The Arts of Understanding

The Arts of Understanding: Prerequisites for Unlocking the Islamic Tradition

Opening Remarks and Welcome

As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu. To the inaugural Harvard Zaytuna Symposium. It is really my honor, as your sister in Islam, as the president of the Harvard Undergraduate Theological Society, and as a huge fan of Zaytuna, and as a student of Harvard University, to welcome you to this momentous occasion.

I would initially like to offer you some opening remarks. From there, we will transition into some recitation of the Quran by Abdelaziz. We will then transition into a translation. We will then transition into opening remarks by Dr. Abdel Rashid, who is the chaplain here at Harvard University. And we will then transfer into a small piece of music prepared. And then we will start what you have all been waiting for, which is our inaugural lecture.

Historical Context: Harvard and Zaytuna

So first, I would like to quickly just introduce what this is. So many years ago, in 1636, Harvard University was founded as the first institution of higher education in the United States, with a Puritan congregationalist foundation focused on training ministers and clergy. Today, Harvard is one of the most prestigious and highly rated universities in the world, producing scholarship within an array of disciplines, while also bringing together students and academicians from around the globe.

In its beginnings, Zaytuna College is the first and only Muslim undergraduate college in the United States with many similarities to Harvard's inception so long ago. We hope that this endeavor will mark the first step in establishing a long and beneficial relationship between Harvard and Zaytuna. On behalf of the organizing committee, we are delighted to have had the opportunity to play a role in fostering this new relationship in the pursuit of upholding truth and serving humanity through academia.

We wish it may continue for years to come in the hopes of nurturing bonds of love, devotion, and learning. At this time, I'd like to recognize the organizing committee. They have put in hours of time.

The Journey to This Symposium

I'd like to actually share how this program started. I will start by introducing Akhed and Hamdi. If you guys could please wave your hands or at least show yourself to the crowd. Where is Hamdi? Is Hamdi grabbing something or doing something right now? These individuals reached out to me with an idea. And when I first heard the idea, I told them, this is my dream. To be able to do this is my dream.

I told them there have been many attempts. And oftentimes, these things can start off as small sparks of energy and eventually die down. But I think it was with taisir, it was with righteous intentions, that step after step after

step, we saw this coming to fruition. And it is really only by the barakah of Allah that you are all gathered here today to establish something so momentous as this.

I'd like to also introduce the organizing committee members on behalf of Zaytuna. Fatima, if you can raise your hand or show yourself to the crowd. There she is. And Danny in the back, also a senior at Zaytuna who has been critical in helping us. I'd like to introduce the master's students who are part of the organizing committee. We have Tolaib, who is a PhD in Quranic studies here at Harvard. And we have Amin Quraishi, who is here with us from Japan at Harvard Divinity School. Could we please offer them a round of applause for helping us put this together?

I'd like to just say that this is a gift. And I pray that we can all be lights in an ebony night of sort. I think we all can relate to what that means. And hopefully leave here as facilitators, as witness to the power of what the Islamic tradition holds and what it can offer to the modern world. With that, I'd like to invite Abdulaziz to come offer some recitation. And then we will transition into translation.

Quranic Recitation

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Surely those who recite the Book of God and perform the prayer and expend that which we have provided them, secretly and in public, look for a commerce that comes to naught. That He may pay them in their full wages and enrich them of His bounty. Surely He is all-forgiving, all-thankful. And that we have revealed to thee of the Book is the truth, confirming what is before it God is aware of and sees His servants. Then we bequeath the Book on those of our servants we chose, but of them some wrong themselves, some of them are lukewarm, and some are outstrippers in good works by the leave of God. That is the great bounty. Gardens of Eden they shall enter, therein they shall be adorned with bracelets of gold and with pearls, and their apparel there shall be of silk. And they shall say, Praise belongs to God, who has removed all sorrow from us. Surely our Lord is all-forgiving, all-thankful.

Musical Interlude

Alright, I'd now like to introduce Zuhi Zhao. He's a pianist from Boston University who will be playing for us Mozart Fantasia in C minor. Can we please have one more round of applause for that beautiful piano piece. And you want to know the truth, there was no practice, there was no preparation. I just invited Zuhi to play less than an hour and a half ago. So that just speaks to Zuhi and we thank you and we appreciate your time.

Chaplain's Opening Remarks

I now would like to introduce Chaplain Khalil Abdur-Rashid to offer some opening remarks for this event.

Chaplain has been a pillar for this community, him and his wife Chaplain Samia offer so much, both in terms of moral support, spiritual support, and so it's really my honor to be welcoming my mentor to the stage.

Good evening everybody, peace and blessings be with all of you. Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wa barakatuh. (بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ - bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim) I'm not going to take a long time so I won't be speaking in the spirit of chaplaincy today, but what I hope to do is just to remind myself and everyone here of what it is that we are supposed to be doing and to remind us of what it means to participate in a symposium like this.

Certainly on behalf of Chaplain Samia and myself, we extend a tremendous humble welcome to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, to Dr. Aisha, Dr. Wayan, of course Dr. Omar Qureshi, Sheikh Mashuk, to all of the distinguished students of Zaytuna, to our community and to our campus.

The Difference Between Information and Sacred Knowledge

And it is really important just to keep something in our frame of mind, in our backgrounds, in our foregrounds, in our hearts and minds and spirits. And that is what happens when we encounter knowledge and ilm. There's a difference between information and ilm. Ilm is a term of sacred knowledge. And we meet all the time, we have different encounters, but there are two ways to meet.

You can meet, you can have an encounter and then you part and you go back and there's not really much of an impact that it has, similar to what's called the Majma' al-Bahrain, the place where the two seas meet and there's no overlap. But then there's the other encounter where you encounter things in your environment, you encounter knowledge specifically and people of knowledge, and you take from them.

The Metaphor of the Honeybee

And in the spirit of what the Quran talks about, the honeybee, you go from flower to flower and you take and you absorb. And the metaphor or the example of the honeybee is what I'd like to leave with all of us today and set the stage. That the honeybee, particularly the Quranic example of the honeybee, is really important. That we, our role in engaging in the world, particularly as Muslims, is such that we are supposed to be the kind of people that engage, that benefit, that absorb, and that give back, that produce.

