By Saad Razi Shaikh
Edited by IlmGate
Shaykh Hamzah wald Maqbul is currently at Islamic Relief, and teaches all the classes held by Ribat Institute. He went on to pursue traditional Islamic studies, which took him to a number of countries, including Syria and Egypt where he studied the Arabic language, Morocco, Mauritania, and UAE. All of these studies culminated in him receiving an ijazat al-tadris. He is founder of the Eternal Creed project, which aims to present the Aqidah Tahawiyyah into a book form, in a modern style, with examples and references which will be familiar to a modern audience and connect with them intuitively. In this interview, he speaks about dealing with the intellectual challenges of the day, the quest for personal ijtihad in the internet age, the necessity of being grounded in our aqidah, and on the neglect of traditional Islamic scholarship.
We see in the modern age, first beginning with Jamal al-Din Afghani, and continuing with the keyboard warriors of the internet today, a clamor for ‘personal ijtihad.’ What are the effects of this demand on the ummah today?
The idea of ijtihad is taken from the hadith of Sayyidna Muadh ibn Jabal رضي الله عنه. He was one of the Rasul’s ﷺ close companions and students. Rasulullah ﷺ appointed him as a judge over the people of Yemen. When he was sending him to Yemen to take up his judgeship, the Prophet ﷺ personally accompanied him to the edge of the town of Madina. Then he asked him a question, “If you are to judge in a case, how will you judge?” Muadh ibn Jabal said that he will judge according to the book of Allah. The Prophet ﷺ asked him, “What if you don’t find the answer explicitly there?” He replied that then he’ll judge according to the sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ. “What if you don’t explicitly find an answer to it there,” he was asked. He replied, “Then I will exert myself, I will exert myself in finding the correct view on the issue and I will not slacken in there.”
Ijtihad is on the heels of having the knowledge of the book of Allah and the sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ. In that sense, if somebody performs ijtihad, after having exhausted the knowledge of the Quran and sunnah, and then uses it in a way to find the correct view on a certain issue that’s not explicitly mentioned therein, that’s a good thing. The problem is that people want to make their own kind of flimsy opinions and call that ijtihad. That’s not ijtihad. That’s an abuse of the word ijtihad. It’s not correct, it is a misuse.
The other thing is, the issue with Jamal al-Din Afghani. He was definitely a person who was trained and learned in certain sciences. But if you read Pankaj Mishra’s book From the Ruins of an Empire regarding certain individuals who kind of fought back against colonialism, he actually does a biopic in the first half of that book on Afghani. And obviously the author is not a Muslim, so certain theological issues don’t really matter to him, but he mentioned that Jamal al-Din Afghani is not Afghani at all. He’s actually an Iranian who was heterodox by Shiite standards, so after getting tossed out of Iran, he went from court to court in the Sunni world masquerading as an Afghani. He basically used his period of training in the ma’qūlāt (the rational sciences) in order to try to justify his heterodox ideas. And that in and of itself, the jettisoning of tradition, is a type of silliness, because no functional legal tradition can function without precedent.
But I don’t see a connection between the two of them except that both of them, in a cursory way, are calling for ijtihad. One is calling for an ijtihad that’s not based on the Quran and the sunnah. And the other later one is calling for ijtihad that’s not based on any learning whatsoever. So this type of intellectual laziness, on behalf of the ummah is what has given us arguments like ISIS and things like ‘look, you know, someone doesn’t agree with me, therefore they are kafirs, so let’s just kill everybody.’ And that’s a particularly egregious misinterpretation of the religion, because it results in violence. But there are other misinterpretations that may not result in violence. Therefore, the modern nation-state doesn’t see any reason to stop it. But it’s just as deleterious to Muslims as individuals and as a civilization in this world, and the hereafter.
For the layperson, what does aqidah mean?
Well, for many laypeople, it doesn’t mean anything at all. What it should mean is the way that Islam is engaged in the mind, the way a person should think about Islam, and the way a person should venerate the Deen, the place that their mind should give it. And this is a problem, that we’ve turned Islam into customs rather than a way of life, a way of being in your mind, in your heart, as well as in your body.
You speak of the abandoning of the study of aqidah as a major concern today. In your understanding, what are the causes that led to the neglect of the study of aqidah?
