The Beginning of Guidance | Session 1

The Beginning of Guidance — Session 1

بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ

As-salamu alaykum brothers and sisters. It is a great honor and a great privilege to be in the month of Ramadan first and foremost, and with a group of dedicated learners secondly. MashaAllah, this is nurun ala nur — this is light upon light — coming together for the sake of talab, coming together for the sake of seeking knowledge, and doing so on the first day of the blessed month of Ramadan.

I want to start by thanking Mufti Abdul Wahab Waheed and his brothers for providing me with this absolutely fantastic opportunity to engage with students. I count it as one of their favors upon me. The task that I was given was talking about the book of Imam al-Ghazali, Bidayatul Hidayah, which literally translates as The Beginning of Guidance.

Understanding Imam al-Ghazali and His World

This is one of the books that Imam Ghazali wrote after his sojourn where he traveled the Muslim world. He traveled the Muslim world not only in search of sacred knowledge but in search of experience. Before going into his text, we have to talk a little bit about the man and the culture that produced the man. Because if you don't understand the culture that produced Imam Ghazali, then you really won't understand Ghazali. And if you don't understand Ghazali, it might be difficult to appreciate what he means to our tradition.

I was a student at al-Azhar University and when I was in Cairo, sometimes I would journey downtown to American University in Cairo — the acronym is AUC — and it is the place, almost without exception (Cairo University also has some prestige, but American University is the place), that the elite of Egypt send their children to be educated. Among other things, they really just had a nice bookstore. It was very close to the US Embassy, before it moved out to Cairo Jadida — New Cairo — it was right downtown in Midan Tahrir. It was a place that I would go from time to time. Sometimes being in Egypt, you would just get fed up and you would just want to see people stand in line, or you would just want to go to a bookstore like the bookstores you remembered from the States. There was a kind of cultural nostalgia that took place when we would go there.

Once I was there, I was reading a book and this young Egyptian student came up to me. She said salam alaykum — I was probably wearing a headdress similar to this kufi — and I returned the salam and she was making some kind of small talk. At some point she stopped me and she said, "I just want you to know, the American accent — you really have it." And I was like, oh thank you, I've been working on that accent for 27 years. Then she said to me, "What are you studying here at AUC?" And I said, "I'm not studying at AUC, I'm actually at Azhar University." And she looked very sad — she looked at me like, oh no.

I said, "What's wrong?" She said, "Well, in Egypt we are given a placement exam at the end of high school and the highest scores without exception go into engineering and medicine, and then down in descending order. The least promising students — the dimmest students — they go into sharia, they go into the ulum sharia. So you are in a class of our least distinguished students. Those are your classmates."

And at that point it hit me: that ilm — religious knowledge — in some of our cultures and in some of our societies has lost its sharaf. It has lost its grandeur. It has lost its illustriousness.

And when you're looking at Imam Ghazali, you have to understand that the religious culture of his time was the polar opposite of that. Imam Ghazali wrote about young men falling over each other to become qudat — Islamic judges — people fighting with each other for positions in seminaries so that they could become mashaykh mutafaqqihah, people of fiqh. In the time of Ghazali, you must understand, ilm al-sharia was the thing to study. It is not dissimilar to the place that law has in our society. Americans are a very litigious people — which means they sue each other a lot — and corporations make frequent reference to law, so attorneys, and particularly corporate attorneys, enjoy a certain measure of social prestige that barristers and jurists in other places don't enjoy. So when you think about the culture that Ghazali is speaking to, the culture that produced Imam Ghazali, think about that as a culture in which ilm, religious knowledge, was the thing to study. By becoming a religious scholar of significance, one would be given control of awqaf — of endowments worth millions of dollars — one would enjoy esteem, one would enjoy considerable fame. Imam Ghazali was someone who excelled in that culture.