(ثُمَّ كُلِي مِن كُلِّ الثَّمَرَاتِ - Quran 16:69) First Allah says in the Quran, that the honeybee has been commanded to go and to derive from different flowers, different fruits, go to different places, learn different things, ingest, absorb, consume, if you will, take things in. So you learn, you benefit, you sit with teachers, you sit, you meet people, and you absorb.

But not just absorb, but you digest. (يَخْرُجُ مِن بُطُونِهَا شَرَابٌ - Quran 16:69) And that digestion then becomes something different. And so we are meant to not just take in information, we are meant to produce something new from the experiences that we have, particularly with our teachers.

The Purpose of This Symposium

And this format in tonight's lecture by Sheikh Hamza and the guests that we have here, these are teachers of ours and they represent the teachers in our tradition. And this symposium represents the teachings of our tradition in dialogue and discussions. And this is really important in a climate where there's a lot of polarization and not a lot of desire to sit at the table and have dialogues and discussions and understand how to come to terms with each other, how to encounter difference, and how to respectfully navigate those differences.

And then how to produce something for the world to benefit in the spirit of the honeybee, when it's the product that comes out is shifa only mass, is something that is of healing to not just one community, but to everybody.

So our hope and our purpose for what may blossom from this inaugural lecture, this inaugural symposium, is that we may be inspired, we may be moved, we may be shaken, we may be stirred, we may be uplifted to be able to improve ourselves so that we'll be in a better position to walk the path of being subjects who produce a product that is healing to the maladies that afflict our communities, our country, and even our own selves.

A Teacher's Wisdom

And so I'll leave you with the advice of my first teacher, the very first person in my life, when I was a young man, I was 19 years old, who taught me the very first lessons of Islam, and he was teaching, and he was dying of cancer, he was dying of bone cancer, and he used to come to class, he was never late. I was the one at 19 who was late, he was never late. And he used to say that, you know, this, what you're learning is not information, what you're learning is prophetic bequeath, knowledge from the prophets.

And we have a responsibility to pass that on, and we pass it on not just through words, but with beings who we are. And so I will close so that we can understand better what that means. I wish all of you a warm welcome this evening, may Allah be with you and bless you, and may we help, help us unite ourselves so that we may be standard bearers in this life and in the life to come, to what is healing, and what is beautiful, and what is praising.

Introduction of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf

The inaugural lecture, or the lecture that will happen with the symposium, intends to create a space to feature prominent scholars and public intellectuals from each institution as an opportunity for the whole community to learn and gain knowledge. This year, the inaugural speech features Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, presenting the Arts of Understanding, Prerequisites for Unlocking the Islamic Tradition.

He is the co-founder and president of Zaytuna College, and arguably the most influential Islamic scholar in the West. But I think for the majority of us in the room, this is a man who has shaped who we are, who has brought us closer to Allah, and who we are incredibly blessed to have joining our community tonight. Please welcome Sheikh Hamza Yusuf.

Sheikh Hamza's Opening

Praise God. In a place where God is meant to be praised, because the founders of this place founded it as a place to actually produce ministers that would go and minister the community. So Harvard's grown much since those early days.

First of all, I'm very honored to be back here. I haven't been here probably in over 30 years, but I did come and lecture before and had a very interesting time, and had a wonderful time in the bookstores, and I hope they're still there because I know they're disappearing these days. Everybody's going on Amazon, which is not a wise thing to do, but people are doing it anyway.

So alhamdulillah, I want to say that this is, I think, a wonderful thing that our students, we're a fledgling school in California, and Harvard is a well-established bastion, really, of knowledge on many, many different levels. So we're humbled and honored to be here, and we're certainly grateful for Sister Jenna for doing the hard work with her team. We're certainly very, very grateful to Dr. Khaled Rweiheb, somebody I know all the faculty at Zaytuna hold in high esteem for his extraordinary scholarship and contribution to this tradition. So I think Harvard's very fortunate to have somebody of his caliber here.

Arabic Studies at Harvard: Historical Background

(بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ - bismillahir-rahmanir-rahim). Before I get into what I wanted to talk about, I know many of you know this already, but for those of you who don't, the second president of Harvard University, his name was Charles Chauncey, and he was 1592 to 1672 in the mid-17th century, he became a professor and the president of the school. He had studied in Cambridge in England, and obviously as you know, Cambridge, Massachusetts was meant in some ways to reflect Cambridge, England, the great hope that the Americans would develop great schools and colleges like Oxford and Cambridge.

But what's interesting is that Chauncey boasted that he knew more Arabic than any other person in the American colonies, and he's the one that introduced Arabic into Harvard. I was really struck by the fact that Noah Webster, who's one of the unsung founding fathers, he's really the founder of the American language in many ways because he really wanted to have a language that was independent of English English and create an American English. Very proud of it.

There's a very interesting book called Founding Grammars, which is about this fight between Noah Webster and Lindsley Murray. Murray was an Anglophile. He was American who ended up going back to England, but he wanted to see an English English established in America. So this is a classic problem with linguists. Webster was more of what we would call a descriptivist, and Lindsley was a prescriptivist, and we're still having these debates today, believe it or not. The Kufans and the Basrans had these debates. The Kufans are closer to the descriptivists, whereas the Basrans were more prescriptivists, so they did not like this kind of open-ended approach to language.

Noah Webster and Arabic

Noah Webster, who wrote his book in, it was published in 1828, he tried to prove that English, all languages derive from Hebrew, but what he found, he found more relations to Arabic than to Hebrew in the book. So you will find, and I don't know where they got typesetters typesetting in the 1820s in America, the Arabic typesetting was quite extraordinary. So he has things like cave, that clearly came from kahf, earth, that clearly came from ardh, papyrus that clearly came from bābūs, so he has all these funny derivatives back to Arabic. We still use Webster's dictionary. That was a little aside. A little footnote for those of you who might not have been aware of that.

