Medina and Athena- Restoring a Lost Legacy

Medina and Athena: Restoring a Lost Legacy

Opening Greetings and Introduction

As-salamu alaykum, greetings of peace. My name is Safir Ahmed and I serve as an editor at Renovatio, the journal of Zaytuna College. Tonight is an exciting night because we are launching a joint project between Zaytuna College and our neighboring Catholic institution, the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology.

You'll hear more about this partnership from the first speaker when I bring him up here. Just for now, suffice it to say that it's a partnership based on the Common Heritage, as we call it. The Common Heritage series is what we're really about, these events.

We've been working on it and it's based on the ancient philosophical traditions that are common to both the Catholic and the Islamic intellectual traditions. In particular, it focuses on pedagogy and dialectic as well. But first, a couple of quick points.

About Renovatio and the Common Heritage Project

If you haven't yet seen a copy or been familiar with Renovatio, the bookstore across the hall is open and will be open after the event. So feel free to pick up a copy. The talk being given tonight is partly based on the article that was published in the last issue of Renovatio, and that issue is available as well as previous issues.

The title of that piece was Medina and Athena, Restoring the Lost Legacy. I just want to say quickly that Renovatio is a co-sponsor of this event, partly because the topics for tonight and for tomorrow night fall well within the scope or areas of interest of Renovatio, which is essentially we invite writers and scholars, philosophers and theologians, historians, to draw from faith traditions, to draw from literature, to draw from history, and to help us grapple with the problems and the moral challenges of modern life. And also to help us answer the ongoing sort of perennial questions or ultimate questions.

Tomorrow's evening talk is also a very interesting one. The talk will be given by Dr. Andrew Hicks, I believe he's here tonight, I saw him earlier, yes there he is, who is a professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University. The topic tomorrow is called The Listener's Guide to the Cosmos. It's about music and harmony and the cosmos, in other words it's about the sounding universe and our place within it.

That I hope is sufficient to intrigue you to come back tomorrow night and listen to his talk. Our program tonight is very simple. I will in a moment introduce our first speaker, and he will talk about the partnership that I mentioned earlier between the two institutions, and after that we'll have, you'll hear from our provost, Dr. Omar Qureshi, and he will then turn it over to President Hamza Yusuf, who's also by the way the Editor-in-Chief of Renovatio, and he'll be giving the talk tonight. So let me introduce our speaker.

Father Chris Renz on the Common Heritage Series

Father Chris Renz is a Professor of Liturgical Studies in Science and Theology and Director of Institutional Research at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Among his research interests are beauty, creative intuition and poetry, sacred arts, Catholic culture and Catholic worship. He has been working along with Sister Marian Farina at the DSPT, who teaches philosophy and theology there, with the scholars at Zaytuna College as well.

So please welcome Father Chris Renz. Greetings of peace. I'd like to begin with heartfelt thanks to Safir and to the entire community here at Zaytuna College for your kind hospitality in hosting these inaugural lectures, which begin this new and exciting collaboration between Zaytuna and the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, which we have entitled the Common Heritage Series.

The Beginning of Philosophy is Wonder

Quoting a conversation between Socrates and a young mathematician, Joseph Pieper in his classic work, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, comments: "There, for the first time in the Theaetetus, without solemnity or ceremony, almost by the way, though fresh as dawn, appears the thought that has become commonplace in the history of philosophy. The beginning of philosophy is wonder."

True to that premise, this philosophical collaboration between our two schools began with a wonder-filled observation made by myself and Dr. Mark Delp, the past dean of Zaytuna College here, who sends you his own greetings, along with apologies for being unable to be with us this evening.

During discussions that were designed to support Mark in his efforts to lead Zaytuna in its quest for institutional accreditation, the two of us were struck, that is to say filled with wonder, at how much each of our academic programs relied upon ancient Greek philosophy. We felt that this commonality provided Zaytuna and DSPT with a unique historical moment in which to explore whether and how this common heritage might provide a basis for collaborative teaching and learning.

With the encouragement from our administrative leadership at both schools, we formed a group of three faculty from each school: Dr. Mark Delp, Dr. Omar Qureshi, and Philibert Cheng from Zaytuna College, Sister Marianne Farina, Dr. Marga Vega, and Father John Thomas Malign from the DSPT.

The Importance of Classical Disputation

Now I would like to transition for a moment in my introductory comments to a slightly edited text from Dr. Delp which he sent to me as his way of participating in the evening events. So I quote: "In our meetings we often expressed the concern that students as well as teachers of our own time increasingly resist not only formal argumentation but the fundamental act of drawing distinctions. We thought that a course of studies deriving from the vast Catholic and Islamic traditions of disputation might convince our own students that far from being mere sources of emotional conflict, formal disputation in the classic philosophical sense can free the mind to seek truth cooperatively."

Over time we realized the need to create a shared learning environment that would deal with the common heritage of classical and medieval disputations while also honoring and respecting our different theological traditions and cultures. The result is a plan to offer two pilot courses, one next spring in 2020 and the following in the fall of 2020, for students of our two schools in which participants will learn about and practice this classical tool that is directed to a shared discovery of truth.

Using primary texts from Plato and Aristotle, participants will explore how later commentaries from each of the two traditions productively engaged these common texts. Topics that illustrate our shared metaphysical commitments will help students both to adopt and to apply these skills to common concerns of contemporary society in ethics and metaphysics.

It is our sincere hope and objective that this pedagogical approach will illustrate that there was no domain of human knowledge in the ancient world that did not originate from the intensive give-and-take of ideas which constitute learned and sincere disputation. Furthermore, and perhaps more critical for our own time and place, that disputation is a model for cooperative learning, not only here in Berkeley, but wherever there is an openness to wonder and a desire for the common pursuit of truth.

Finally, I would like to mention that the year of study in which we engage was made possible with funds from the Wabash Center, which supports projects that promote the development of faculty pedagogy. Now it's my great pleasure to introduce one of the colleagues of this study project, Dr. Omar Qureshi, who is the provost of Zaytuna, who will introduce our speaker for this evening. Thank you, Father Chris.

Dr. Omar Qureshi's Introduction of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

As-salamu alaykum, peace be to you all. Zaytuna community, our DSPT community, Dr. Hicks, we welcome all of you to tonight's event. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf is a leading proponent of classical learning in Islam.

He's the president of Zaytuna College and has taught courses on Islamic jurisprudence, ethics, astronomy, logic, prophetic biography, and hadith, as well as other subjects. He also has promoted and continues to promote Islamic sciences and classical teaching methodologies throughout the world. He has been an advocate for social justice, peace, conviviality among peoples and places.

For several years, he has argued that the them-versus-us problem is fundamentally flawed, as he considers himself one of them as well as one of us, hence the common heritage project that we're all engaged in. He's published numerous articles and translations, including The Prayer of the Oppressed and Purification of the Heart. He also serves as vice president for the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies, an international initiative that seeks to address the root causes that can lead to radicalism and militancy.

He has also authored numerous articles and essays: The Liberal Arts in an Illiberal Age, Freeing Thought from the Shackles of Feeling and Desire, Does the Human Fetus Become Human? Is the Matter of Metaphysics

Immaterial? Yes and No. I would like to take this opportunity now to welcome our main guest speaker, our main speaker for this evening, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. Thank you very much.

Sheikh Hamza Yusuf's Main Lecture

Opening Acknowledgments

(بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ - Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim). First of all, welcome all of you, especially Dr. Hicks. We had the pleasure of having dinner earlier, a group of us, and was really, I think, very intrigued by what he has to offer tomorrow.