When people see us talking about Imam Ghazali, quoting Imam Ghazali, reading the Ihya, reading Bidayatul Hidayah, reading Ayyuhal Walad, reading Al-Iqtisad fil I'tiqad — reading the books of Imam Ghazali — for someone unfamiliar with Imam Ghazali, it would be natural to ask: why are his books so important? Why is he one of the scholars on the Islamic Mount Rushmore? Why is he one of the most quoted scholars of our tradition?

The answer to that question really comes down to perhaps three things. One: erudition — Imam Ghazali was very erudite, he was widely learned and deeply learned. Two: sincerity — Imam Ghazali proved his sincerity to the task. And three — and I think this is the most important of them — credibility. When Imam Ghazali writes the Ihya, he is taking to task the toxic religious culture that he excelled in, that hoisted him to exalted heights. So he was the best person to critique that culture. He was the best person to talk about the insincerity of that culture, the hollowness of that culture, the toxicity of that culture — because he was the person that excelled, the person that became the focal point of that culture.

Imam Ghazali: The Faqih and the Spiritual Crisis

Many of us when we think about Ghazali, we think about Ghazali the mutasawwif, we think about Ghazali the man of deep spirituality. Before he was the mutasawwif, he was Ghazali the faqih — Ghazali the faqih of the Shafi'i madhab. Some of his books on usul al-fiqh, on jurisprudence, are still studied in the great centers of learning in the Muslim world today. I had a particular experience with one of Imam Ghazali's works on usul al-fiqh — Al-Mustasfa — this is a very dense, very complex book on usul al-fiqh. Just to give you a sense of how dense this book is: sometimes he would be talking about jurisprudence, he would begin with a shart, a condition, you would read for three or four pages, and then you would see the jawab al-shart, the answer to the condition. So he would say "if this happens" — four pages of conditions — "then this is true."

I'm telling you the honest-to-God truth: that book put me in the hospital. Wallahi, I was preparing for an exam in usul al-fiqh. Anyone that has read mutoon, has read traditional texts, they know that it's a very dense, very involved kind of reading. And I'm reading it — reading it, reading it, reading it — and all of a sudden I started to experience some sharp chest pains. I had been reading for maybe nine or ten hours. Some sharp chest pains, and then it felt like my heartbeat was fluttering — some palpitations. My roommate looked at me sitting at my desk and he said, "Ubaidullah, wallahi habib, I know that you're averse to going to the doctor and you probably wouldn't want to do that here in Egypt. But you don't look good — you should go to the doctor." Against my own wishes, I went to the doctor just to satisfy my roommate.

I came in, they took my vitals, they didn't see anything amiss about my vitals. Then the doctor started talking to me about what I was going to do. I said, "Well, we're in the time of the imtihanat, we're in the time of the exams." He said, "What exam are you preparing for?" I said, "Usul al-fiqh, jurisprudence." He said, "What are you reading?" I said, "Imam Ghazali's Mustasfa." He stopped, took off the stethoscope and said, "You know, this is not the first time this has happened. You're just stressed. There's a lot of tension — it's deep and tedious reading. Just relax for a day or two, study something else, and then go back to that particular mawdu'." This was Imam Ghazali.

He was someone that people traveled from distances to hear him talk about usul, to hear him talk about philosophy. But at some point, as he was at the height of his career — holding the chair of Shafi'i jurisprudence at the Nizamiyya Madrasa in Baghdad — Imam Ghazali experienced a breakdown. And the breakdown was so intense that he could not even speak. He said he could not even recite Surah al-Fatiha.

He said the source of his anguish, the source of his tension, was something we call causality — that he was not exactly certain about the belief that:

— that God is over all things capable. He found himself inclining toward deism — this belief that yes, God is the uncaused cause of all of creation, but after that initial creative act, God steps back and allows the laws of nature to govern the cosmos. This was the aqidah of Isaac Newton, the aqidah of Thomas Jefferson, the aqidah of many Enlightenment philosophers — this idea that God is the divine mechanic who creates the world, but then the world runs on its own. Isaac Newton called it the clockmaker, or the watchmaker.