The Challenge of Arabic Language

So what I wanted to talk about, the arts of understanding, prerequisites to unlocking the Islamic tradition. The Islamic tradition is not an easy one to unlock, for a number of reasons. One, it has a very very difficult language at its foundation, which is the Arabic language. Arabic, I call it what the Arabs call great poetry and great oratory. The easy impossible.

There are elements to Arabic that are extraordinarily accessible. People can learn it quite quickly. It has amazing patterns. You can learn these patterns. But the older you get, the more you realize how impossible this language is to actually master. And this is why in Mauritania, they say (لَا يُحِيطُ بِالْعَرَبِيِّ إِلَّا نَبِيٌّ - lā yuḥīṭu bil-ʿarabiyyi ʾillā nabiyyun) No one can really know all of Arabic except a prophet.

It has one of the richest vocabularies in the world. It's also retained qualities of ancient languages, and due to the Quran, it has not developed in the same way that many other languages have developed. Like English for instance, we once had a duel in English. We also had inflections, so we had an inflected language. A lot of that has been removed from the English language.

So Arabic is very difficult, and there's a very interesting view about what the first language was in the Islamic tradition. There are different opinions about it. Was it Arabic? Was it Syriac? Was it some unknown language? Imam As-Suyuti says, One of the strangest things is that the questions in the grave will be in Syriac. Well, there's a relationship obviously between Syriac, these Semitic languages, with Hebrew and Arabic.

The Liberal Arts Tradition

So why am I so interested in the liberal arts? Partly because I was brought up in that tradition. My father was a liberal artist. He was very committed to the liberal arts. He'd studied in Columbia when John Erskine had

introduced a core curriculum. Mortimer Adler was there, and the great Mark Van Doren, who wrote a book called Liberal Education, worth reading if you can find it.

But I grew up in this hearing from my father, these sayings, especially the importance of these fundamental knowledges, that without them it becomes very difficult to penetrate pre-modern works. Well, when I became Muslim and went over to the Middle East, and I started studying particularly with Mauritanians, what really struck me was their emphasis on the same things that my father had talked about in Latin and Greek. Things like the importance of grammar, the centrality of logic, the importance of rhetoric. These were all things that were really emphasized.

And then as I grew into understanding the Islamic tradition more and more, what I realized is it really was a parallel tradition of liberal arts alongside the Western tradition. So where do they come from, these arts? They're surrounded in mystery. The obviously Eurocentric view would like to claim that they came from Greece, but we know that the ancient Indians were involved in grammar. They had their types of logic. They were certainly understood what beautiful language was, but very often it's associated with Pythagoras of Samos. He's shrouded in mystery himself because most of the writings about him are 200 years after he died. But he was certainly very interested in the mathematical arts.

The School of Athens

This is a beautiful painting that I'm sure all of you are familiar with, the School of Athens. It shows Plato and Aristotle. Plato looking up to the heavens, Aristotle with his hand towards the earth. This idea of these two approaches, the one, the Platonic, which is really to study the heavens, and then the Aristotelian that we should study the earth, and the idea that we need both of these. What's interesting is they have Averroes there, and he's kind of, looks like he's maybe cheating there with Pythagoras. He's definitely trying to catch some knowledge from what's being written on that page.

The Pursuit of Liberal Arts

This is really one of my favorite pictures. It's a young man. He's a student. It looks like he's a beardless student, so he's probably early adolescence, maybe 13, 12, 13. Most people who did go to college finished by 15, generally, at that time. But he's being led into the six liberal arts by grammar. They're personified as beautiful women. The idea that the young man should pursue them like he would pursue a beautiful woman with great passion, great desire, and purpose.

If you look, there's symbols that go with the art. For instance, you can see the woman holding the scorpion. The scorpion was actually for dialectic. Sometimes it was symbolized with a snake, but it was for dialectic, which is when somebody has a good proof, it's like getting stung by a scorpion. You have to submit to it.

Then over the seven is prudentia. Prudentia is wisdom, prudence. In Arabic, Imam al-Ghazali in the Mizan al-Amal, he talks about the hikmah nazariyya and hikmah amaliyya. Hikmah nazariyya is what we would call in

Latin prudentia, prudence. The idea of wisdom is practical wisdom, hikmah amaliyya, as opposed to theoretical wisdom, which is hikmah, what the Greeks called sophia, as opposed to phronesis. These were the terms. These are very important distinctions.

Wisdom and Hitting the Mark

She is basically the embodiment of phronesis. If a physician is sued, they will have testimony from people who will testify what a prudent doctor would have done in the situation. Practical wisdom. Prudentia has really got her bow there because the idea is that wisdom enables you to hit the target. In Greek, Hamartia, New Testament Greek Hamartia, in Hebrew, in Arabic, and in Old English, the terms for sin are all archery terms, which mean to miss the mark.

When you sin, it's actually, this is the Socratic idea that it's actually ignorance, that when people behave wrongly, they do so out of ignorance. They mistook an apparent good for a real good, and they went after it, whether it was pleasure or something else. These liberal arts, which emerge in our civilization, and they are taught and embodied in these extraordinary universities like the University of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and then they come to the United States, Harvard, 1636, Princeton, Yale. These are the great civilizational entities.

The History of Universities in the Muslim World

So what's the history of the liberal arts in the Muslim world? Well, there's debate about where the university, the idea of a university begins. But the Arabic word for university is usually jami'ah, which means comprehensive. So it's the comprehensive studies. Sometimes they use kulliyah, which is more for college, but again, it has the idea of the universal, the kulliyah. And so, the idea is that you should be studying holistically.

One of the things that C.S. Lewis in his extraordinary work on the discarded image, he laments the loss of holism in our understanding of the world, in our understanding of education. We now study all these disparate subjects, but don't really have any way of pulling them together. I mean, the physicists are looking for this theory that's going to make everything make sense. They're looking for a holistic view in physics, but what about a holistic view that ties everything together? Because the ancients really looked at the world that way. They saw everything as being related to everything else. They didn't see (مَا تَرَى فِي خَلْقِ الرَّحْمَنِ مِن تَفَاوُتٍ - mā tarā fī khalqi r-raḥmāni min tafāwut) (Quran 67:3). They did not see any fissures in the creation of God. They saw that it was all somehow united.

