0:00 uh so be it the uh the grammar of thought is to learn how the mind should work properly when it reasons that's what the grammar of thought is so this is called man even T wrote a book called even though he was a logician he wrote a book called reputation of the logicians because he said and this is very interesting statement he said logic does not benefit stupid people and it's Superfluous for highly intelligent people that is absolutely true the problem is most of us fall in the bell curve in that middle and this is why the sahab didn't need mon because the the
0:46 ones that were fukah and were reasoning were reasoning with their Brilliance and so people that are highly intelligent generally don't need mon they still will benefit from this this training but they don't need it so is to teach people uh of lesser capacity how to avoid pitfalls like Hasty generalization it's a logical fallacy in what's called material logic because we do that naturally I I had three um South Asian taxi drivers in New York they all cheated me so every South Asian is a cheat that's obviously a fallacy so that that uh but that's how the mind works so that's his first book and it's a brilliant book we're actually alhamdulillah it's been translated and
1:31 and it's being uh edited uh now and so we we're actually this is going to be part of the zetuna curriculum Series so alhamdulillah that book should be out hopefully within the year the second book he wrote which is I think one of the most extraordinary uh books in uh in ethics and that is which is so the is the standard of knowledge is the um scales of action so that you could weigh every action and determine whether the action was worthwhile or whether it wasn't so it's a book of virtue ethics it's a brilliant book it's heavily influenced by the great polymath and Persian
2:16 Scholastic who wrote one of my favorite books so now just in IM he wrote his two most important books one is the a bridge version the other is more extensive and so economy in in in belief and the other one is the principles of the axioms of Creeds of creed uh now so that so he has his project of introducing the approach uh using logic in in Scholastic uh theology now it's important to remember the last book that he wrote probably is called not allowing common people to study
3:05 theology so he was not somebody that really encouraged but he recognized that a certain group of Scholars must learn this because it will enable them to refute uh the opusc and the attacks of the religion by people from outside so for instance right now we have all of these philosophers we have deconstructionists we have structuralists we have post modernists we have um postc colonialists we have all these different we have critical race theorists we have uh all of these PE and then we have uh also the analytic school we have people uh that are working within that school not not just philosophers theologians like Alvin
3:51 plantinga uh who I was fortunate enough to um be part of the award ceremony a brilliant scholar working within a certain School of philosophy to defend Faith so he understood that you're always going to have these people out there who use their intellects and sophistry to confuse people and if you don't have people trained to recognize it to see it and to be able to refute it you're going to get into trouble and what will happen is you will be left to the argument of blood that that that's when you can't defend your religion with intelligence uh the people that are zealots that don't have the intelligence or the training to defend it will end up defending it through violence and that's not a defense of religion blood is no
4:38 argument so that's a really important thing to remember now in Islam he took the abridgments of IM IM wrote a famous book called in in the it's a very important book but he he takes it and he writes a long abridgment of it a middle abridgment and a short abridgment and in fact one of the early on only 10 years after the IM died he died he
5:24 said so these are the four books in that IM WR the people who are sha know this imali is the most important after IM I mean obviously the Imam himself Imam shaffi but all of the later books that come out including Imam noi are all dependent on the books of imali so these are foundational books in the this is in not in so this is in the branches of Juris prudence and not in in the legal philosophy now inan he writes as a beautiful short book called which is really to prepare a person for the spiritual path to get you to be doing practices uh on a daily basis but then
6:10 he writes his ma which is Reviving The Sciences of the religion and I'm going to get into that he then AB Bridges it in Persian in a book called Kim the Alchemy of of of happiness and then and this is the book inshallah uh I'm going to be talking about in a few days he writes a book called Quran he writes it quite late he's referencing all his other books in it this book is his theory of the Quran and what you realize from this book is his entire tradition revolves around the Quran everything the Imam was doing is really revolving around the Quran primarily and then the Sunnah of the Prophet
6:55 secondarily so he is a jurist of the first order and he brings his juristic world view uh into into the quranic world and into the prophetic world but it also is working in his theological perspective and in his spiritual perspective now the third book is very interesting it's called again it's relatively late so these three are the abridgements actually Jah Al Quran is three parts and the third part is the this is the third part so he said in when he wrote Jah Quran he said if you want you can uh uh use this as a
7:43 separate book because he wrote that it it was later published as a separate book but it's actually part of the of the Quran so he shows you what the Quran is calling us to and and and and that is why his entire Opus is basically a commentary on the Quran and the prophetic Life as We Know is a commentary on the Quran so it all goes back to the book of Allah the prophet Sall alaihi wasam Sunnah is an explanation of the Quran everything is from the Quran it's all from the Quran I'm not a Quran I'm 100% believe in theah but the Sunnah is an explanation of the Quran and we should understand