That is not aqidah. This is what some people call the God of the philosophers. We believe in the God of the prophets. We believe in the God that is active in human history. We believe in the God of:

— that even when the Prophet ﷺ threw the dirt at his adversaries at the beginning of the Battle of Badr, Allah says: "And you did not throw when you threw, but it was Allah who threw." We believe in the God that is mentioned in Tafsir al-Kabir of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi — that when Ibrahim was cast into the fire, Allah had to say "be cool and be peaceful for Ibrahim" because Allah could have said "be cool" and the fire could still have burned Ibrahim. Because fire does not burn because it is intrinsically hot — fire burns by the permission of Allah. We don't even acknowledge those causal relationships of their own independent power, and this is why we believe in khawariq al-'adat — a break in the natural chain of events — what we call mu'jizat, miracles, when this happens at the hands of the Prophets. Because miracles affirm for us that God is always in complete control of the process. Everything — not even a single leaf falls from a tree except that it is in a book with Allah and He has intimate knowledge of that.

And Imam Ghazali, because of his engagement with Aristotelian philosophy, started to doubt this point of our aqidah. And that doubt caused him to have an emotional breakdown. He said: if you ask me if 2 plus 2 is 4, I'm absolutely certain of that. But if you ask me whether or not Allah has power over all things at all times, I'm not certain in the same way.

So he withdrew from his career. Can you imagine this — again, the reason I gave you the lengthy preamble — this isn't like one of our mashayikh leaving the madrasa or leaving the jami'ah. This is the chair of constitutional law at Harvard Law School leaving his post because he feels that he lacks sincerity. Imam Ghazali withdraws from everything: his career, his fame, his money, his status — everything. And he wanders, staying in different khanqahs — different cloisters — studying with people that don't have the knowledge of the outward sharia that he has, but who have the dhawq — people that have the experience of worshipping Allah, people that have the taste so that they know the realities being described by the Prophet ﷺ. They know — not with the intensity or the clarity or the vividness that the Prophet ﷺ knows them, because nobody does — but they know of those realities. These are the people we refer to as the arifeen billah, the knowers — people that know through the knowledge of this faith.

Not from kasbi knowledge — knowledge that you study from sutoor, from lines and books — but from wahbi knowledge — knowledge that Allah gives to an individual from the practice of what he knows, from the practice of what she knows. This is why the great description of a person of spirituality is someone that practiced what they knew, so Allah taught them what they didn't know.

Imam Ghazali knew lots of things — he was the top of the top — but he lacked sincerity. So he took up residence with people that possessed the sincerity that he lacked. And there's a lesson in this for us. Some of us, mashaAllah, we fetishize outward knowledge of the sharia — and that's good, reverence for the sharia, this is a beautiful thing. But Imam Ghazali said: you can study the bab of salah from the beginning of the chapter until the end of the chapter, but this is not the thing that will wake you up for tahajjud in the morning. This is not the thing that will even wake you up for fajr. It's something in your heart that wakes you up for tahajjud. It's something in your heart that wakes you up for fajr.

And this is why the Prophet ﷺ said: if the iman of Abu Bakr was placed in one tongue of the scale and the iman of everyone else was placed in another tongue of the scale, the iman of Abu Bakr would outweigh the iman of everyone else. And then the Prophet ﷺ said in one of the narrations:

(Referenced in various narrations of the companions; attributed to the Prophet ﷺ regarding Abu Bakr al-Siddiq — see Al-Ghazali, Ihya 'Ulum al-Din)

"He is not the most knowledgeable of you, and he is not the most well-versed in the Quran — however, there is something in his heart, there is something in his chest."