Great Islamic Universities

So Zaytuna College, which we named Zaytuna after, was founded in 737. It was actually preceded by the great university in Qayrawan, which after some Tunisians fled to Fez during some civil strife, they moved into a quarter of Fez called the Qarawiyyin, which means the people from Qayrawan, from Tunis.

Well, there was a woman there, Fatima al-Fihriya, who inherited a massive amount of money with her sister, Mariam, from her father, who was a Tunisian merchant. And I think a lot of Western people don't know how

many great institutions were built by women because they did get inheritance in the Islamic tradition. In fact, as late as the late 19th century, if you read Florence Nightingale's her travel log to Egypt, she actually studied the inheritance laws and was upset that we didn't have more progressive laws like these in England. So she was quite struck by the inheritance laws. She actually learned quite a bit. I actually wrote an article many years ago called Florence of Arabia. You might want to take a look at.

Florence Nightingale and Islam

She actually went into a mosque in Qayrawan and she said, I kept hearing my heart, she was a Unitarian, she said, I kept hearing my heart say, turn to Mecca, turn to Mecca. And I felt as if I found the religion I was finally looking for. And then these men shooed her out and she said, oh, if only there was a place for women in this religion. I could say I found my home. Quite sad. In any case, I've seen those men who do that. They don't always just shoo women out, they shoo men out sometimes too. In any case, Florence, wonderful lady. She was quite a theologian. She actually edited Jowett's translations of Plato. She was quite a stunning scholar in her own right. She also introduced statistics. These are all asides. She introduced statistics into medical studies.

The Chair of Grammar at Qarawiyyin

That, believe it or not, is a somebody who I should know but I don't really know but it is a younger version of the person standing before you. I'd like to talk to him personally but don't have a chance. I'll leave it at that. But I was fortunate enough to actually sit on the chair of grammar in the Qarawiyyin where we were studying the Ajrumiyya. The reason, as George Makdisi shows in The Rise of Colleges, they called it a chair was because the only one that got to sit on the chair was the teacher. When you're talking about chair of the department, that's why they call it a chair. That actually came from the Muslim world.

Al-Azhar University, which, interestingly enough, was founded by the Fatimiyya, which was a part of the Shia tradition. Then, later on, when Salahuddin al-Ayyubi comes, he makes it a Sunni bastion. It has an extraordinary history and is still one of the largest universities in the world. It's quite extraordinary.

The University of Timbuktu

The University of Timbuktu, which I actually visited, is amazing in Sankore. If you read Rodney's book on how Europe underdeveloped Africa, a lot of it deals with this area of Africa. If you haven't read it, there's a beautiful book called, pardon my French here, The Badass Librarian of Timbuktu, which is about how this man here saved all the manuscripts when ISIS showed up. It was done with the Germans who sent him canisters and they were able to put them into waterproof canisters and sail them down to Mukti to prevent them from being burnt by these fanatics. He's an amazing man.

We don't even know what's in a lot of these places. David King reminds us that there are tens of thousands of manuscripts that have never been read yet. He says we really don't even know what they knew in mathematics, let alone in other subjects.

Revelation and Grammar

Now just look at the subject. Obviously, revelation is central. It's central to the Jewish tradition, to the Muslim tradition, and to the Christian tradition. But how do we understand revelation? Augustine wrote a very beautiful book on Christian doctrine making an argument that it was absolutely necessary to know these arts before you actually interpret revelation. We have these ministers in some places, you know, in very often their families are their only flock, but I mean these are people that really have not studied grammar and yet they're reading the Bible and interpreting the Bible.

If you do read the Bible, you should know what a conditional sentence is. It's very important. You could really mistake what you think God is saying if you don't know grammar. So grammar is very important. So these revealed religions put an immense emphasis on grammar, and none more so than the Muslims, because much of the Jewish emphasis comes after they begin to interact with the Muslims.

So you will see the first Jewish Hebrew dictionaries come after they're introduced into dictionary making by the Muslims. It's quite stunning how heavily indebted much of the Jewish tradition is, and the Jewish scholars will admit this and do so in their writings, which is why much of that great period they wrote in Arabic as opposed to writing in Hebrew. So Musa ibn Maymun is often read in Arabic, because he originally wrote many of his treatises in Arabic.

The Trivium and Quadrivium

So you have this revealed religion, then how do you understand it? Well, human beings are divided into these two ways of knowing the world. One is the trivium and the other is the quadrivium, and basically this is the idea of quality and quantity. So the qualitative sciences, and I'm using science in scientia in the old pre-modern way, not in the modern way that we've reduced it to material sciences. Grammar was seen as a science.

So grammar, logic, and rhetoric, this was the triad, the thalāth in Arabic, șanā'at al-thalāth. And the most important was considered grammar, because without it, you could not go to the other two. And then the idea of revealed religion, you had logic, prudence, theology, exegesis, readings, the qirā'āt, prophetic traditions, many other subjects, but I'm giving just an overview.

Muslim Contribution to Sciences

The Muslims were, became obsessed with the quadrivium. They really got very interested. They got from the Greeks and from the Indians also, because they were syncretists. Wherever they went, they would take the books, translate them into Arabic, into Persian, and study them. And for a long time there was a belief simply that they were the caretakers. This was a common trope in western academia, that they simply held the Islamic tradition in abeyance, the western tradition, and then at a certain point, they just handed it over to Europe, and then Europe, of course, took it to another level.

Well, the truth is far, far different from that. George Sarton, who was here at Harvard, wrote an extraordinary history of science. Two volumes of that six-volume work deal almost entirely with Muslim scientists and their contribution to science.

So, there was heavy contribution in all of these areas. Harmony is very interesting, because al-Farabi wrote a book that's amazing. It's called Kitab al-Musiqa al-Kabir, The Big Music Book. And they were inventing instruments, adding the famous addition of the fifth for the quintessence, you know, because a lot of this was based on pre-modern ideas, like the four elements. So, the Oud, there was a fifth string added to it, and then you had the sixth string added with the guitarra, the Spanish guitar. Six being a perfect number. So, very interesting things with that harmony.

