Adab before Ilm

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise belongs to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon the honorable prophets and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and companions. Many thanks and blessings. From now on, my brothers and sisters, one of the... Alhamdulillah, we are living in times where there is a lot of interest in Islam. I have lots of young friends of mine, some students, some not students, but people who are who I know in many countries, who are very interested in Islam. Also, similarly, people who are interested in... therefore, this interest in Islam, for a lot of them, it's... it translates into, you know, harakas and conferences and so on and so forth. Of course, lots of stuff on social media and so on. So people are interested in the deen. But there are two... simultaneously... two problems that I find which are... which seem to go hand in hand. The first problem is that, thanks to the deen, we are able to go to our home. Thanks to the ease with which information... I want you to distinguish between information and knowledge. Between malumaat and ilm. Information and knowledge. I want you to distinguish between these two things. They're very, very important. So, the one thing is that, because information is easily accessible, easily available, whether it is multiple translations and tafaseer of the Quran al-Kareem, whether it is the siyasita or other books of hadith, whether it is reference material, you go to chat GPT or you go and do any kind of a search, and you put a prompt and it gets you information from all over the place. So, because there is this ease of accessing information, there seems to be a loss of the awe and majesty of the knowledge. And people I see treat the knowledge of the Kitab of Allah and the teachings of Muhammad Rasulullah like they treat any other kind of knowledge. So, the awe and the majesty of this knowledge, that this is Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala Himself speaking, that awe and majesty seems to take a backstage and may Allah have mercy in the case of some people, it disappears. So, therefore, for example, when we hear the stories of the importance of adab, the importance of the manners, the methodology of preparing yourself to receive the knowledge. The famous story of Imam Malik bin Anas , whose mother used to . She used to tie a turban on his head for him to go to learn with Rabia Turai, Rahatul Ali, who was his teacher. And his mother used to tell him, learn from the adab of Rabia before you take from his knowledge. Take from his adab before you take from his knowledge. And this is when Imam Malik was a little boy and his mother used to take him, they say she would take him for, in time for Salatul Fajr to the masjid, the masjid of the Nabi wa Sharif. And she would leave him there all dressed up. So, imagine he's being woken up before the time of Fajr and then he is being prepared by his mother. And then she takes him there, walks him there, leaves him there. He is in the masjid of the Nabi wa Sharif immediately after Salatul Fajr, he is there in the class of Rabia Turai. And he is there in the class of Rabia Turai. And he is there in the class of Rabia Turai until the time for Zuhar and then after Salatul Zuhar, his mother would pick him up and bring him home. Now, I don't know whether there was a breakfast program at that time or what, or whether this little boy didn't even eat any food all the way until Zuhar. And that's the time when he would have gone home and he would have had a meal. These are things to think about and say that today people walk around with buckets in their hands, what amounts to buckets, saying that they get dehydrated, unless they drink this gazelle down, this liters and liters and liters of water. You need to have food like little babies every hour. But whereas these people, imagine the kind of discipline that they were raised in. The result of that was that Imam Malik al-Ahmad al-Ali when he became a great Imam and then he wrote the Mu'atta. It is said that he became the first Imam of the Muslim community to be born in the time of Zuhar. Now, this is not the first time. Now, this is not the first time. Now, this is not the first time. But before he gave the dars of the Mu'atta, which he would give every day from Asr to Maghrib and then Maghrib to Isha, so he said before he did that, every day he would make ghusl, he would pray two ragat of salah, and then he would come and sit and give the dars of Mu'atta. Now, our internet alims, if you say this to them, they say, oh, but you see, he's only reading hadiths. Where is it necessary? Where is it written? What is the dhalil to say that he needs to have even wudu? Forget about ghusl. Why does he need to have ghusl? I mean, obviously, he's not having ghusl because he needed ghusl. This is out of adab that he's making ghusl. So what was the need for that? Why must you have wudu even to read hadiths? With the Quran, again, there are all kinds of debates about whether you need wudu to read. Whether you need to have wudu to read the Quran, or whether you can touch the musaf with wudu, or whether it is permissible without wudu. The point is, questions that people ask, they betray their inner feelings and their inner attitudes. The very fact that you need to ask a question like that, the very fact that you need to ask a question, do I need to have wudu before I touch the Quran? Now, obviously, there will be legitimate reasons to ask that question, but otherwise, you need to ask yourself this question. Do I need to ask this question? Or should it be a normal thing? I'm touching the kitab of Allah. Why do I need to ask whether I should have wudu or not? I will not touch it unless I'm in a state of wudu and I make wudu. What's the big deal? Alhamdulillah. You're not making wudu with fire, you're making wudu with water. So what's the big deal? The very fact that you ask this question, you know, if somebody says, is it permissible for me to sit and stretch my legs? No. I'm not saying that I should stretch my legs and point my feet at my father or my mother who are sitting across the room. Is it permissible? Does Islam allow this? Where is it written that this should not be done? If somebody asks this question, what do you say to them? But then we live in a world today where people do that with the kitab of Allah itself. We will sit in a masjid with their feet pointing straight towards the face of the Imam and straight towards the Qimla, and they don't see anything wrong in that. Allah hafiz, Allah khawaz, Allah billah. So this is the big danger that I see. And I want to warn myself and warn all of you, never lose the adab of the ilm. What you get without adab is malumat, is only information. That information is dalil against that person which will land you in Jahannam because that information will not bring about a life change in his life. That information will not move him. The information will not melt his heart. It will not soften his heart. That information is just data. And that data has no nur in it. Because when you take out the tarbiyah from the ta'aleem, the nur leaves the ilm and only the words remain. The tarbiyah is the preparation of the soil that the farmer does before he sows the seed. Without preparation, if you just sow the seed. The seed will perish. The seed will die. It will get eaten up by pathogens, by insects and various things. And even if it survives and even if it germinates, it will never give you the kind of crop, the kind of harvest that that seed was capable of giving you. It will be a sickly little thing which will maybe just wither or die or something will happen to it. Whereas if you prepare the ground. If you till the soil. You sow the soil. You plant the soil. You make sure the pH value is what is required. The organic matter content is what is required. You make sure the soil is free from pathogens, free from all kinds of harmful things in it. It's soft. It's friable. And then you plant the seeds. And when you plant the seed, you make sure that the seeds are planted at the correct depth for that particular crop. Because some things have to be planted deep. Some things have to be planted right on the surface. And after you do all that, you fence the plot and you ensure that there is irrigation. You ensure that there is water. And then you get a beautiful crop which far exceeds your expectations because of all the preparation that you did to plant the seed. The same thing, the same seed you could have planted without any preparation and the seed would have perished. The fault does not lie with the seed. The fault lies with the preparation. The preparation is tarbiyah. And the ta'aleem is the seed. It's the Kitab of Allah and the sunnah of Rasulullah . But when that is thrown on soil, on ground, which is sterile, which is stony, rocky, then this does not germinate. It does not give you a crop. And that is a very important thing to keep in mind. And this is a big danger. I should say two dangers. The next one, I will talk about it tomorrow. But the first one is this, which is the lack of adham. Adham. The basic habits and the care that is required in approaching the Deen of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala. Everything has a system, everything has a methodology to learn. You don't go and jump at the and, you know, get to the top just like that. You have to go through the grind, go through step-by-step-by-step until you reach the top. And if you don't do that, that is like building a building without the foundation. The building will topple. It can't be constructed. It can't be formed. It cannot stand because it has no roots. It hasn't gone into the ground. There's no foundation. So today, the easy accessibility of knowledge has created this phenomena where we have people who can read Quran, who will quote Quran,