And Imam Ghazali's great conclusion after spending ten years in the company of people like that was that faith is a taste. And if in your religious knowledge you intend anything other than that which was possessed by the heart of Abu Bakr, you are misleading yourself and your path will never lead you to haqq — it will never lead you to truth. In fact, the more you learn:

(A saying attributed to scholars reflecting the danger of knowledge without sincerity — referenced in Imam Ghazali's Ihya 'Ulum al-Din)

"The more you increase in knowledge" — if this is your niyyah — "the more you will increase in distance from Allah." This is what Ghazali found.

He returned after ten years — ten years — to his post at the Nizamiyya. And what's beautiful about his return is that when people heard that the most famed scholar of their era was coming back to his post, everybody journeyed to hear his first address. And they say that the only thing he said was:

"God said in His illustrious Book" — and everybody broke down and started weeping. People that write about his tarikh al-hayat, his biography, they contrast that with the fact that he used to give three-hour, four-hour lectures about Hellenistic philosophy, about jurisprudence, about fiqh, and people would be amazed — but nobody would weep, nobody would cry. Because:

The word that is emitted from the heart takes its place in the heart.

And this is why we read from Imam al-Ghazali. This is why we study the work of Imam al-Ghazali. It's his credibility. He stands up as someone who was everything that the corrupt religious students of his time wanted to be — he had already been that. Everything they wanted to achieve, he had already achieved — all of the fame, all of the reputation. He already had that. So he was best positioned to tell people: that is a completely vain and empty pursuit.

The only thing I can liken it to is the way that people now are so into celebrity culture. Everyone is into celebrity culture. Imagine the biggest celebrity of our time making a tawbah. Can you imagine how they would be listened to? Can you imagine how, if they began to write books about celebrity culture, how those books would fly off of shelves? That is Ihya 'Ulum al-Din. That is Bidayatul Hidayah. That is Imam al-Ghazali's work — Revival of the Religious Sciences. That is The Beginning of Guidance. Those are books, those are texts that come out of his transformation. And we're blessed to be able to read from this book.

Who Is This Book For?

Now, the first thing that I want people to understand — and I want to leave at least twenty minutes for questions, so I have a very short time — the first thing we have to understand is that even though Imam Ghazali writes this book intending it for ulama in training, intending it for people that want to be scholars, that applies to all of us. Because in that time you didn't have a society of mass literacy. In that time, people were content to just listen to whatever the Shaykh told them to do. They were truly people of trusting adherence. We are not. We're not at the highest level of scholarship and we're not people who can give independent opinions free from the constraints of a madhab. But we are a learned society, we are a learned people.

Just the fact that we've assembled on the first day of Ramadan to study — all of you are tullab al-ilm. And I say seekers of knowledge — I never say "students" of knowledge. "Students of knowledge" is the worst translation in the entire English language. This is like saying "eaters of edible things." We're all seekers of knowledge. So everyone listening, everyone who benefits from the beautiful programming of Miftah, is a talib al-ilm. Maybe you're not enrolled at a jami'ah, maybe you've never studied at a madrasa, but all of your teachers have studied at universities, they have all studied at madrasas. And although you're not taking a prolonged, protracted course, this is talab al-ilm.

So this book applies to us. I don't want you to hear anything in Imam Ghazali's text and think about your mashayikh — "I wonder how this applies to them." I don't want you to hear anything and think about your imam — "I wonder, does my imam know this?" No. Think about yourself as a talib al-ilm, as a seeker of knowledge.

Imam Ghazali's Opening Address to the Seeker

Imam Ghazali begins — and I'll be reading certain excerpts that I feel are eloquent and moving — with Ghazali's writing I might quote them, but I want the class to retain its flow, so the spoken medium of this class will be English, but some things you have to read the way that he wrote them just to get into the spirit of this text and savor the elegance of Imam Ghazali's writing.

He says — Oh hopeful seeker of knowledge, Oh one who hopes to gain something of knowledge — if you, in your pursuit of knowledge, intend competition and vying for position; if you intend to sit at gatherings impressing people with what you have learned; if your goal is to show how much more you know than other people; if your goal is to be better than your peers, to outstrip them, to be in the vanguard; if your goal is to get people to look at you; if you are attention-seeking in your knowledge; or you want to accumulate the worthless dregs of this dunya — know that you are striving toward the destruction of your deen, the ruination of yourself, and the loss of your Akhira with dunya.