And I really, if I had to choose between this lecture or his, I would definitely choose his. So if you can't make both, I'm sorry. But I think he's really a brilliant young scholar, and I think everybody's going to be very pleased with what he has to offer.

I also want to thank the Dominican College. I'm going to embarrass Sister Marianne Farina a little bit, but I always tell people that Zaytuna College actually was founded by Sister Marianne Farina, because Dr. Hatem and I, many years ago, we were in the yurt, and she came down, we had a meeting, and she said, have you ever thought about a college up on Holy Hill, like a Muslim college up on Holy Hill? And I actually hadn't. So I told her if she's ever canonized or beatified, I'll testify to one of her miracles.

But I've seen a few from her since then, so I'm very impressed, and we're honored to have her on the board. She's a very distinguished scholar herself. And Father, thank you for gracing us with this.

The Historical Context of Muslim-Christian Relations

This initiative, I think, is really part of our history. People don't realize how much interaction has existed between the Christians and the Muslims in the past. In fact, recently on the Amir Stein site on YouTube, Philip Penn did a very interesting five-minute, I think it's seven minutes, based on his two books, working with the Syriac literature, making an argument that more than about half of the Christian population in the world lived under Muslims for quite some time.

And he makes an argument that if we look only at Western Christianity and its relationship, which was often unfortunately belligerent from both sides, he said it would give a very distorted view of how Muslims and Christians interacted, because there is another story, and that's the one he highlights in his work.

Dialogue, Language, and the Commitment to Reason

I want to just, before I get into the topic, Medina and Athena, I'd like to really explain to you very quickly what this is really about. For me, what this is about is dialogue and language and a commitment to the intellect and a commitment to reason and a commitment to the idea that human beings actually can speak to one another and can listen to one another and learn to do that and get better at it, because it's something that we have to habituate ourselves to this.

It's not something that necessarily comes easily, as you'll note, with little children, because little children have to learn how to be patient, have to learn how to listen, have to learn how to understand what's being said to them, not rushing to judgment.

The Art of Persuasion and Rhetoric

So I just would like to read a short from this is a work that Scott Crider did, which is The Art of Persuasion, and we published it in the curriculum series. It's the second one after the Creed that we did in the series, and I think because the importance of rhetoric in our two traditions, in the Western tradition and the Muslim tradition, rhetoric was the subject that was studied.

Both of our traditions were obsessed with rhetoric, because at the root of the idea of rhetoric is the art of persuasion, that you can use words as opposed to weapons to persuade. One of my teachers wrote: "Where men lack the arts of communication, intelligent discussion must languish. Where there is no master of the medium of exchanging ideas, ideas cease to play a part in human life. When that happens, men are little better than the brutes they dominate by force or cunning, and they will soon try to dominate each other in the same way. The loss of freedom follows. When men cannot live together as friends, when a whole society is not built on a real community of understanding, freedom cannot flourish."

And this is why it was so important for the people that founded this country, this idea of education. In fact, the only private institution mentioned in the Constitution is the press, because they understood the absolute importance of an educated population. And if you look at their op-eds 250 years ago, they're now considered literary classics, because they were a highly educated group of people, and they were obsessed with Greece and Rome.

They were Christians, most of them. Some of them were deists and Masonic practitioners, but they were committed to the idea of education, and they saw it as very important. Obviously, they did not have a universal idea. This comes later, but there's a reason why they put "in order to form a more perfect union," moving towards that perfection.

Violence as Failed Rhetoric

So, I wrote after that: As an art of communication, rhetoric obviates the need for physical or psychological coercion, which occurs either when words lose their force, or in their absence, force takes their place. Violence is merely rhetoric carried on by other means, and while blood may be no reasonable argument, it has persuasive qualities to which lesser and coarser men quickly resort.

Indeed, it too often proves to be the most expedient means to end a dispute. With violence, the polis has failed. Brute force determines the direction of human matters.

As Adler states, if we are deprived of the art of rhetoric, we are deprived of freedom-freedom to think, freedom to feel, and freedom to choose persuasion over force, civility over violence, and ultimately our

Historical Examples of Rhetoric's Power

Socrates knew too well the dangers of rhetorical ronins. One of the greatest orators of American political life, the 19th century South Carolinian senator and seventh vice president of the United States, John C. Calhoun, shamefully used his exemplary rhetorical skills to argue for the continued enslavement of countless souls as a positive good.

For an example of the artful use of rhetoric for nobler purposes, we need only look to Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose passionate public speeches moved a nation struggling with the vestiges of slavery toward a more perfect union. Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, led to another eloquent example grounded in a command of rhetoric when the then-senator Robert F. Kennedy spoke before a mostly African-American crowd that same day in Indianapolis, delivering the sad news which it had not yet heard of the assassination.

Kennedy's ability to blend pathos, ethos, and logos in the perfect storm of Kairos is credited with helping prevent in Indianapolis the riots and violence that plagued many American cities at the time. One of the interesting and intriguing aspects of Kennedy's speech is that he quoted Aeschylus. I think that's the last time a politician has quoted Aeschylus. Now we're lucky if they quote the Simpsons.

Medina and Athena: The Lost Legacy

So the topic tonight is Medina and Athena. Athena is the Arabic way of saying Athens. There's a tradition called Jerusalem and Athens, and much has been written on that tradition, this idea of the impact that Hellenistic thought had on the Christian tradition.

And it's essentially something that emerges over time, but you can see the roots of it at the very inception of Christianity, and certainly in John's Gospel, one sees a powerful relationship with some of the Hellenistic thinking. But the idea of Medina and Athena is not as well known, certainly not in the West. I think Muslims who know their tradition and know their scholastic tradition are very well aware of this relationship.

So this lecture is really about that lost legacy. Now I would preface that by saying that arguably the Persians, the Iranians today, are still very much in touch with this tradition, and in the Shia tradition there has been a very robust philosophical engagement. And arguably, and there are many recent researchers in this area that have shown that the idea that somehow philosophy died out in the Muslim world.

The Continuation of Islamic Philosophy

There's this argument, it's an Orientalist trope, that during this very early period there was a lot of Islam, they call it Arabic philosophy, Al-Farabi, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, these become, they have their Latinate terms, the names move into Latin, Al-Farabius, and Avicenna, and Averroes, and highly regarded in the European scholastic tradition. But they don't see the continuation of that philosophical tradition.

It actually is quite stunning, because philosophy moves into theology in the Islamic tradition, and there's a profound philosophical theological tradition. And then it moves into a type of theosophia, which you find in writers even as late as just over 100 years ago. You still even, believe it or not, in what's today called Saudi Arabia, what was then called Arabia, there's a great metaphysician from Al-Ahsa, quite late. But you have people like Mir Damad and Sadruddin Mulla Sadra, they call him.

I mean, these are some of the most important human philosophers that we have, and that's why people like Corbin, who discovered him from the West, spent his entire life after he discovers him, studying him. So, to say that it's a complete lost legacy, I think would not be true. But for the Sunni tradition, in many ways, it is arguably a lost legacy.

And I think, for me personally, I think it's part of the reason why our own tradition has fallen into what I would call an ossification, a type of stagnation, in dealing with a dynamic civilization.

Dynamic Clinging and Western Civilization

When you look at Western civilization, I don't know how many people saw the film Gravity, but I have a friend of mine who's a philosopher, who says one of the secrets of Western civilization is what he calls dynamic clinging. This ability to, in the midst of immense movement and transformation, this ability to hold on and cling, where other civilizations just completely are, it's like a tornado comes through them, and they're overwhelmed.