I don’t think there’s any sort of intentional neglect. In the modern era, the postcolonial era, we went from a largely agrarian society in which most people were uneducated and simple; to the modern nation-state, where there’s at least some attempt to “educate” all of the public with some basic modicum of education. So what’s happened is people have attained, on average, a system-wide marked increase in their learning with regards to material things. But the increase in intellectual sophistication and spiritual sophistication has lagged behind. There’s been very little wide-scale effort to increase the literacy of the masses in those things, except for some attempts like the Madrasah system, the Jama’at al-Tabligh, and the Sufi tariqas which existed from premodern times, etc.
However, nothing has rivaled the efficiency of the nation-state in its increase of people’s literacy with regards to material sciences and material learning. So what you have is a bunch of people who know a lot of things with regards to temperature, elements, physics, biology, the water cycle, foreign languages like English, etc but they have not learnt anything in regards to the Deen more than what they would have learnt in their illiterate, preindustrial and agrarian societies, despite the fact that they don’t live in those societies. The social norms are not the same as those societies. And in those societies people used to be humble, so a scholar theoretically could tell them something and people would have the capacity to accept it. Whereas now they have the habit of questioning everything, but they’re neither equipped with enough knowledge to have those questions make any sense nor to understand the answers to those questions when they receive them. This is a problem.
Your work, the Project Eternal Creed is described as ‘Universal Guide for Perplexing Times,’ you further described the Muslim community as being in a state of ‘unprecedented bewilderment today.’ What is the source of this bewilderment?
Again, it is a sign of the high amount of material learning and thinking coupled with the low amount of intellectual spiritual training that people have, which stretches the mind in unnatural ways and leads to a very imbalanced type of thinking.
Many Muslims today are ill-equipped to deal with questions and attacks against their faith, both from the left and the right. To counter such questions, is it necessary to have a certain level of Islamic literacy in our communities today? What would such a level of Islamic literacy comprise of?
Yes. First of all, I don’t believe in this left-right thing. I think it’s a type of stupidity for people to define themselves by their favorite extremism. Whereas anybody who has a sound mind will not define themselves by their preferred extremism. Rather, they would focus and make constant attempt to reach some sort of correct understanding of the correct solution, which neither tends to one extreme or the other. To deal with attacks against someone’s faith or to be able to understand the world around them, a person needs to have the benefit of wahi (revelation), and the insights that it gives to a person about themselves, about the horizons, about this world, and about the hereafter.
Furthermore, to understand wahi, there is a basic literacy that every Muslim should have. Given that we send kids through 12-plus years of schooling, everyone should have some basic understanding of Arabic. They should be able to understand the gist of the text of the Quran without needing a translator. They should have a basic understanding of fiqh, a basic understanding of aqidah, and a basic understanding of tasawwuf. These three different dimensions of the Deen are chalked out by the hadith known as the “Hadith Jibril,” containing the definitions of Iman, Islam, and Ihsan.
Everybody has to have this basic orientation so that they can fit the data points of those things. They then learn about the world around them into some sort of cohesive picture rather than something that is fragmented or worse yet, something that’s tearing their mind and turning the heart apart into different directions and different trajectories.
In seeking religious knowledge today via the internet, what are some tips and points of caution you would suggest to the believers?
Don’t seek religious knowledge via the internet. Go meet the ulama, go and see the different madrasahs, go and see how the Deen is being practiced on a day-to-day basis rather than sitting in your house and being comfortable. Because this Deen is not attained through comfort. It’s attained through mujahada, through struggle against the self. Until and unless a person goes and sees who is actually walking the walk in their own personal lives, they’re just going to sit at home on the couch and look at Islam as another consumer good. So they’ll shop for the product that pleases them the most, and that’s the product that’s going to destroy them. Go and sit with the ulama, with the Shaykhs, sit with the different Imams in the different masjids and see who actually has a dedication to learning and practicing the sunnah, and not who has a dedication to what agrees with you or what you think is practical or whatever.
The whole point of revelation is to teach mankind what he knew not. So if you’re going to go in with your own preconceived notions and try to judge whose Islam is better based on that, then that’s no Islam at all. Rather go and try to understand the wahi. See who comes down on that standard better. After a basic orientation or understanding about those things, then there’s no harm in watching a Youtube lecture, taking a class online, or listening to something on Soundcloud, but once you know who to take from. Until then, there’s going to be a race between ignoramuses as to who can squabble the nonsense that pleases the egos of the public more. Whoever wins that race is going to be the biggest loser, and whoever follows that loser himself is going to be a loser. We ask Allah for his protection.
Imam Ghazali offered a brilliant counter to the intellectual challenges of his day, the Mutazilah. What are some lessons we can take from his approach in dealing with the intellectual challenges we face today?