So the first thing he says to the aspirant student: check your intention. What do you want here? What is your goal? Is your goal merely to seem sophisticated?

SubhanAllah, this is an issue for us. I mentioned the religious culture of Egypt, in which a talib al-ilm was looked down upon. The same thing could be said of the subcontinent. However, in America this is not the case. Religious scholarship in America — mashaAllah, this is one of the things that I love about our community — it does have some sharaf. When you see people of scholarship, we treat them with great respect. These are people that walk with great dignity in our community.

Imam Ghazali is saying: if your goal is just to be one of those people — to be someone for whom people present their chai with two hands and with their shoulders drawn in; if your goal is to be someone for whom, when you walk into a room, people stand up; if your goal is to have your hand kissed; if your goal is to be someone that when you start speaking everyone says "be quiet, be quiet, he's the one we came to see" — know that you are striving toward your own destruction. You are striving toward your own ruination. And you're selling the most precious thing you have — your akhira, which is eternal — and the only thing you will get back is dunya:

"Will you give up that which is better for that which is worse?"

So the first thing that the Imam does is get us to check our intention. And sometimes this can occur in very subtle ways. Maybe none of us is thinking about being that kind of media personality, but maybe we love to get people around us at gatherings and just say things that people have never heard before.

Your intention for giving up precious time before salatul maghrib in the month of Ramadan, it better be something better than that. We don't do this so that we can answer religious trivia. We do this for the face of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala — to get closer to our Lord. That's all we want by this.

And right now, before we go any further — before there is any tahliyah (the word in Arabic tahliyah means to fill ourselves up, and over the course of these four weeks we will be filling up on the writing and knowledge of Imam Ghazali) — there has to be takhliyah: we have to empty out before we can fill up. Let us empty ourselves of any corruption that may have entered our niyyah. Starting with me, because I'm the one everyone is looking at. And that's why reading these texts, studying these texts — these are mirrors. It's very difficult to look in them. Because when we look in these texts we can see ourselves, and sometimes we're made uncomfortable by what we see. And we ask Allah to set our affairs aright, insha'Allah.

The Teacher's Responsibility

He also mentions — and this is the part that's really striking:

(Imam al-Ghazali, Bidayatul Hidayah — The Beginning of Guidance)

"And your teacher, if this is your goal, your teacher is an assistant to you in disobedience, a partner with you in your loss. He is like someone who sells a sword to a highway robber." Like somebody who is selling a gun to a stick-up man — that is what your teacher is like.

So when we approach the majalis of knowledge, the gatherings of knowledge, we don't only want to make sure that our intention is pure for ourselves, but also for our teachers — so that we don't humiliate them. Not that they will be taken to task for what we do with the knowledge they teach us, but when we look at them in their great sincerity, we have to think to ourselves: what they are doing for us, teaching us the knowledge of Allah, it has to be for more than to assist me in my loss. It has to be for more than to give me the tools of my own downfall. Their intention is to give me tools of my upliftment. But in order for that to be true, my niyyah must be sincere, my niyyah must be pure. So we have to strive for that, insha'Allah.

Supplementary Guidance: Imam al-Mawardi on Types of Students

And so we'll also consider a beautiful passage from Imam al-Mawardi where he talks about the different profiles of students. He mentions several things that you want to be careful of.

First, he says: be careful not to be the excessively selective learner — the person that is very specific about what they want to learn. "I want to learn about the stock market." "I want to learn all about what the sharia says about cloning or mortgages." He says: don't be like this. Take knowledge from its very roots, start with the basics. And this is why one of the biggest regrets of my scholastic career is not staying with tahfiz al-Qur'an — wa miftahun li kulli ilm, the Qur'an is the key of every knowledge.