But at the outset of that film Gravity, you have a Muslim technician, he's working on the thing, and then you have this woman who's trying to fix something out in space, and then you have George Clooney, who's in this rocket ship, he's just the bus driver, and he's just kind of playing. And it shows, I think, the three ways in which technology is approached. You have the people that use technology as a kind of game, they're just floating around, and this is what he was doing, but then they find out there's about to be a collision of a satellite that's fallen apart, and the woman won't stop working.

And this is the Western obsession with, even as global warming and all these things are happening, we just keep working, despite the dangers that are inherent. The Muslim is the first, he's just collateral damage, so a piece of shrapnel goes right through his face, I think his name was Zayn, and he's just gone. And then the woman, though, she clings on to the thing, so this is the dynamic clinging of Western civilization, she just holds on for dear life.

Anyway, it's a very interesting film, because I think there's a lot of very interesting questions that arise out of that film. One of them is the idea, can religion really be removed from our lives? Because each space station she goes to, there's a religious icon in it. So no matter how divorced we get from Earth, the Buddha is there in the Chinese space station, and the Orthodox icon is there in the Russian space station, so religion is still, the questions of religion are still troubling us.

And then the idea of gravitas, that we in essence are like the George Clooney character, just without, we're weightless. One of the Arabic words for human, the humans and the spirit world are (الثَّقَلَانِ - al-haqalan), the two weighty ones. Humans are supposed to have gravitas. We need to get back to gravity, which is how the film ends with her prostrating on some Earth.

The Meaning of Liberal Arts

So the term liberal arts has become an increasingly ambiguous term, due to the disparate ideas and images it evokes amongst educated people. An important failing of modern education lies in its inabilities to draw distinctions and to define terms.

The idea of really thinking about what words mean, because people know words like democracy, but can they define it? Are we in a republic, or are we in a democracy? These are actually very important ideas that are often just left unexamined. Both of which have been long, this idea of distinctions and defining terms, have been long obsessions of the scholastic mind.

In logic, we're taught that we can arrive at a definition only through an understanding of the genus and its difference from others in the same genus. So what's the difference? How does a human that's clearly got animality, how is the human different from other animals?

The genus of the liberal arts falls under the rubric of education, but what differentiates a liberal education from others? In order for us to arrive at the definition of the species of liberal education, the distinction resides in the word liberal, which juxtaposes and contrasts it with a servile education. So in the classical world, there were liberal people that were free, the liber, the person who was free, and then there was the servant class. So free people got educated, and what they were educated in were the arts.

And servile people learned crafts, learned skills. These terms come out of a pre-modern understanding of societies that had hierarchical structures.

Social Hierarchy and Education

So the Hindu tradition has, in essence, done what happens naturally in almost every society. So the Hindus have this, they have the Brahmin, and these are the educated people. We have people in universities that have chairs and professors. These are the Brahmins of our civilization.

And then you have the Kshatriya, the military people. So we have our Pentagon and all these military people, the police force. These are the people that keep order. And then you have the Vaishya people, the merchants, and the farmers, and all these people that do these things.

And then you have these people at the bottom who do, like the people that collect garbage, and the people that do the menial tasks that most people would not feel comfortable doing. I mean, it's interesting that hierarchy is a sacred rule. It's this idea that God has designed a world that has hierarchy, that we're born into hierarchy.

And so a liberal education was given to these free people as opposed to the vocational training given to the servants and slaves that taught them utilitarian skills so they could provide the goods and services society needed. Goods and services. I mean, these are two really beautiful words that have been so bastardized in our economic understanding, where pornography becomes a good and Netflix becomes a service.

Such skills and crafts could be learned through apprenticeship and did not require the rigorous training of the mind, although it did require rigorous training. I mean, we once had carpenters, and if you go into houses built a hundred years ago, they're quite stunning because they had master carpenters that had journeyman carpenters from jour. They were able to work by day, but they apprenticed for seven years to learn a craft.

The Three Essential Occupations

A liberal education in the pre-modern period prepared a student for three essential occupations, and this is the ancient world. The theologian who tended to the ills of the soul, the lawyer who tended to the ills of the society, and the physician who attended to the ills of the physical body. The theologian, so these were the three trainings.

Thus, a society through a liberal education and through this elite had trained minds to tend to the ailments of these three aspects of life on earth. The moral and spiritual life of the soul, the social, commercial, and political life of men living together, and the healthy life of the physical body necessary to enjoy the other two aspects of their lives.

The Seven Liberal Arts

The seven liberal arts, and seven is one of these numbers. It's the sum of three and four, which are very interesting mystical numbers. And so seven in the Arabic tradition, there's a very interesting thing that classical Arabic does. So you count to seven, but at seven, you don't just go to eight. It's like my child told me this joke once about why is six afraid of seven, right? Because it ate nine. So they go from, they say seven with the و (waw).

So there's a waw in classical Arabic between seven and eight to indicate that something changes. And this is called the law of octave in music, where there's something that happens when you get to seven. There's a shift.

And there's a very interesting book, if you're interested, by Rodney Collin, who was one of the founders of the Integral School over in San Francisco. He wrote a book about the law of eight, the law of octave, and he used his own life as an example. So seven is the age of discrimination, and then 14, you enter into adolescence, 21, adulthood.

I mean, these are major shifts in your life happen, occur at seven. So seven is one of these numbers. It's a mystical number in the Islamic tradition.

The Division of the Liberal Arts

The seven liberal arts divide the world into spirit and matter, quality and quantity, soul and body. An educated person achieved competency in both the life of the mind and the life of matter. The qualitative studies involve the spoken language of literature, especially poetry, which is extremely important in the pre-modern world.

The thought processes of the mind that conceptualize, judge, and reason, and the development of an aesthetic sense necessary to effectively persuade, praise, accuse, or defend. The quantitative studies focus on the mysteries of numbers through a mastery of arithmetic and geometry, applying them to music as numbers in time, and then to the supernal world as numbers in time and space.

So you studied arithmetic, which is discrete number, but then you studied geometry as a study of number in space, and then music in time, and then astronomy is music in time and space, where you enter into the music of the spheres.

This holistic approach to education cultivated a mind open to wonderment and a mind reverential to the harmony of creation. The roots of this form of education can be traced back to the mystery religions of Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. You'll also, India undeniably has elements to this tradition that are quite ancient.

The Abrahamic Synthesis

Its greatest development emerged in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim civilizations, and so I'm arguing here that it really, the Abrahamic faiths are the fashioners of this tradition in a way that previous civilizations did not do, and so they embrace these qualitative and quantitative arts better to understand their respective scriptures and the physical world around them.

The Muslims considered revealed books to take two forms, those embodied in the actual words of God, so you have the revelation itself, (الوَحْيِ - al-wahy), (الكِتَاب - al-kitab), found in the Torah, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Quran, and Muslims believe that all peoples had some type of revelation, whether oral or written revelation, but there was another revelation, which is the so you had (التَّدْوينِي - al-tadween) and (التَّكْوِينِي - al-takweeni), the revelation of nature.

The first was studied with the tools of the Trivium, and the second with the sciences of the Quadrivium, so these tools enabled people to penetrate the mysteries of the world that they are embodied in.

Five Purposes of Liberal Education

In his useful book, Learning to Flourish, a philosophical exploration of liberal education, Daniel DeNicola provides us with a beneficial taxonomy for the contested term of liberal arts, because now it's become very contested what liberal arts means. He presents five purposes of liberal education: the transmission of a cultural inheritance across generations, self-actualization leading to a normative individuality, understanding the world and the forces that shape one's life, engagement with and action in the world, and the acquisition of the skills of learning. Arguably, the best of the liberal arts colleges will have all of those elements in them.

