parts, right, it's got hands, it's got the numbers, it's got, so, you know, and this is the thing about poetry, this is my interpretation, you, you're free to have your own, right, because that's the beauty of poetry.

For me, because I know his poetry reasonably well, and I know for a fact that he was very familiar with the stars, and he writes, he, stars come into his poems a lot, he's got poems about Orion kind of going over the, the fence, out watching Orion leap over his fence, so he knew that time, and he spent a lot of time at night walking those lanes, he knew that the night sky is a clock, like I learned this when I went to the Sahara, so he looks up, and what does he see, one luminary clock against the sky, right, so suddenly that darkness is penetrated by what, by light, okay, so he sees the light at night.

The Proclamation of the Heavens

And what does that light proclaim, because it's a clock, and, and what is a clock, it tells time, night time, we call it night time and day time, so there's two experiences of life on earth, right, the Quran talks about making Allah made the night and the day, like they alternate, the one who wants to become aware, to be reminded, and show gratitude, right, so what does he say, and further still, at an unearthly height, so we're in the celestial realm, he's, he's left the earth now, of sad city lanes, and interrupted cries, and watchmen looking for criminals, and all that dark stuff that happens in the dark, he's left that, and now he's looking at a luminary light in the sky, and what's the light proclaiming, proclaimed, that luminary clock against the sky, proclaimed the time is neither wrong nor right.

What does he mean, Musab, what's he mean, what does he mean neither wrong nor right, what's wrong and right, first of all, what is that, what's that demarcation, it's a moral demarcation, right, wrong and right is, is about morality, now who, who are the moral beings on this planet, humans, right, animals, if the lion eats you, you don't say it's an immoral lion, it's a hungry lion, and you just happen to be there, you can't impose, the lion has no moral agency, because it doesn't have free will, it's an instinctual animal, it's acting on instinct, but humans act, right, they act based on moral agency.

And so what's he telling us about what the heavens are proclaiming, what's he telling us, what's the heaven proclaiming, what's, what's he realizing looking up in the heavens, the night time, the darkness and evil that men do at night is not about the, the time, it's not because it's night time, it's, that's not what's wrong with the night, what's wrong with the night is us, we're what's wrong, the night's just neutral, it's what you do in the night that's going to determine whether the night is a good night or a bad night, right, those, those are what humans do in the night, but he's saying I've seen something else about the night, the night's much deeper than all this

darkness, there's stillness at night, there's tranquility at night, there's peace at night, there's clarity at night, there's unity at night, there's all these other things, time is neither wrong nor right, right, it's what we do in time that makes it wrong or right, right, I have been one acquainted with the night, right.

Interpretation and Deeper Meaning

Anyway that's one way to look at it, there's other ways, you know, I don't think it's, no, because that would be like relative, relativism, I don't think he's talking about relativism, I think what, to me what he's saying is by looking up at the heavens, what the heavens are declaring, those lights in the night, what they're declaring is it's not the time, that it's, you know, the sadness of that city lane at night, the, the, the trouble that the rain causes at night, the watchman looking for criminals at night, that blood curling cry that's interrupted that we hear at night, that's not, you know, that's not what makes the night, the night isn't wrong or right, it's what humans do that makes it wrong or right, the night is something stunning, it's something beautiful, we shouldn't be afraid of the darkness of the night, it's something, it's something to be acquainted with, there's power in the night because in the night the stars come out, in the night we can look up and see, you know, Plato said that, that God put stars in the sky so that people could look up and observe the order of the heavens and in seeing celestial order, desire to bring that order back down to the earth, right, as above so below.

He's watching the perfection of the night in the skies and it obliterates those imperfections that we see here, you know, there's something much higher that when we elevate, when we, when we look up, that's what will elevate us from all this horrible stuff that's going on down here because this isn't, don't let this determine your experience of the world, right, don't let what's happening down here, I mean, I was on the way today, you know, and I was late for something and I saw this peregrine perched up on the, and he was just so noble, you know, and he was just perched up on the lantern, you know, on the street light, he was just perched there and he was just like, and I was just like, what does he know, you know, what does the falcon know, right, what does he know, he knows he's amazing, I'm not a sparrow, I'm not a blue jay, he knows and you can see it in him, like just the way he looks around, he has, all the other birds are, they're scared, they're all running around, little thing, they fly off, he doesn't, he's just like, I'm at the top here, I know I am.