Imam Ghazali was an Usuli scholar, meaning he was a scholar that dealt with things based on principles, pure principles that were derived from the Quran and sunnah. He looked at Islam on the basis of principles. If we don’t study aqidah and don’t study the usul (the methodology of fiqh), if we don’t study the sources of Islam, we will never understand those principles. And if we don’t understand those principles, all of our responses are going to be from our own nufus, our own desires.
Ghazali’s brilliance is in his ability to take in the wahi (the revelation) and understand what it’s saying on the level of principles. Principles are a-contextual. They’re stripped of time, they’re stripped of space, there’s stripped of place. They’re pure and they’re valid, whatever time and place they’re in. They then give you a good starting place to start from in order to bring those principles into context and try to practically sort out the problems that you have in front of you.
The issue is this: people try to sort out the problems before they understand what the solution is. You have to understand the solution first, then you can negotiate the difficulties in implementing that solution. People put the cart before the horse and try to figure out the solutions before understanding the problems properly, which leads to a type of confounding, and that doesn’t work. Because of our community’s – certain sectors of it at least – lack of appreciation for scholarship, we have failed to train on a wide-scale individuals that have that principle level understanding of the Deen.
The idea is that every student of knowledge is not going to be able to understand those things. Then, everyone who understands those things is not going to be able to understand the context we live in. And then everyone who understands the context we live in is not going to be able to apply it, meaning they’re not going to have the wherewithal either mentally, psychologically, or in terms of common sense to apply those solutions practically to society. It’s like a funnel, you need to have a huge infrastructure that you bring down to bear on these problems.
It has to be in that order, that you bring from the society those people who wish to seek knowledge and have a desire for it. From them, you’re going to bring forth a group of people who understand it. From them, you’re going to bring forth a group of people who understand the problems that we’re facing today. From them, you’re going to bring forth a group of people who are going to be practical enough to be able to suggest some sort of solution that’s workable. If you don’t actually produce that machinery, to just a wish for some sort of solution to pop up out of the middle of nowhere is a type of stupidity.
Today, we see large-scale funding models and geopolitical rivalries sponsoring and spreading certain ideological visions of the religion. What effect does this have on the unity of the ummah today?
If we don’t take it upon ourselves to preserve the Deen in its pure form, amongst our flock and amongst our congregations, then we shouldn’t be surprised if somebody else is going to use the Deen as a type of weapon for their own geopolitical or economic interests. The communists have done it. The West has done it. The Rawafid have done it. A number of different geopolitical actors have done it, and are doing it. Meanwhile there are some places where a native form of Islam – which is based on a true desire for the love of Allah and his Rasul ﷺ – is in practice. But that’s exceedingly rare because people are not putting in the time, effort, money, resources, and human resources that are needed in order to make that project work forward. Although, al-Hamdulillah, the ummah is putting in enough to at least to see that the knowledge is preserved, should the people get together at a later date in which to actually implement that corpus of knowledge in society.
Ideology is understood as a set of ideas that helps explain the world, and provides a plan of action to influence it. Ideologies are understood to have taken the place of religion in secular societies; and in religious societies, ideological interpretations of religion have gained ground. If this is indeed the case, is it possible to rollback the influence of ideologies on religion today?
Yes it is possible. But that’s going to involve people understanding what their religion is in the first place. Again, it must be based on wahi itself: a dispassionate, complete, and thorough study of what revelation teaches us. We live in a world wherein very few children will memorize the Quran. and those that do, amongst them maybe less than one percent will ever bother to learn what they’re reciting and what it means. With that low level of literacy, people are going to use religion, especially Islam, which is a great motivator for the sincere-but-uneducated masses of people. People are going to use that motivation to get Muslims to do all kinds of dumb things. Until we put in enough effort to not only train a certain set of people who have a very deep understanding of revelation but also proliferate amongst everyone some basic understanding of what revelation teaches, then they’re going to be ideal prey for such ideologies, whether they masquerade about in the guise of religion or whether they drop the facade and try to dispense with religion altogether.
Allah ta’ala be our help. May Allah ta’ala use us for the reviving of this sacred knowledge that everyone in every time, in every age has a great need for and that there’s great mercy and great benefit in it. May Allah ta’ala use us for its preservation and for its propagation. And may he give us the tawfiq of seeing the fruits of that revival in our lives, in this world and the hereafter, and in the lives of our children and future generations.
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