Defining Education and Liberal

So, first, we need to define, I think, these two terms, education and liberal, and one of the interesting things about political scientists is they almost always write treatises on education. It's very interesting. People that are obsessed with the order of a society. I mean, obviously, people like Cicero, that were very concerned with political science, and then you have Locke, who wrote on education also.

Kant wrote on education. So, and then, in our tradition, the same thing occurs. Al-Mawardi, who was a political scientist, also wrote on education. Imam al-Ghazali, who wrote both in political science and in education. So, those two words, education and liberal.

So, a useful definition, I think, comes from the 19th century theologian, Cardinal John Henry Newman, who, in Discourse 6 about the idea of the university, said, quote: "Education is a high word. It is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation," end quote.

The Question of Knowledge

Obviously, this definition begs the question, what exactly is knowledge? And this is a very important—Dr. Sayyid Naqib al-Attas wrote considerably on what is knowledge, because he argues that a confusion of knowledge is at the heart of the problem of modern society, which has led to a loss of societal decorum, which leads to a rise of false leadership, which creates further confusion in knowledge.

So, that answer demands an immense amount of thought, and the metaphysical assumptions embedded in any given civilization determine their conception of what constitutes knowledge. So, it is by no means a facile problem. Nevertheless, let it suffice for us now, as it serves as a common-sense understanding of education.

As for the word liberal, Aristotle provides us with a definition in his Rhetoric, quote: "Of possessions, those rather are useful, which bear fruit. Those liberal, which tend to enjoyment. By fruitful, I mean, which yield revenue. By enjoyable, where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using."

Thus, a liberal education involves the student acquiring the preparation for knowledge, and the teacher imparting that knowledge, based upon the student's preparation at each stage, through the mechanism of scaffolding, or apperception, that is done for its own sake, and not for a means of sustenance.

Learning for Its Own Sake

So, traditionally, the idea that you were educated, one of the things that really struck me about Mauritania, where I study in West Africa, is that these students would study 20 years in the Mauritanian madrasa, and then they would just go open up a shop in Senegal. I mean, they did not study simply to become a scholar, or to teach, they studied for their own moral, spiritual, and intellectual edification. That's why they studied.

And one of the signs of the end of time, according to our Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam), is he said, people will study for other than the sake of God.

Once this is accomplished, real learning can begin. In other words, after a didactic phase, the real learning by intellectual midwifery, the maieutic approach, can begin. This way, we learn to live a fulfilling, purposeful life, rather than learn to earn a living.

Six Elements for Acquiring Knowledge

In terms of preparation, I would like to offer an expression from Imam al-Juwayni, the teacher of Islam's greatest scholastic master, Imam al-Ghazali, who lived in the 11th century, and later came to be considered the Aquinas of Islam. We would say that Aquinas was the Ghazali of Christianity, because Aquinas is after Imam al-Ghazali, and influenced by him.

So, Imam al-Juwayni states, you cannot acquire knowledge without six elements. I will explain them with brevity. A quick mind, zeal, a foreign land, an immense effort, a professor's inspiration, and a long lifespan. These couplets, which are found in many Muslim works, and most of our faculty memorize them, because we all heard them several times.

They appear almost 70 years later in a slightly altered form in Latin by Bernard of Chartres, who says: "Mens humilis, studium quaerendi, vita quieta, scrutinium tacitum, paupertas, terra aliena." I hope I didn't mangle that too bad. I actually got the Latin medal in high school, but I haven't studied it for a long time.

So, this translates to: a humble mind, zeal for learning, a quiet life, silent investigation, poverty, a foreign land.

Civilizations and Foundational Texts

Civilizations rise out of foundational texts. Without Homer, the Athens of Solon or Pericles may never have existed, not to mention the Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It's very interesting how many times he's quoted by these masters. The Bible enables a great Jewish tradition of scholarship to emerge, and when translated into Latin, it gives rise to a unique European Christianity.

As Christians rediscover Athens, an extraordinary synthesis occurs that marries Athens and Jerusalem. Christianity and Hellenism are the spiritual basis of Western civilization, and centuries later, as these two traditions begin to wither from neglect and recede into the background, the loss of reason and revelation takes a

greater and greater toll on the generations devoid of them, culminating in an evaporation of the immaterial glue that held the fabric of society together.

The Islamic Civilization's Parallel Development

Beginning in the 8th century, the Islamic civilization runs parallel with the Western, and in many instances intersects profoundly with it. If you look at the great books collection that the University of Chicago did, they go, I think it's Augustine, and then the next book is Saint Thomas Aquinas. So there's this gap of 600 years. It's quite extraordinary.

It just suddenly, something else happens. Now, there was actually a lot more going on in that period than—the Dark Ages is something that the Enlightenment liked to look down upon, this age of deep religion and deeply dyed faith. So the Dark Ages weren't as dark as a lot of modern minds would have it.

But nonetheless, during that period, something quite stunning was happening in the Muslim world. So the Muslims had their foundational text, the Quran, which at its heart is a call to knowledge, study, and devotion. I mean, the very first word in the Quran is read (اقْرَأْ - iqra - Quran 96:1).

And the Quran mentions the word knowledge over 100 times. The word think or reflect has 68 mentions. The first word revealed to the Prophet is read and the Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - sallallahu alayhi wa sallam) said: طَلَبُ الْعِلْمِ فَرِيضَةٌ عَلَى كُلِّ مُسْلِمٍ وَمُسْلِمَةٍ

(Source Name)

(seeking knowledge is incumbent upon every Muslim man and woman).

In one tradition, he states :: أُطْلُبُوا الْعِلْمَ وَلَوْ بِالصِينِ )seek) knowledge even unto China). The pursuit of knowledge became a major obsession of the Muslim world.

Knowledge Triumphant in Islamic Civilization

In his book, Knowledge Triumphant, the Jewish historian Franz Rosenthal argues that the Islamic civilization is unique in history in having as its raison d'être the discovery, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. But the concept of knowledge included what a man believed, what he considered good or bad, and whether he had clear standards he was willing to live by. Hence, the idea of an education included moral, intellectual, and spiritual training.

In his book, Arabic Thought and the Western World, Eugene A. Myers remarks about Imam al-Ghazali that his, quote, "first contribution to Islam was to bring education into an organic relation with a profound ethical system. He taught that the material gains could not bring happiness without a moral and spiritual reawakening. Education must then not be limited to imparting knowledge. It must stimulate the moral consciousness of the individual."

The Great Translation Movement

In the same book, Myers further reveals the immense influence Athens had on early Muslims as the great Greek classics of science, mathematics, logic, and philosophy were translated during the period from 650 to 1000 of

the Christian era. This historical translation movement, which included translations by many Arab Christians, Yahya ibn Adi is a great example of that, who had studied with the Byzantine tradition, introduced several texts that would transform the Muslim world considerably and also create many intellectual crises in the process. At the same time, there was also an immense transmission from Persian and Sanskritic work.

So, there was also influence into the Muslim world from these, and that's why Islam, in this very interesting way, is this extraordinary bridge between the East and the West. I mean, it's very interesting they call it now the Middle East, even though that was a British invention, because it was middle to them, right? It's not middle to the people in the Middle East.

The Development of Islamic Curricula

So, due to an intense reliance on the Quran and the Sunnah, the prophetic tradition and emphasis on language studies highlights the overall education direction. Grammar, lexicology, and the collection, study, and preservation of rich and distinctive jahili pre-Islamic poetry become mainstays of the early Muslim curricula.

Avicenna, who died in 1037, takes the corpus of Aristotle, and he has differences with Aristotle, so he's not a muqallid of Aristotle like you find of Averroes. He has his critiques, but he does something quite extraordinary.