Then he said: don't be like an older person who is too proud to start where younger students start. You're starting a little older and you think: "I don't want to do makharij al-huruf — where the letters come out — and alif ba ta time. I'm too old for that. I don't want to sit in a madrasa and memorize with children. I want to study sharia, I want to study mustalah al-hadith, I want to study Arabic." Full disclosure, that was me. Sitting in the madrasa with our maulana, doing hizb, and I was older — because I became Muslim at sixteen, decided that I wanted to study at twenty-one — and so I was sitting there with all of these young children thinking, "I'm not a kid. I want to do an 'alim course." Imam Mawardi is saying: be careful. Take knowledge from its roots. The roots support the branches in every ilm. You have to take the roots so that you can take the branches. The person that only takes the branches ends up without the branches and without the roots.

And the last one that he mentions: don't be someone who only studies what comes easy, but doesn't want to study what comes more difficult. Again, full disclosure, I can reference myself. The Arabic language was something that I was able to acquire with some degree of proficiency very easily — I love language generally, English, French, Arabic, German — so Arabic acquisition was easier for me. Tajwid — oh man, tajwid was very difficult for me. Tajwid was a struggle. I used to recite to my teacher in Egypt. I would say تَ، تَ and even as I'm saying it now you can hear what we call hams, that little breathy sound. He always wanted the ta to be clean — تَ، تَ — and I would have a little of that hams, and he would keep correcting me. And so it became bothersome to me, and I found myself doing less of my tajwid and more of my sharia. No, no — the things that come to you with more difficulty, you have to study them in the same way that you study the things that come to you with more ease. The Prophet ﷺ spoke specifically about the one who reads Quran and stumbles, makes a mistake — for him there are two rewards.

Imam Ghazali's Three Categories of Seekers

Imam Ghazali mentions three types of students. He says seekers of knowledge are essentially of three types:

The First Type: The Sincere Seeker

The first type is sadiq — sincere. This is the person that studies, taking his knowledge as provision for his journey to the akhira. He or she only intends by that knowledge the face of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, the home of the hereafter. And this person is min al-fa'izeen — this person is certainly victorious.

The Second Type: The Concealed Seeker

The second is a person that begins the pursuit of knowledge seeking fame, seeking fortune — hiding this in his heart. He knows that he's seeking fame, but he's hiding the debased nature of his state in his heart. He's seeking fortune, he's seeking fame, he wants to be well known, he wants glory, he wants honor — but he's concealing this in his heart. Imam Ghazali says this person is in a very dangerous position and it is feared this person will die with a su'ul khatimah, a bad ending. But eventually, this person will begin to add to their knowledge action — adafa ila al-ilmi al-amala — and will begin to put into practice some of the things they neglected before. And they will become of the fa'izeen.

This was autobiographical, insha'Allah — Imam Ghazali was telling the younger students: you can begin like this and you can be different than that. Don't give up hope. You can be someone that started out seeking fame and fortune and position and status, you can make tawbah, you can add to your knowledge action, and then you can become like the people of the first group.

The Third Type: The Overwhelmed Seeker

And then the last group — he says these are the people istahwatha alayhimu al-shaytan — the shaytan has completely overwhelmed them. These are the people that are seeking the fame, seeking the fortune, completely insincere in their action, but they think themselves sincere. Because they wear the clothes of the ulama, because they speak like the ulama, because people address them as though they were the true ulama — but they are not.

So Imam Ghazali identifies these three categories that seekers of knowledge fall into: sincere, becoming sincere, and completely insincere. And this is how he ends the first chapter. We will begin next week, insha'Allah, with the steps taken toward sincerity.