The Purpose of the Liberal Arts

So, here, this was the idea that if you mastered these sciences, then the grammar would give you facts, data, terms, basic skills. The logic would give you the ability to know the what and the why of things. And then wisdom, rhetoric was the proper use of it in conveying it to others, persuading others of the truth. Very important. Many, many examples of this in... We have many, many little couplets and things like this, telling us of the importance of grammar.

Things like So, saying like if you want to learn quickly, then study sound logic, you'll think properly, and grammar will rectify your tongue. (وَمِنَ الْبَيَانِ خُذْ دَلِيلًا لِلْحُجَّةِ - And from rhetoric, take a delil for your intellect.) (بِهِ تَسْمُوا - whenever you speak.)

So, there's the trivium right there. And there are many, many Arabic couplets or triplets that talk about that. The quadrivium, I'm not going to go into. It's a fascinating subject, and obviously extraordinarily developed in our civilization. Leibniz and Newton adding an extraordinary tool to really facilitate rapid works in math.

Physics and Geometry

The great, he won the Nobel Prize for Electro Quantum Dynamics, Richard Feynman. In Cal Poly, I actually listened to his lectures. They were fascinating. But in Cal Poly, he described physics as the expanding horizon of our ignorance. But he said that he always taught the freshman seminar using only geometry in physics. And a lot of students hated it because they all knew calculus was much easier. He said, well, the reason I do this is sometimes you get into a horse and buggy for the sheer enjoyment of the ride. So, and MIT is still very serious about geometry.

Imam al-Tusi on the Purpose of Education

So, what was the purpose of all this? Why were they doing all this study? What was the purpose? Well, one of our great, great scholars, Abu Nasr, Imam al-Tusi, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who interestingly enough died the same

year that Aquinas did. He was a Shia scholar, but the Sunnis always taught his books. In the Ottoman, great Ottoman tradition, the Kurdish tradition, they taught Tajrid al-Aqa'id. His Ilm al-Hay'a was taught. Many, many other books because he was a genius and he was well worth studying.

So, he says in his Nasirian ethics, Akhlaq al-Tusi, which was written in Persian, although translated about 300 years ago into Arabic and really an excellent translation. He says basically that happiness is of three kinds. Psycho-spiritual, bodily, and civic happiness, which relates to the society and civilization.

As for the psycho-spiritual happiness, it has already been discussed and its subtypes delineated. It is attained through five means. First, character development, Tarbiyyah. Second, Mantiq, he says, which Mantiq was short for the trivium. So, it's used, often they will use this as Itlaq al-Ba'd 'ala al-Kull in Arabic rhetoric. They would use one to indicate everything. It's a type of Majaz. It's Mursal Juz'i, you know, the Juz'iya. So, he says Mantiq and then mathematics, which was the quadrivium, Riyadiyat. Fourth, natural sciences, because they saw that you had to have the methodology before you could study the sciences. And fifth, metaphysics. So, the highest was metaphysics.

They were taking the student to metaphysics, which they saw, this is book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, that this was the highest thing that a human being could do, is to contemplate reality with a sound mind, a free mind. The mind that had been freed by deep training, so that it wouldn't be fooled by its own machinations. Education must be undertaken in this sequence so that the benefit may be speedily accrued in both abodes.

Economics and Moral Philosophy

And he wrote a beautiful book, this is from, which deals with the personal ethics and then economia, which is economics, and then finally moral, the ethics of the society, civics, so, politics. And it's interesting because historically, until the late 19th century, economics was part of moral philosophy, so they did not separate it. It's one of the great tragedies of modern studies, is that economics is no longer studied as a moral philosophy. And this is partly because the people that study it don't have morals, and they really don't want to learn them, so they're forced to actually think about what they're doing.

Yeah, so. I mean, somebody asked me once, a Saudi man asked somebody at Harvard, he was a professor, he said, do you teach business ethics there? Do you teach it? That was just after 2008. Yeah, because, I don't know if you know this, but the great Ponzi schemer, Madoff, he actually donated to the business ethics school at Shiva. So, my goodness. That's like penance.

Bodily Happiness and Medicine

So then he says, as for bodily happiness, it is attained through the sciences pertaining to the ordering of body state, health, such as remedies, preservation of health, and the science of nurturing, which are encapsulated in medicine. So medicine is actually not to manage diseases, which is modern medicine. They manage diseases. They don't really cure people, unless they're ER doctors. They're really good. They're the best.

But a lot of these doctors, unfortunately, become drug pushers for pharmaceuticals. Did you know that?

Everybody's silent. Oh no, that can't be true. I just went to my doctor. I have my albuterol. I'm not being serious. I've got my albuterol here. But they're managing my asthma. They haven't cured it. They keep paying them. That's what they love. Long-term patients. That's why they call them patients. You just patient with your illness. Yeah.

But they actually saw health was a good thing. That you should be healthy. Like, we look around in America. People don't look very healthy. They don't sound healthy. Yeah. So how do we restore health to a society? That's a good question. This is what they were interested in.

Astrology and Knowledge

This also includes knowledge of astrology. Now they understood that there's two types of astrology that they were dealing with. One of them was more about what they called the amsija. The other, predictive astrology, they all said was prohibited. So they did believe that there was a relationship to times of birth and things like that with the person and their health and things like that.

So then he says, civic happiness is about politics. It's found upon the science related to the ordering of the affairs of the community, the state, daily life in society, such as sacred knowledge, including sacred law, theology, prophetic reports, exegesis. It also includes worldly disciplines, such as literature, rhetoric, grammar, calligraphy, arithmetic, geometry, calculation, and the like. The benefit of each discipline is in accordance with its appropriate place and God knows best what is right.

Thomas Aquinas on Liberal Arts

So now look at just Thomas Aquinas almost at the same time. The seven liberal arts do not adequately divide theoretical philosophy, but as Hugh of St. Victor says, seven arts are grouped together, leaving out certain other ones because those who wanted to learn philosophy were first instructed in them, and the reason why they are divided into the trivium and the quadrivium is that they are, as it were, paths introducing the quick mind to the secrets of philosophy.