He wants to free Muslims of the dependence on a Hellenistic tradition, and so he literally creates his own organon, which he calls (الشفاء - al-shifa). So, this is going to heal this community with its own medicine for the mind. And so, al-shifa becomes an important book, not only in the Muslim East, but also in Western Europe.

Al-Ghazali's Influential Works

Through its translation into Latin, building upon al-shifa, al-Ghazali writes his influential Aims of the Philosophers, which today it would be published as philosophy for dummies or for idiots or something. He took a very complex book and made it accessible. In fact, a lot of Muslim scholars were very upset with him because they said he's made this accessible to common people, because his explanation was so clear.

And this book, the former head of homeland security, Chertoff, his father did his PhD at Columbia University on the influence of Ghazali's The Aims of the Philosophers on the Jewish medieval scholastic tradition. He argues it was the most influential book on the Jewish philosophical tradition, so it's a very important book that he did.

But after he wrote that he wrote (تَهَافُتُ الْفَلَاسِفَةِ - Tahafut al-Falasifa), which is an argument not against philosophy, but against peripatetic philosophy. This is something a lot of Muslims don't understand, that what he was really criticizing were the problems. He identifies 20, and from that he identifies three really serious problems in their beliefs. So, he wasn't criticizing the methodology, which Ibn Khaldun said was the most rigorous and best methodology.

Even though Ibn Khaldun was not a fan of philosophers. So, it's really important, a lot of Muslims are unaware of that, and so al-Ghazali is blamed somehow for destroying the philosophical tradition, but he wasn't, he was

troubled. So, it's very interesting, when he wrote The Aims of the Philosophers, there's no critique in it.

And this would be akin to somebody today who writes a beautiful book on biology, puts it out there, wins all these awards, and all the biologists say it's great, and then he writes a book debunking evolution. It's like he wanted to show, look, I understand this, so this is not a criticism coming from an ignoramus, which is very often where criticisms come from, from people that really don't understand.

Al-Mutanabbi said: (كُمْ مِنْ عَيْبٍ قَوْلًا صَحِيحًا وَفَاتُوا الْفَهْمَ مِنْ صَقِيمٍ - kam min aybin qawlan sahihan wa-fatu al-fahma min saqim) - How many people find fault in what's being said, in their understanding of what's being said.

The Introduction of Logic into Islamic Tradition

So, now what happens then is he introduces logic. Logic existed, Al-Farabi was working with it and others. Farabi introduced logic early. But Ghazali does something very interesting. He sneaks logic into the Islamic scholastic tradition. If you look at his introduction to the Mustasfa, he changes terms, he does some really sophisticated things.

So, then what happens is there's the emergence of the instrumental arts. These are called (العُلُومُ الآلة - al-'ulum al-ala). Sometimes they call them (العُلُومُ العَالِيَةِ - al-'ulum al-'aliya). You have (العُلُومُ العَالِيَةِ - al-'ulum al-'aliya) and العلوم الآلة (al-'ulum alala). The high sciences, Quran and Hadith and then (العُلُومُ الآلة - al-'ulumalala)the instrumental sciences or arts. They were also called (الصِّنَاعَاتُ الثَّلَاثُ - al-sina'at al-thalath), the three crafts.

And this is what we know in the West as the trivium, and they become fully incorporated into Muslim scholastic tradition. Grammar, however, was the focus. And if you look, there's a beautiful wall mural in the Louvre in Paris that Botticelli did of the seven liberal arts.

It's a wonderful picture, but it shows grammar, personified as a beautiful woman, leading this young student into the other six liberal arts. And then Prudentia is there with her arrow, because hamartia, sin, is an archery term, and in Arabic (خَطِيئَة - khatiya) is an archery term. So, the word for sin in Arabic and in Greek means missing the mark.

You know, the idea that we're trying to do good, but we're fooled by apparent goods, thinking that they're real goods. And so, they understood that grammar was so essential. And that's why for the first six or seven years in our tradition, you went to what was called grammar school, which is a problem because grammar has largely been eliminated.

The War on Grammar

There was a war on grammar in the 1960s by linguists, who—and this gets to essentialism and nominalism, because linguists are—they're nominalists, and grammarians are essentialists. So, this really goes back to a deep philosophical problem that continues to vex our civilization, because we've never resolved this. And right now, the nominalists are definitely ahead.

Islamic Grammar Schools and Education

So, Muslim developed these incredible grammar schools, similar to the ones that emerged in the Western tradition. So, for the first six or seven years of study, students memorized the Quran and learned grammar and diction. Vocabulary acquisition was done through highly ornate fictional stories called (الْمَقَامَاتِ - al-maqamat).

They memorized these maqamat, which are all vocabulary. So, it was like learning the whole SAT vocabulary through a little fictional vignette. Students often memorized by rote the entire story and the explanatory notes on word definitions.

Now, just to show you how much rote memorization went in, I once—somebody sent me a poem of 1,000 lines on a science called (عِلْمُ الْاِسْتِقَاقِ - ‘ilm al-ishtiqaq), which is the relationship of words and derivations. And it had all the ishtiqaqat in this poem. And it was written by a Mauritanian scholar, Muhammad Saddam Hulshayn, who was the teacher, the grammar teacher of Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah.

So, I thought I'd found something. I'd go show him. And so, I went and I brought it to Sheikh Abdullah. And he looked at it. He said, no, no, no, alhamdulillah. He said, I memorized that. And then he started reciting it from heart. He knew all 1,000 lines just on this poem on vocabulary. And that's on top of 4,000 lines of Arabic grammar and then lines of poetry as examples of each one of these.

The Elite Training of Scholars

So, people don't realize—modern people have a really hard time understanding how much study went into these people. And these people were—they were definitely elite, but they were trained not to be elitists. They were trained to be people that recognized that they were guardians of something. They were protectors of something. And they needed to do this for the good of the community, to protect them.

In Islam, the Prophet ﷺ said: (إِذَا مَاتَ الْعَالِمُ ثُغْرَةٌ فِي الْإِسْلَامِ - idhā māta al-‘ālimu thughratun fī al-islām) (if a scholar dies, there's a thughrah, there's an opening in the borders of Islam). In other words, for enemies to get in. And the only thing that will close that border is another scholar. He has to be replaced.

So, it was an understanding that these people were protectors. They were guardians of the good of the society. And so, the Muslim and Western traditions clearly shared this commitment to the liberal arts.

The Decline of the Liberal Arts in Islam

However, as Muslims developed greater emphasis on the religious sciences, the liberal arts elements necessary

for a fully developed individual begin to recede. Grammar studies still relied heavily on literature, poetry, but logic lost its edge, because one of the things Avicenna did was very interesting, and it took me a while to understand this, because he divorced material logic from the study of logic. He considered material logic to be treated under philosophy.

He did not see it as part of logic. And so, he had formal logic. And so, the Sunnis studied formal logic without material logic, which is a major problem. And anybody who studied both will understand why. So, the abandonment of material logic, traditionally understood to be essential for a robust training in philosophy, theology, and critical thinking.

Rhetoric continued to be taught to a high degree, and it still is. I mean, there's still some pretty serious rhetoricians in the Muslim world. But the spatial arts of the quadrivium languished and eventually disappeared from religious training, until very recently in the Deobandi school, they still studied Euclid. So, Euclid—the Muslims were obsessed with Euclid.