8:29 that you need the Sunnah you you can't understand the Quran without the Sunnah and I'll talk about that you mentioned a dialectical relationship between IM Al gazali and and IB could you expand on the nature of that relationship and their respective ideologies I Tam is is a undeniably he's a polymath uh he he was a brilliant scholar he was a h he was a fak uh he was also uh a a um a comparative uh religionist so he he he wrote books on the on the Old Testament the New Testament he has a six volume book that's very important it's I mean it's a extremely important book he
9:15 also wrote a book on a book on the the the problems of and and reason being what's transmitted so Revelation and reason I think at at the root of the difference is IM I Tam really wanted to just keep it at the book and the Sunnah like he really want he did not want the type of edifice that was emerging out of the um of the tradition of Islam and and in some ways you have to appreciate that because there's something very profound about this Simplicity of teachings and and in many
10:03 ways tradition becomes very cumbersome and and and I think kard has a very similar uh attitude towards what happens within Christianity um so I I I appreciate IM Tam I really do I appreciate what he's trying to do but I really feel like you cannot deny the the human uh creativity that comes out of that initial inspiration and you can't deny the fact that the prophet Sall Ali wasall was a syncretist in that he said seek knowledge the Quran says seek knowledge it says go out explore the world go look how creation began that's
10:51 that's that's a recommendation to go study geology uh the Quran has history it says look at the people that went before you the Quran certainly has metaphysics um so all of those are there and so the elaborations that come out of that initial inspiration what you want to do is mitigate the the the influences that are dangerous like and they're going to slip in but you want to to prevent them and I think that was his project I I I think and I have to say this and I'm not the first person that said this but I think IM ad's his his intellect is just so vast and and and I think um
11:39 IM and others said that was more reliable in his than in his actual uh the way that he uh looked at the so I think that's fundamentally at the heart of the differences so like I said I appreciate and I actually understand what Ian Tamia was trying to do but I I really think in the end he's he he's his his project was a a critical Pro like he is criticizing a lot like a lot of his books are criticizing ima's project is a project he's building like he's really trying to to build a normative Islam that will
12:27 withstand the onslaughts of materialism of philosophy of uh of atheism of all that's what he's trying to do he wants to he wants to build a fortress around the book and the Sunnah IMB T he wants he feels like the book in the sunna doesn't need a fortress Imam algazali says no it needs a fortress and I'm going to build it and I think that's fundamentally the difference and but we respect both of them and and uh traditionally uh there were far more critics of IB tamya in our um than there were of IM they both have critics far more are critical of IB Tamia's project
13:14 than they are of of IM alaz but people are going to differ on this and there's people that are going to um stay with IB Tamia uh I don't think it's like you have to choose one or the other but but I think you have to recognize that one of them defines the tradition and that you do need to recognize and arguably for for a thousand years the um considered it was Islam and it's interesting he's called the proof of Islam what do you use a proof for you use a proof against uh people that are questioning you whereas is called Islam he's one of many but that is a l that he was given um so why
14:02 was the imali initially vilified by the scholars of and and well I think I said that they were um I you know this is something that uh more attendan friend of mine says that the were like thean which I don't think is totally fair but they they were very um in in in cam they were dogmatic they did not like speculative Theology and many scholars did not ABD who's one of my favorite Scholars he's one of the greatest scholars in the history of Islam he attacks the terribly I mean he really really just sees them as something really really uh bad for Islam like IB tamya
14:48 although IB tamya he's mixed because he sometimes he Praises them and other times he he condemns him but he does recognize that they did play a role in defending Islam so he's not entirely uh antagonistic so these These are debates amongst the it's it's U uh you know his books were burnt at one point in Morocco although the man that burnt him had a dream where the Prophet s came and had him flogged by Imam Al gazali so he actually repented publicly for burning them he burnt them in a in a in a in a Masjid and uh and then he had that dream and so he repented that's a well-known story uh are there English transl as im's works or other resources fortunately he's he's
15:33 he's been fortunate to have some good translators um there's there's there was a translation done it's an abridgement of the that was done by Malana uh he was a South Asian scholar molana Kim I think yeah and that was reprinted by the Malaysians and they edited a lot of it because he originally did not want he was actually a very formidable scholar he he did a commentary on the Mish translated the into Bengali I think um so he he that is is is good uh fans VII um has done some I actually wrote the um the introduction to a couple of
16:20 those books uh including the Book of Knowledge and then also um the Islamic Tech Society has done a good job uh I mean Dr winter uh uh ABD Hakim winter is uh I think a really excellent beautiful um stylist in the English language and IM gazali deserves a good translator because he is so eloquent in Arabic and it's a crime to translate him poorly I was recently reading a translation of one of I won't say who did it because he's actually a good scholar but it was so bad the English was so bad and and I I I just I felt sad for anybody who read that book and thought that that in any way reflected the style of IM Al gazali so