This is also in harmony with the philosopher's statement in the metaphysics, meaning Aristotle, that we must investigate the method of scientific thinking before the sciences themselves, and the commentator, meaning Averroes, says in the same place that before all the other sciences a person should learn logic, meaning the trivium, which teaches the method of all the sciences and the trivium concerns logic. The philosopher also says in the ethics that the young can know mathematics but not physics because it requires experience. So we are given to understand after logic we should learn mathematics and which the quadrivium concerns. These then are the paths leading the mind to the other philosophical disciplines. So it's the exact same flow. It's quite extraordinary that both the Muslim world and the traditional Christian world had the same basic idea of what education was for and where it should lead to but also why.

The Three Great Sciences

And the reason is this. They saw the three most important sciences in the world were medicine, law and politics, and theology and philosophy. And the reason that this is so is they understood that we have a body, we have a social body and we have a soul. The body has to be physically well so that the soul can thrive.

One of the interesting things that the Taoists say is that the reason the Taoists do so many life extension exercises like Qigong is because they actually say that you owe it to your soul to live a long life because it will take that long to rectify your soul before you leave the body. So it's very important that you take care of your soul because you have this time allotted to you and it's very important to preserve that as best you can. There's an element of choice in good health.

Law and politics was to heal the social body from its ailments and then theology and philosophy, ethics and psychology were to heal the mental and spiritual body from their ailments. This was the doctor, the lawyer and the theologian. These were the great medieval things.

Sequential Knowledge in Islamic Tradition

Now I'm going to quickly get into just an example. In the Islamic tradition and these are the arts that I feel when we come into the Islamic tradition and I'm speaking to the students of Islamic knowledge in the audience. I know there's some other people here but in the Islamic tradition one of the difficulties that we have to remember is this is a sequential tradition like in mathematics. Mathematics is sequential knowledge. You have to learn at each stage. If you don't learn it sequentially it's going to break down which is why the Japanese model is so much better than the American model because you have to get a hundred on every test until they put you to the next level because if you take something you've got a D in arithmetic and you pass them to the next stage they're completely handicapped. By the time they get down the road they don't understand anything.

Well the Arabic tradition is sequential in this way, the Islamic tradition is that it's really buttressed upon certain knowledges if you don't have them. So these ulum al-ala, the instrumental arts, the most important ones were the trivium that I talked about. Ilm al-nahw, ilm al-sarf, matin al-lugha, al-lugha itself, ilm al-balagha and then you had things that enabled you to work with legislative derivations what's called usul al-fiqh, qawa'id al-fiqh and then you had the knowledge of Quran, how to read it, orthopoeia, tajweed, the knowledge of the qira'at and also the nature of the tafsir of it then you had the traditions like the mustalah al-hadith if you don't know the terms you'll have a hard time reading in our tradition because these terms are constantly used and there's something what E.D. Hirsch called domain knowledge that is expected of the person when you enter into these worlds and then obviously mantiq.

Logic in the Arabic Tradition

So you had mantiq and Dr. Khalid Rweiheb has written some really important works on logic in the Arabic tradition and made some really important clarifications in those works one of them is the separation of material

logic from formal logic which is a big problem that because of Avicenna so the Sunnis tend not to study material logic anymore which is a huge disaster you have to study the two together but formal logic which just deals with the validity of your syllogisms and things like that but material logic deals with the actual matter, the substance of what the premises and the conclusions are made of which is called mantiq al-qadaya in one iteration now in modern Arabic they actually call it mantiq al-maddi but it doesn't work I don't think it's a useful translation and then which is such a beautiful science so these were the foundation and then you moved into the ulum al-ghaya like why you studied these it was in order to study revelation which hopefully would lead to a ma'rifah so you studied the methodology and then you studied the sciences themselves which led to this wisdom this was the goal.

The Mauritanian Tradition

This is the tradition that I come from, the Mauritanian tradition. This was my teacher he lived to be 112 he was an extraordinary man he mastered the Mauritanian tradition in the 1930s he actually walked to Hajj from Mauritania a journey of 3000 miles amazing stories he recounted the entire story to me in his tent over several nights it was quite stunning to hear it he was somebody who lived the tradition.

Every night, he had me actually live in his tent which was difficult because other students were there after about 3 months I actually asked him if I could go live with the students because it was getting a little embarrassing envy creeps in and things like that during that time he always woke up about 3 hours before Fajr and he would start his tahajjud and he would pray until Fajr every night he did that the people that told me who lived with him he had been doing that for 70 years it was very consistent.

He was one of the most consistent people they said that Kant that they used to set their watches with Kant's walk every day in Konigsberg. Mauritanian Hajj was like that you would know exactly what he was doing he just had something that some tradition called sacred monotony this idea of just living recognizing that it really is groundhog day that life really does repeat itself and then what do you do with those days that you've been given as they accumulate there's only about 40,000 of them and then they're gone no it's actually 20,000 I was giving you double it's not much.

Memorization in the Mauritanian Tradition

So their tradition and I did not complete it but I did study in it so I did study some of these texts like the Ajrumiyya, Mulhat al-I'rab I did not do the Ahmirrar or the Kafiya Shafiya so if you look in their tradition they memorize everything so 114 lines in the Ajrumiyya, 375 in Mulhat al-I'rab, 1001 in Ibn Malik's text Ibn Malik's text by the way which is now considered advanced grammar is intermediate grammar it's actually an abridgment of al-Kafiya al-Shafiya which has 2793 lines the Ahmirrar which is Mukhtar al-Bukna's additions to the Alfiya is 1800 my teacher memorizes not only the 6,083 lines in all of these but shawahid for almost every rule so we're looking at tens of thousands of memorized lines and I'm not exaggerating really I'm not exaggerating.