And this is why you see all these mosaics and tessellations and these extraordinary geometrical patterns everywhere in the Muslim world, because they saw—what they saw in geometry was one─I mean, notwithstanding the fifth book, they argued that if you went through Euclid, you would be convinced of God. That the beauty of proportion in nature is so stunning, that one would only conclude that this must have been designed. And so, that was—so, why this dissolution, identified by Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century, began and continued is unclear.

George Makdisi's Theory on Divergence

But one interesting theory is presented by George Makdisi in his Rise of Colleges, Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West. Very important book, I think. After making a cogent argument that much of the scholastic method of inquiry emerged as a result of the Christian European tradition coming into direct contact with the then-dynamic Muslim scholastic tradition, Makdisi raises the issue of why, after the Middle Ages, the Christian West was able to spring forward in its development and the Muslim world lingered.

He says: "The factors involved are no doubt many and complex, but a most important factor, to my mind, was the provision made for perpetuity in the legal systems, the two legal systems of the two civilizations concerned. Islam had only one form of perpetuity, the waqf, or charitable trust. The Christian West came out of the 13th century with two forms of perpetuity, the corporation as well as the charitable trust."

And even its charitable trust was, in that century, capped with the corporation. Islam's form of perpetuity was static. It's very interesting getting back to the dynamic clinging that I began with. That of the Christian West was dynamic. Islam labored under the heavy dead hand of Mortmain, whereas the West was able to make use of all the benefits of the waqf and make even this form of perpetuity dynamic through incorporation.

The divergence in the parallel courses of both civilizations began to take place in the 13th century, a great century of corporations for the Christian West.

The Government Cooperation of the Mufti

The other major factor, Makdisi argues, was the government cooperation of the office of Mufti, which would be akin to a jurisconsult in the Western tradition, a source of legal opinion. Prior to the emergence in the 13th century of this government position, lawyers were independent and received their salaries from their clients and from patronage and also from al-waqf.

Makdisi concludes, quote: "The scholastic method became an emasculated pro forma exercise and even eventually disappeared from the scene as a dynamic element in education and the process of determining orthodoxy. On the other hand, the scholastic method was kept alive in the West long after it had disappeared from the land in which it originally developed. The renaissance of the 15th century did not put an end to the practice of disputation in Western institutions of learning. This practice was continued in college universities of colonial America long after the American Revolution."

From borrower in the Middle Ages, the West became lender in modern times. This is George Makdisi, who was not a Muslim. Lending to Islam what the latter had long forgotten as its own homegrown product when it developed the university system, when it borrowed the university system replete with Islamic elements.

Thus, not only have East and West met, they have acted, reacted, and interacted in the past as in the present and with mutual understanding and goodwill, and with mutual understanding and goodwill may well continue to do so far in the future with benefit to both sides, which is what this is about.

Restoring the Relationship Between Athena and Medina

So, I'm going to go, just because I've been going on longer than I was planning, but so. At Zaytuna College, we've set out to do our best, you know, so the divorce between Athena and Medina explains much of what went wrong in the Muslim world. A restoration of this relationship, which was so vibrant in the early period and did so much to nurture Europe out of its intellectual malaise, is essential for a renewal of the intellectual tradition of Islam, which can enable Muslims to grapple intelligently with the challenges of the civilizational crises that currently confronts our entire species.

How then do we mend the severance? Just to point out the importance of this, what Ghazali understood is that within the methodology of this tradition, there are important tools for grappling with problems, especially with new problems. You cannot deal with the crises of, like for instance, today we're dealing with gender and the fluidity of gender, and this idea somehow that I can be trapped in the wrong body, and people do have these experiences, but if you don't understand what a human person is, if you don't have a philosophical foundation for, do we have essences? Is there something essential to our nature?

Again, this gets back to nominalism and essentialism. These are philosophical problems. If you don't understand them, you will not be able to grapple. You can just say, oh well, that's kufr, and they're going to go to hell or whatever. That is not a convincing argument for somebody that you want as an interlocutor. You have to have a persuasive argument, and so this ultimately is where the importance of this tradition comes.

The Goal of Erudition

So we've set out to do our best at restoring this holistic tradition, which in the West was called the liberal arts, and in the Muslim civilization it was known as the comprehensive studies, which lead one to become an (أَدِيب - adib), which approximates the English concept of an erudite gentleman.

I mean, we forget that the Muslim civilization was a civilization of erudition. We were committed to learning. Learning was very important, not to become a pedant. You know, like Ogden Nash's, you know, I introduced to you Professor Twist, you know, conscientious scientist, trustees exclaimed he never bungles and sent him off to distant jungles, camped along a riverside. One day he lost his loving bride. She had, the guide exclaimed later, been eaten by an alligator. Professor Twist could not but smile. You mean, he said, a crocodile.

I mean, that kind of pedantic behavior, which many, many people have made fun of in history. Butler is one of them. Also the great poet Alexander Pope, you know, the blockheads, the bookish blockheads who fill their minds with lumber, you know, red. So that is not the point to become somebody who just shows off his erudition or something like that.

The Four Causes and the Purpose of Education

No, it's to really understand the world is not just matter without purpose, but through this matrix of causes, the material, the efficient, the formal, the final, that placed purpose at the highest level of the inquiry. This is the lens through which we can view Muslim efforts to help restore this lost tradition, beginning with the final cause, which answers the question, what is the purpose of education?

The purpose of education from our perspective, and for Zaytuna College, is to aid students in their pursuit and discovery of the truth. So we actually do believe that truth is discoverable.

The Islamic Epistemological Framework

The Islamic epistemological framework remains rooted in the three laws of thought. We believe in the law of identity, a thing is what it is. We believe in the excluded middle, and we also believe in the law of non-contradiction. You can't deny these laws without affirming them. This is one of the ironies of, and the paradoxes of these laws.

In the most important theological creed in Islamic history (النَّسَفِيَّة - al-Nasafiyyah), written in Central Asia in the 12th century, Imam al-Nasafi and his commentator, Imam al-Taftazani, write: "The people of truth assert that reality is judgment that corresponds with the actual fact. It is applied in a general sense to propositions, to

articles of belief, to religions, and to different schools of practice, with reference to their inclusion of reality. Its opposite is the unreal. But as for the term truth, it is especially applied to propositions. Its opposition is falsehood. The distinction that may be made between these two pairs of contrasts is that in the case of reality, the correspondence is seen from the standpoint of the actual fact, and in the case of truth from the standpoint of judgment. And the meaning of the expression, the truth of a judgment, is the agreement of the judgment with the actual fact."

This is our tradition. I mean, this was the most studied creed in the later Muslim period.

Moderate Realism and the Mystical Dimension

So Muslims are committed in the normative tradition to a moderate realism, not dissimilar to the Catholic tradition. An undeniable mystical dimension exists alongside this approach that has a heavy influence upon the tradition. And I consider it analogous to Newtonian and quantum physics.

While appearing mutually exclusive, they nonetheless operate on different planes, something the Islamic tradition referred to as varying degrees of existence. So Muslims believe that truth can be found, supported by reason, and actually realized in a sanctified soul. These three degrees of existence are known as knowledge of certainty, truth of certainty, and finally the essence of certainty.

Imam Ghazali likens the stages respectively to the hearing of fire, seeing the fire, and then actually being burnt by the fire. Alongside this pursuit of a discoverable truth, education must inculcate fallibilism, this idea that I could be wrong. And this is extremely important.

Hence, intellectual humility commands a central position in the hierarchy of virtues. In fact, Imam al-Junayd argued it was the first obligation of the human being, as knowledge was unattainable without it. So I'll just conclude here.

The Material Cause: The Curriculum

I go through these causes. The material cause involves the curriculum itself, the intellectual material, the education, the tools and subjects. For instance, at Zaytuna, we place a strong emphasis upon the acquisition of the tools, especially grammar, and these tools that were traditionally the foundation of Muslim education.