17:08 and I know he's a great Persian stylist I I'm not able to read him in Persian but I I know from people that do know Persian that he's a beautiful stylist in Persian so he was a very gifted orator A Gifted writer um so I would say that those are good uh Dr winter did uh the breaking of the two desires was excellent book and I and I I think he did one other uh yeah the remembrance of death how can we Pur pursue the spiritual path you I pursue today stay tuned because that's essentially what I'm going to talk about really what his project is because that is his project and so inshallah if Allah gives us life maybe we meet again did imali reject the relationship between cause and effect
17:55 I'll get into that a little bit he did not and that's one of the big problems the are accused of being occasionalist which are people that don't really believe in cause and effect it's very important that it's a very sophisticated understanding we cause and effect is the way Allah has created the world it's the Sunnah of God in the world to deny it is deny to deny reality and so we do not deny cause and effect but we have I think a very profound understanding of the Divine um the divine nature of what's happening in the world and and and and and that's
18:41 where the imaz um is a Mystic so I would look at it you have Newtonian physics and you have quantum physics sh is Newtonian is quantum if you this an analogy I'm not saying don't say oh he said that cam is quantum physics I'm saying that in the same way that the quantum laws do not work in the Newtonian world that's the same that's happening so it's two different way we have something called you know we live in a multiplex Universe uh that in fact it's not a universe it's it's a Multiverse and he's the Lord of all the worlds so
19:26 there are many worlds universes is this world it's one world but there are many universes and so uh what's what we know if you look at a Persian carpet the ant knows nothing of the pattern of the Persian carpet that is our intellect uh before the glory of Allah's creation and the prophet indicated that in a Hadith about the that the mul in relation to the malakut was like a ring in the midst of a desert a small ring so he's all so this whole idea oh people lost their faith because they realize the universe is vast our Prophet knew how vast things were he didn't it increased his faith you know this is something material say
20:13 oh why are there so many galaxies well you can do the same thing if you go inward like if you magnify yourself inwardly you'll see the same number of of miraculous whether you go out or in in fact there's a Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carroll who showed basically that the largest things in the universe if you take the largest things that we know of and you take the smallest things we know of and and you divide them by add them together and divide them by two you get the basic human proportion he won the Nobel Prize so we are the microcosm like the the cosmos is out there but it's also in here everything's in here and in fact it couldn't be out
20:58 out there if it wasn't in here that's how we can see it and understand it so anyway we'll get into that inshallah and then did Imam kazadi only acknowledge virtue ethics in his Works how about other normative ethical theories such as consequentialism deontological ethics I mean these are terms that come later Islam does have a kind of deontological approach I mean we do believe in Duty bound ethics um and we also have consequentialist ethics because uh there are situations where like Kant said you couldn't lie in any situation right and that's his deontological approach but uh we know that lying is permitted to save somebody from a tyrant for instance uh so that's a kind of uh
21:46 looking at the consequences so um I think ver the point of virtue ethics is the foundation of all ethics and and it has to be studied to understand cultivation of Virtues and why it's important so I think uh traditionally the virtual ethics has been the most important approach to ethics in our tradition can you please recommend an introductory book on the Quran that one can share with non-muslims Quran you know I found it's very interesting uh Quran uh I would not recommend a non-muslim reading the Quran because it's such a difficult book in Translation first of all it's it's a
22:31 nonlinear book but second of all um there's a lot of lunai in in in the Quran and and I actually had a a young Singaporean uh a really wonderful Muslim lady that that worked with us uh with the Rea group when we were in uh Singapore and she was very troubled she had taken a a uh a course in University and the course made an argument that the Quran needed you know that it needed commentary and she was like why would God reveal a book that is not sufficient unto itself and initially I didn't really have an answer for her I didn't give her an answer I just thought about it but I actually
23:16 realized it's it's a reminder for you and for your people Imam Malik said that is saying so and so on so and so on so and so that Allah has made his book impossible to reach without the intercession of Scholars of the so you cannot understand the Quran without the prophet sallam and you cannot understand the prophet without the scholars so you always need commentary and and that is because the meanings of the Quran are locked in the hearts of human beings and it is men like and
24:02 women sometimes but it's men like IM Al gazali who unlocked many of the mysteries of that book and that's what we're going to look at with Quran but before we do that I have a few more things I want to say about the Im so inshallah may Allah bless all of you may I hope you remember all of us atar remember zetuna all the people at zetuna also support zetuna inshallah we we have some really really big plans but we need your help to do what we're doing may Allah bless all of you and thank you sub