Questions & Answers

On Kasbi Knowledge vs. Wahbi Knowledge

I want to revisit an important distinction. I was once sitting with a teacher and he would take a single riwayah, a single narration from the Prophet ﷺ, and he would talk about that narration by telling stories and giving personal anecdotes. And here I am, this arrogant Westerner — I don't know anything about Islam — sitting there thinking to myself, "I came here for kasbi knowledge. I don't want to hear your stories. I don't want to hear your personal anecdotes. I want to hear qala Allah, God said. Qala rasuluh, His messenger said. Wa qala al-sahabi, a companion said. Whatever remains after that, it's not important to me."

Every time he would start telling stories and personal anecdotes, my face would be a little less engaged. And he could see this. And he said: "I want you to hear something. When I'm quoting a book, you should be listening. But you don't need me to get the knowledge that is in the book. I could tell you, go get this book, turn to this chapter, turn to this page, and you would find the same thing I'm saying written there on the page — and you would probably find a sharah, an explanation, written by a scholar who's more knowledgeable than me. This is the truth. But when I tell you something that I've learned because of my experience of these meanings — you should be listening even more closely. Because when I tell you that, I'm giving you something that Allah gave me that you can't get from anyone besides me. That's wahbi knowledge."

So what I was saying is: if a person learns kasbi knowledge — knowledge that you sit down and study with teachers, memorize, read books, and practice — Allah will begin to give you wahbi knowledge, knowledge that comes directly from Him. And that is the knowledge. The opinion of many of the mufassirun is that when Allah says:

"Whoever is given wisdom is given a great thing" — that verse is actually referring to wahbi knowledge. Because in terms of kasbi knowledge, Allah talks about Bani Israel — members of the Jewish community who were like donkeys carrying books. That's kasbi knowledge without action and sincerity. Donkeys carrying books. But the wahbi knowledge is the knowledge that leads to the face of God.

How Do We Taste Faith in Our Hearts?

Another question: how do we taste faith in our hearts? You should probably ask someone that has already tasted. I myself am trying to taste — I'm with you. I'm trying my very best to taste. We have to seek out those people that we believe have actually tasted. Our responsibility is to cultivate the tendencies by practicing our deen, so that if that taste comes to us, we will be ready to receive it. And this is why I teach — really just to place myself with the seekers, not to place myself above the seekers.

What Are the Manifestations of True Knowledge?

The manifestation of true knowledge is aml — practice. Many of us study and it doesn't increase us in humility. It increases us in verbosity, in talking. It increases us in being loquacious. It's said that the more knowledge a person has, the more humility you will see them characterized by. It's like the tree that has heavy fruit — the branches bend low. But the tree that has nothing on it, those are the ones extending and jumping up.

So I would say that the manifestations of true knowledge are two. The first is aml — if knowledge does not lead to practice, then the knowledge is not true. And the second is humility. If knowledge leads to vanity, or vainglory, or pride — and we're not talking about izzah, we're talking about iftikhar, kibriyah, takabbur, negative pride, not dignity — then the knowledge is not true.

Imam Malik used to dress very well. And when people asked him, "Why do you dress so nicely?" He said, "I dress for my knowledge. I dress for my knowledge." That's izzah. That's sharaf. But we're talking about kibriyah. So those are, to my mind, the manifestations of true knowledge.

The phrase that Imam Ghazali said when he came back to his people — he was opening his lecture, and he just said, qalallahu ta'ala fi kitabihil majid — "God says in His glorious Book." That's it. Before he could even get to the ayah, before he could even make istishhad of the ayah, people broke down. And this is always quoted as the power of sincerity. Just the fact that he truly believed God revealed the Quran — that when he says "God says in His glorious Book," he had utter certainty of that. People could feel that. And that made them weep. That made them tremble — with a feeling of raw'ah, it was awe-inspiring to them. Because they could see that this man believed this with all of his soul.

MashaAllah, I think this was a good start. If there's anything I can do to improve the class, improve the flow, if there's any angle of teaching Ghazali that you would like me to explore, I am completely open to that. I am your servant and your brother, Obeidullah Evans. It's an honor to be with you on the path of knowledge. Jazakumullahu khayran, wa-salamu alaykum.