The rigor of the Arabic language demands a high level of grammatical understanding to avoid egregious misunderstandings. Arabic, you cannot really know Arabic anymore without understanding grammar. And this is, it's a difficult language, and it's a profoundly, all languages have a grammar, but without grammar, it's very easy to make major mistakes with Arabic.

So, and then also the vastness of the pre-modern vocabulary. So a scholarly Arabic dictionary contains close to 20,000 roots. From each root, several words can be formed. The key was to learn the roots and the meaning

patterns.

I mean, to just give you an example, Shakespeare uses about 28,000 words, 40% he only uses once, and he's probably got the vastest vocabulary in our English tradition.

So Arabic, you're looking at just an incredible number of words, and surprisingly, they're used in, anybody who spends a lot of time in classical Arabic tradition knows that the words are used, and they're very, fortunately, the Arabs are humble enough to know that most people don't know a lot of these words, so they'll put at the bottom, they have no shame in explaining the words in the text. We have to look them up, generally, in English writing.

The Efficient Cause: Pedagogy

And then the efficient cause involves questions of pedagogy. How do we impart knowledge? It involves both the art and science of teaching. All of teaching is either inductive or deductive. Teaching can also be didactic or dialectical, the highest form being dialectical.

At Zaytuna, we seek to revive the didactic element of teaching because it was characteristic of the scholastic methods of both the Arabic and Latin traditions, as a prerequisite to the dialectical element, and also because it enriches discussion.

Some liberal arts colleges no longer use the didactic method, but the lecture ought to be revered as much as rigorous discussion. A good lecture is the only way in which mature, masterly acts of reasoning can be exemplified for a student. For this to happen, one must attend not only to what is said, but the what is of extreme importance, but how one unfolds meaning in time.

In making ideas manifest for others by the artful use of words, the orderly acts of the intellect, and the clarity and arrangement of discourse, the lecturer bids the student to follow a way of thinking that originates in the content and spirit of the canon of text.

Furthermore, when reading the text in their original language, lecturers ought to be compelled, as it were, by an intellectual law of gravity to keep close to the firm ground of the text, the grammatical possibilities and the semantic fields created by the richness of Arabic etymology. The same is true for Latin and Greek.

The lecturer proceeds to practice the exegetical skills necessary to evince the unity of a passage or of a number of passages in a text. Considered in this light, lectures can be understood as living commentaries, and the students who follow them collaborators in an ancient scholarly art.

The Formal Cause: Language Arts and Transcendentals

Finally, we have the formal cause, which gets to the essence of education, given the formal cause's profound relationship to the efficient cause, as the formal cause is first an exemplary cause. Hence, the formal cause involves both the pedagogy and the curriculum. The curriculum must consistently be informed by the language arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Books are approached with an understanding.

Language allows multiple possibilities, and one must strive to determine the author's intent in didactic works. While more freedom exists in works of literature and poetry, logic enables us to determine the soundness of the reasoning and rhetoric to assess the merit of the craft or the artifice.

The ultimate aim of education is the inculcation of love, of the love of beauty, truth, and goodness in a human being. These are the great transcendentals that are shared by both our traditions. Muslims call the highest truth إيمان (Iman), or a firm conviction of God's existence and providence. We call goodness إسلام (Islam) or submission and resignation to God's will and action in accordance with it.

So we do good. We believe true, what is true, and we do what is good. And on earth, in accordance with God's will, on earth as it is in heaven, and we turn beauty إِحْسَان (Ihsan), which literally can mean to make beautiful, (يُحَسِّنُ - yuhassinu) or (يُحَسِّنُ شَيْئًا - yuhassinu shay'an), to reflect beauty and to perceive beauty.

Each of these is reflected in the arts of freedom. Grammar is man's greatest good. This is what enables us to communicate and separates us from the animals. He taught the human being how to articulate. Logic makes him capable of recognizing truth and seeing falsehood in its absence, and rhetoric enables him to transmit beauty in all he does.

With mastery of these arts, we can embark on the discovery of the absolute by light of reason only, free of the constraints of our senses, resulting in the perception (مَعْرِفَة - ma'rifa), of reality, where at last we find peace and understanding.

Conclusion: Understanding Our Traditions

So that, I skipped a few pages, but if you want to read the essays in the Renovatio, that is in essence, I think, what we're trying to do here. We're really trying to understand our tradition with the tools that produce the tradition, without which it's very difficult to penetrate them. But we're also trying to understand the immense tradition that we're seeing, in some ways, a dissolution of, and Berkeley, I think, is ground zero in some ways for that.

We have something, what Jacques Barzun called primitivism, which is this, it's a Rousseauian desire to get to some kind of primitive state of nature. But our tradition is, in the Quran, one of the gifts in Surat Yusuf is that he says, one of the blessings of God is that he brought us out of (البَادِيَة - al-badiya) of the Bedouin, because the Bedouin are the first peoples, the aboriginal peoples, and their lives are very hard, and they're often cultures that are very rich, undeniably, but the richness of a literate culture for us is the great gift of the book, (الكِتَاب - al-kitab).

And this is why we honor the Christians and the Jews as (أَهْلُ الْكِتَابِ - Ahl al-Kitab), the people of the book, which literally means (البِيبْلِيُوس - al-biblios), the Bible. So, I mean, you could translate it as the people of the Bible. So we are the people of the Quran, and they are the people of the Bible (الكِتَاب - al-kitab)

And that's why these three Abrahamic traditions, I believe, and this is our commitment, despite all of the horrors that have been perpetrated by members of all three of these traditions, these are beautiful traditions. And if

they're understood correctly, they're traditions that bring immense purpose and meaning to our lives. And ultimately, we believe salvation of the soul itself, according to our Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم who said that anybody who says (لَا إِلَهَ إِلَّا اللهُ - la ilaha illallah), there is no God but the one true living God, sustainer of the heavens, the earth, creator of all things seen and unseen, that anybody believes in that God will ultimately be saved. Thank you.

Question and Answer Session

Thank you for that, Sheikh Hamza. It's getting a little late, but I'd like to see if people have any questions. If you have a couple of questions, we might make some time for it. If Sheikh Hamza is willing, you can line up at this microphone. And if you have any questions, please step up and ask them. Come on over here to the microphone so he can all hear you.

Question on Astronomy and Music in Islamic Tradition

Sheikh Hamza, thank you very much. I'm inspired not only to explore more richly the trivium and quadrivium in the Western tradition, but also its instantiation in the Islamic tradition as well. My question perhaps concerns material in the pages that you skipped over. It would be too broad to ask you how astronomy and music have shown themselves in the Islamic traditions down through the ages. Maybe it would suffice to ask how you're seeing them instantiated and explored here at Zaytuna and the role that you see in human formation of those two in particular.

You know, I would argue thank you for that question. It's a really wonderful point. I would argue that the reason new atheism is around is purely artificial light. I really mean that. If we would just turn off all the electricity just once a month for people to see the heavens again, they would come back to believing in something bigger than themselves.

Because I personally—many times, many nights—the Sahara Desert is the darkest place in the world in terms of artificial light. There's almost no artificial light where I was. Many nights in the Western Sahara, I literally was reduced to—I mean really crying just because it was just so overwhelming to see the beauty of the heavens. And people have been deprived of this for so long.

I mean, we see Orion, which is stunning. I love Orion. But just to see the multitude of stars, the heavens declare your glory. Plato said that God put the heavens there for us to see the order and want to bring the order of the heavens down to the earth.