Sarf and Language Studies

In sarf they memorize Lamiyyat al-Af'al, Ahmirrar of Lamiyyat al-Afal so you're looking at about 195 lines and then they do ilm al-lugha muthalath Qutrub, muthalath Ibn Malik, diwan sitta al-jahiliyin this is in addition to the mu'allaqat some of the mu'allaqat are in there not all of them but that's in addition to the mu'allaqat maqsura Ibn Durayd it was a beautiful poem diwan Ghaylan very important for them, it's a very difficult poem Arabic is very difficult maqamat al-Hariri, they memorize the maqamat the reason for that is for vocabulary acquisition because there's a lot of really good vocabulary.

I actually did read the maqamat but I preferred Badi' al-Zaman al-Hamadani who I really liked his maqamat and he had a character called Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari and Abu al-Fath was what they call nassab he was like a religious charlatan they're all religious charlatans in this genre but what struck me at the time I was a little shocked because it was so outrageous and I realized that he was really warning people about religious charlatanry because there are a lot of religious charlatans so they've always been around.

Warning Against Religious Charlatans

But he had this character, Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari who was very eloquent and he would come into a village and he'd tell all the people oh, I saw a dream of the prophet and he said that you are a blessed village but you haven't had rain for several days and he told me to do a rain prayer with you but he made a condition I had to extend the sajda and they're all like oh, mashallah, and they all go out and they do the rain prayer and they're all in sajda he gets up, robs all their houses and then just takes off it's very interesting genre of literature like watch out that's the message somebody comes and tells you I saw a dream of the prophet red flag keep it to yourself anytime I hear that I'm like uh oh watch out, be careful.

Religious charlatans put your hand on the television can you feel it brothers and sisters send in that money don't think the Muslims are free of those guys we just we have a different kind don't get away with it like the poor

Christian people yeah you know and the beauty of the beauty of the people believe and the grifter knows this is the tragedy of the grifter is he knows that human beings are essentially believers like if you meet a guy on a plane and you're sitting next to him oh what do you do I'm a nuclear physicist No you're not wow that's interesting because people just why would he tell me he's really a bus driver why would he tell me that but grifters know that and that's how they get people and the worst are the religious ones because they're preying on the beliefs of human beings that are very precious and they're really sinister people.

Balagha and Other Sciences

So then we have balagha this is the Mauritanian madrasa I did the Jawhar al-Maknun but then they go on that's from so that's about 2,240 lines of poetry beautiful beautiful little text in formal logic 142 lines so that's their trivium and then they go into usually fiqh and they have a this is their I did the Risalah and some sections of Mukhtasar Khalil so I went through that but they memorize all of them I did too some of the Mukhtasar and very few little of the Tahdhib but they memorize all of them these are very difficult books and then they do the Quranic sciences I'm telling you they do all of these things and they memorize most of them so it's really quite stunning theology they usually do so they don't go into the some will read the greater books of e.g. some will read those and then in also very extensive in the I translated that and then in they read several books I was able to read all these books.

So that's the amount of poetry they memorize 33,668 when they finish and they really do and they retain it it's quite stunning to see it this is the reason why wherever you go in the Muslim world Mauritanians tend to be the dominant scholars so in Kuwait now in Qatar it's the in the UAE it's in Saudi Arabia increasingly it's the teachers in the haram you find them in many many places in Morocco too so this works and that's why they have leadership is because they went through this tradition it's a very difficult tradition it is possible you don't have to have all the memorization.

A Later Tradition in Arabic Grammar

But I'm going to just wanted to look I did want to go through this but I think I've been how much time has gone past oh one hour so I think I was going to go through this nice just to show you a later tradition and how succinct they became this is done in I read this many years ago I taught it in Malaysia it's a beautiful little text but it's it just shows you how rich this was done simply for memorization but there's an immense amount many many commentaries on this text this is one of the most important books I wish I knew about this when I first started Arabic the Turkish and the Kurdish people use this.

I once went to a Turkish a Kurdish bookseller in Istanbul he's a friend of Dr. Mashuk's and he was so eloquent and I said that I asked him where did you study Arabic he said in the Kurdish madrasa and then I said what text did you study he said and then he told me all of them are gone except for one and I said which one he said and he said so I was really impressed with that so in any case this I was going to go through this just to show you

how important it is to learn these things this is just in so in the he gives us 14 different uses for there's 12 for min there's all these different types of min.

The Importance of Understanding Arabic Particles

I'm going to open it up for we could like so because I met him right some say that's for that's Imam Shafi's position Imam Malik said (لَيْسَ فِي الْبَاءِ لِلتَّبْعِيضِ - laysa fi al-ba'i li-tab'idi) Malik actually rejected that and he actually said it was for ba' za'ida which is one of the 14 so you get into differences of opinion and these are very important this is why in Usul Al Fiqh they go deeply into what are called the huruf al-ma'ani because this is where the complexity of Arabic really gets.

I love this this is a little mnemonic device that they taught students to learn the 10 categories of Aristotle so you can see there it's so you have this jawhar the substance kamm za the quantity kayf tawil the relationship he's the son of Malik fi baytihi the place bi'l-ams the time kana mutakayyi'an the position bi yadihi ghusn possession and then lawahu action and then faltawa the passive so those are the 10.

Logic and Tasawwuf

Just this is very interesting because my argument is that if you do not know the mantiq you will get lost in our tradition so I just want to show you one example of this from the opening of Ahmad Zarruq's book on Tasawwuf he says in that book (الْكَلَامُ فِي الشَّيْءِ فَرْعٌ تَصَوُّرٍ مَا هِيَّتِهِ - al-kalamu fi ash-shai'i far'un tasawwuri ma hiyyatihi) to speak about a thing is a consequence of conceptualizing its essence it's a far' comes out of conceptualizing its essence so tasawwur he means by that what the manatiqa the logicians it's simple apprehension you understand what something is you understand its mahiyya you either do this badihatan or nazar you have to contemplate it discursively or you get it intuitively the mahiyya is the quiddity in fact there's an argument that quiddity becomes quidest is from the Arabic logicians mahiyya what is it (بِشُعُورٍ ذِهْنِيّ مُكْتَسَبٍ أَوْ بَدِيهِيِّ وَمَادَّتُهُ وَفَائِدَتُهُ - bi-shu'urin dhiniyyin muktasabin aw badihyyi wa maddatuhu wa faidatuhu) so it's either bi'l-iktisab or bi'l-badaha you either get it through acquisition or li ma'adinihi so he's just giving you all these examples of why that's important.