That, you know, humans are something amazing, right, humans are amazing and you can look at all that darkness out there and you can decide that, oh, the world's wrong, but look a little higher, elevate your head, you'll see, you'll hear something proclaim from the heavens, time is neither wrong nor right, it's what you do with your time that makes it wrong or right, yeah, anyway, great, and he's definitely, he's got intimate knowledge, yeah, yeah, yeah, he has intimate knowledge with the darkness, that human side of the night, but he's acquainted with that celestial, he sees another side, that's excellent, great, great insight, Rashida, because that, I totally agree with you on that, that the acquaintance is not with the saddest city lanes, he knows those intimately, it's not with the watchman, he knows that intimately, it's not with the interrupted cry, he knows those things intimately, what he's acquainted with is something much deeper, he knows it's deep, but he's only acquainted with it, yeah, good, excellent, uh-huh.

On the Importance of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic

Okay, you know, I would say, first of all, to learn, you know, grammar in the scholastic tradition did not just mean rules of grammar, it also meant literature, one of the things that all of our ulama had to learn was jahili poetry, because poetry teaches you the nuances of language, poetry is very ambiguous, and there's reasons for that, and if you want to read Revelation, the best way to learn how to read Revelation is to learn the poets, because they're really going to help you understand that Revelation, and this is why we didn't teach him poetry, and it wouldn't be appropriate, because they're too close, they're too close, Revelation and poetry are too close, because real poets are inspired, and we all know that, that's why we honor them, right, I mean, a real poet is, they're, we don't, where did it come from, like, where did they get those ideas, you know, where did that come from, because we can't do that, most people cannot do that.

So the poet's somebody, somebody that, if you really understand language, you're in awe of great poets, and Revelation is not poetry by any means, and they can't be compared in that way, but what, what Amir Abd al- Qadir al-Jazairi says in Tanbeeha al-Ghafin, he says the reason they accuse the Prophet of being a poet, a poet is because of the similarity that Revelation has with poetry, it's, it's, it's language that, I know this means something, what does it mean, you know, there's, there's so much in it, it's impregnate, it's, it's pregnant with meaning, and you can exhaust yourself trying to understand the meanings, right, you know, just to finish, so, you know, I would say that grammar, you really need to study, I mean, Arabic is, is a great language for grammar, because you really have to know grammar to be able to read Arabic, that's not the case with English, it's a much easier language to read without knowledge of the rules of grammar, but you will lose a lot by not knowing what prepositions really mean, you'll know, you know, if you don't know that adverbs, you know, that they modify, you know, he runs swiftly, you have to know what, what that, what that's telling you about how he runs, you know, and a lot of it we just know intuitively, but to understand the mechanics of it will really help you have a deeper level.

So, you know, I mean, I think grammar is really important, rhetoric, you know, in Arabic tradition, you have three, you know, three stages of learning rhetoric, learning, you know, tropes and figures, learning what they call muhassanat al-kalam, the ma'ani, like alliteration and antithesis and, and all these techniques that are used, internal rhymes and things like that, jinas, what's called jinas, I mean, learning these things helps you understand the power of language, it also enables you to write better and to speak more effectively.

But logic is a really, to me logic is foundational, because logic gives you such a precision, and the only people in our culture that still study traditional logic to a certain degree are lawyers, and, and unfortunately a lot of them learn, not all of them, there are good lawyers, and so I'm not going to rag on, you know, it's only about 99.9% of them, but there is that, you know, so, you know, lawyers do learn logical fallacies, they learn, but mastering, logic is basically three things, it's understanding, right, it's judgment, and it's reasoning, these are the three acts of the mind, understanding, which is called tasawwur in Arabic, is, is to be able to conceptualize