And just astronomy is so important. And modern astronomy has killed astronomy. It has killed it. So many people take courses in astronomy at college. They're the worst courses that you can take. They will kill any love that inspired you to take that course in the first place.

And so we do a lot of natural-based astronomy, of literally going out observing the moon. We have an incredible teacher, Dr. Yusuf, who's been watching the moon every month for, I don't know, 25 years or something. He's

really probably one of the world's leading experts on moon sighting.

And if you've ever seen a new moon born, you will know exactly what I'm talking about. I've only seen it once, literally come like I saw it birthed. And it was just such a stunning experience to see that. But everybody, we go out moon sighting, and everybody who's done it knows the joy that you get when you first spot the moon. It's such a joyous experience.

And the word for seeing the moon is the same word for the cry of the child in Arabic (اسْتِهْلال - istihlal), when it first comes into the world. It's a shout for the child. What am I doing here? But for us, it's like, what is God doing with us? This is so amazing. So astronomy is really important.

They learn to do sundials. They learn to identify stars. We do real phenomenological astronomy, just understanding. Because we are in a geocentric world, whether we like it or not. The heliocentric and the geocentric are both true. One is true from experience, and the other is true from just very complicated mathematical conceptualizations.

But geocentrism, nobody talks about what a beautiful earth turn that is. Because we just don't. I mean, I always like Paul McCartney said, the fool on the hill sees the sun going down, and the eyes in his head see the earth spinning round. I mean, that's a stunning piece of poetry, inspired clearly. Because that's the modern person. We're so conflicted existentially.

And so astronomy is really important. Traditionally, music harmony was harmonia, was the liberal art. It was actually far more theoretical than what we would consider music today. But music (المَقَامَات - almaqamat) were very important in Islamic civilization. And we have great masters still alive in that tradition, which the maqamat are closer to what we would call the modes than they are to the modern music. But they do, I mean, they do inshad and things like that.

So, but we haven't done any formal training in that. I really want to get more quadrivium based. It's tough. A lot of students just shy away from it. One of the things that most impresses me about St. John's College is that they really do the quadrivium. And they love it. The students love it.

If you've never done the, in book one, I think it's the 47th proposition. If you've never done it in Euclid, just do it one time. It's actually quite stunning experience to prove the Pythagorean theorem. In high schools, they teach you how to use it. It's a utilitarian function of it. But Euclid was much more in showing you why these things are true, not what you can do with them.

Question on Bilingual Editions of Scholastic Works

Hello, thank you for your very interesting lecture. I have a question kind of about bringing forward the synthesis of the traditions. I know often in the Christian tradition, you know, in our theological journals and things like that, I mean, we're really often working in Latin sources, or translations thereof. I'm wondering, is anyone discussing possibly doing editions, possibly of original languages and translations of the scholastic, the Latin

and the Arabic scholastic writers, I mean, in one book facing pages, or interlaced works, so that scholars can have that all in one place?

Right. Well, I mean, that's definitely what the curriculum series is about. So for instance, we're producing in the next couple of months, I think, hopefully, it'll be done by December, a book on Maturidi theology with a critical Arabic edition and a really good English translation by one of our professors, Sheikh Faraz Khan.

We're also working now on, we're editing Ghazali's book on logic, which is an amazing textbook for logic مِعْيَارُ العلم (Miyar al-'Ilm). We have a critical Arabic edition, so it's going to be side by side. So what we hope to do is bring out, you know, I don't know if people know like Loeb's classics, right? Like some people know, all the teachers are going, but Loeb's, I'll tell you about Loeb's classics.

Has anybody ever heard of the Kuhn-Loeb family? Okay, this is one of the biggest banking families of New York. They were billionaires in today's money. So over a hundred years ago, one of their sons went to Harvard and studied Latin and Greek and had a really hard time. And so he convinced his dad, one of the richest men in America, to fund the translation of all these Greek and Latin classics.

So I'm looking for that character to help us. So if you know somebody like that, right? One of the students, we have a billionaire student that convinced their dad to fund, but this does take a lot of work and to free people up to do these translations. But, and then the scholastic tradition, I would love to see some of the translations of Ghazali and these that are in Latin, you know, really bringing those back into it.

I think they'll probably be pretty good translations because they were such rigorous scholars. So that would be fascinating, but Latin and Greek will come back. They will have their revival and already we see the seeds of it. Arabic is, to me, just, it is such a stunning ocean. And if you, you know, I wanted to study other languages, but there's always something more to learn in Arabic.

So it's one of those languages that where you fall into it, it's just really difficult to get out. And that's the reason why the Arabs call a dictionary مُحِيط (muhit) which means ocean, right? So Arabic is literally, it's just vast and it's extraordinary and there's great gifts in it.

The Value of Studying the Classics

And we believe the wisdom of the, you know, Mark Twain once said that the ancients stole all their best ideas from us. One of the best reasons for studying the classics is that you realize, one, we're all still human. The problems of yesterday were around. If you want to read a wonderful study on women fed up with men governing everything, just read Aristophanes, the assembly women, you know, I mean, it's like they were dealing with the same problems or read Lysistrata, you know, fed up with wars and sending young men to war.

I mean, there's so much, the Mathnawi is filled with incredible psychological insights into the nature. Rumi has a great story of a man who goes to have a lion tattooed on his back. And so the tattoo artist starts and he's like, oh, what's that? What's that? He said, it's the tail. He said, no, no, no, start with the head. And so he goes to the

head and then he said, wow, what's that? He said, it's the head. He said, no, no, no, do the body. And then he's, same thing happens with the body.

And finally Rumi just says that, you know, you have to suffer if you want to be a lion, if you want to be great, if you want to be virtuous, you have to suffer, you have to, but people want everything without the pain of getting it. So he uses that. There are many examples of that in both the traditions.

History as Medicine for a Sick Mind

I mean, if you read, Livy said that the study of history is medicine for a sick mind. Because when you study history, you will, you'll feel a lot better about the time you're living in. I mean, we're actually living in a global warming is, it's uncomfortable, but pestilence and plague, that was uncomfortable too. Like 25 million people died. You know, I mean, we tend to forget like how good things are. And that's why these people are really worth reading.

If you want to understand what happened in Syria, you can, I guarantee you, you can find out by reading al-Maqrizi. Al-Maqrizi wrote a book on the causes of the collapse of states and everything that he identified. I saw the correspondence or read book five of Aristotle's Politics on revolutions. And you'll see why Aristotle talks about the 99% and the 1%. He talks about this problem that Willy Brandt, right?

The German back in the 1970s, people are too young in here to remember this guy. He wrote a book called North and South, basically predicting what's happening in Europe right now. He said, if we don't do something about this incredible inequality gap of wealth, we're going to have a disaster on the horizon. And you will have these people flooding in, desiring what we have because they're so deprived.

So it's very important. These are ways of understanding our world that having understanding, you know, knowing a diagnosis is a great gift, just to know what's going on with you. There's a relief that comes, even when the doctor gives you a terminal diagnosis, there's a relief that comes with having a diagnosis of knowing what's wrong. But you cannot work to make something better until you make a sound diagnosis of what's wrong.

The Cure for Ignorance is Education

And so we believe at Zaytuna that what's wrong with the world is very simple. It's ignorance. And the cure is education. It's a very simple equation. It doesn't mean that there aren't evil educated people. Goebbels was real. He was the only PhD in the hierarchy of the Nazi government. He's a smart guy. He studied one of our great social psychologists, his book on propaganda. So he learned a lot from the Americans.

But education is not necessarily going to protect you from being evil or crafty. But ignorance, there's a real problem. So thank you.