And then he says (مَاهِيَّةُ الشَّيْءِ - mahiyatu ash-shai'i) the essence of a thing is (حَقِيقَتُهُ - haqiqatuhu) its reality (وَحَقَائِقُ الْأَشْيَاءِ ثَابِتَةٌ وَالْعِلْمُ بِهَا مُتَحَقِّقٌ لِلْحَقِّ - wa haqaiqu al-ashyai thabitatu wa al-ilmu biha mutahaqiqu lil-haqqi) of our belief we actually believe that reality is knowable we're not skeptics we have a realist tradition not modern realism but pre-modern realism we have a realist tradition so this is all there and this is a book on Tasawwuf and he's already using and then he goes it's what the hadd gives you the sura the form of it the way it's defined is through what's called a hadd which means the hadd is like hadd al-sayf so it's the finitus, it's the end of something definition definitus, out of the end of something, it's to get to real and understanding so you're looking for jami' mani' that's the type of definition a comprehensive definition aw rasm rasm, this is a logical term description, like the human being is described as hayawan natiq, the rational animal his description is hayawan dahik, the risible animal so risibility, the ability to laugh, is what they call a property a proprium, khassa it's not 'arad 'amm, it's 'arad khass like this is unique some say pigs laugh but his argument basically is that this is unique to human beings, it's a property.

Defining Tasawwuf

Like the essence, if you took the hadd of a triangle you say a triangle is the genus the jins is polygon this gets into material logic you have the categories, which are the modes of being, that relate to comprehension, then you have the predicables that relate to extension, and so when you want to say something about somebody you're going to be using these, these are the ways that you talk about things, and so what he's saying there is that when you want to define something you want to give it a hadd, which is the genus, and the difference, what makes it different so then, what does he say he says so he's saying that the definition even though it has over 2000 definitions, all of them go back to (صِدْقُ التَّوَجُّهِ إِلَى اللهِ - sidqu at-tawajjuh ila Allah) so the jins then is an inner directedness the difference is it's taqab, so he's giving you the definition, so my point is, if you had not studied logic this would not have made much sense to you and there is a translation of somebody who did not know logic, and when you read it, you'll see how ridiculous your translation will end up being because you didn't have that tool to study it.

Translation Challenges: Example from Imam Tahawi

I just wanted to use finally, as this really is the end that, you know this was from the creed of Imam Tahawi I have made mistakes in my translations, so this is in no way to fault people I know people could find mistakes in my translations, we're all learning hopefully you don't make big mistakes but but if you look at this passage which to me was one of the most difficult when I translated Tahawiyya so you have to know for you know, it's a fasl this is a different that he's talking about so you have to understand so this translation, the ability required for an action is from divine facilitation which cannot be ascribed to a created being.

So, min nahwa tawfiq. So he translates it as from divine facilitation, which cannot be ascribed to a created being, along with the action itself. So, fahiya ma'al fi'al. It's just not right. As for the ability from the view of health, capacity, capability, and sound means, it is before the action itself, and what is related to these are addressed as it was said by the exalted. And what is related to these are addressed. Again, it just doesn't make sense.

Here's another one. And the ability which deeds occur by is simultaneously with the deeds. This ability is the one depending on Allah's creation of the ability to do good. These are all published, by the way, which is forbidden to ascribe to creation. As for the ability that is associated with health, capability, mastery, and effect free of instruments, this is before the deed, and this is the ability that accountability relates to. So, that's correct, at least the last part.

The capacity of a man is of two types. Capability in terms of tawfiq, which makes an action certain to occur, cannot be ascribed to a created being. There's nowhere to say that. It's amazing. I don't know where he got that. This capability is integrable with action. Anyway, it goes on. The capability in terms of divine grace and favor, which makes an action certain to occur, cannot be ascribed to a created being. This capability is integrable with action, whereas the capability is an action.

So, here, the reason I put that in brackets, even though it's not in there, is that the first istitaa is divine enablement, that an act requires. And then, when he says min nahwa tawfiq, he's really saying, for example, an act of obedience, or an act of disobedience, right, which cannot be attributed to a creature, occurs concurrent with the act. As for the material enablement, so that's a different enablement. That's the amma. That results from health, capacity, poise, and sound means. It precedes the act. In sacred law, it is upon the latter that legal and moral obligations hinge. And I used hinge because muta'allaq, mi'laq, is a hanger, you know. It's related to the word.

So, I always try to find words like wus'a, I use capacity, because wus'a and capacious in Latin, almost identical terms. So, it takes a long time to do that kind of translating, but it's really good to try to find those.

The Fatwa of Mardin: Textual Corruption

This is an example of textual corruption that you'll find in the tradition. So, this was a fatwa from Mardin. Ibn Taymiyyah was asked about these people that didn't practice Sharia, and he said بَلْ هِيَ قِسْمٌ ثَالِثُ. He was asking about Mardin يُعَامَرُ الْمُسْلِمُ فِيهَا بِمَا يَسْتَحِقُّهُ، وَيُقَاتَلُ الْخَارِجُ عَنْ شَرِيعَةِ الْإِسْلَامِ بِمَا يَسْتَحِقُّهُ.

So, this fatwa was used to kill Sadat. This was in Abu Salam Faraj's book, which told them why they should kill Sadat. This was the fatwa of Mardin that was used. Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah held a seminar in Mardin at the time. The fatwa was read. During the fatwa, he said, that can't be right, can't say yu'amilu, yuqatilu. And he knew it from balagha. He said, it's not right. You wouldn't say yuqatilu bima yastahakkuhu.

And so, he asked to see the original manuscript. And the people that were there, there were some people there from the Gulf who were really upset. They were saying, no, no, don't change the fatwa. So, when they got back, he got somebody from the Maktab al-