Concerning Divine Wisdom in the Creation of Man | Shaykh Amin Kholwadia & Dr. Kamran Riaz

0:00 foreign [Music] Gathering which is a cause of great happiness for me uh that we get to hear from uh until the two principal drivers behind the uh composition of the current volume in front of us uh entitled uh concerning Divine wisdom in the creation of man uh by the uh Islam Imam it's a book that I've been hearing about off and on from Sheikh Amin for several years now and it's a book that uh

0:48 I've been hearing about the the process of it being uh edited published and prepared for uh dissemination in the public uh for for a number of years uh uh as well and having uh taken uh you know a chance to read the book over the last couple of days it really is a momentous occasion for uh the life of learning and teaching and all things intellectual regarding Muslims uh in North America uh and inshallah indeed in in the world and so I don't want to take too much time inshallah our uh two speakers who are the two Chief uh composers of this work uh inshallah I'll let them speak uh on their own behalf

1:35 but uh before uh handing the mic over to also known as shechamin I wanted to uh say a little bit of something about why what it means to have this work be something uh to be read from Imam gazali obviously we live in an era where the amount of empirical knowledge regarding the human body and really regarding material things in general it's it's absolutely staggering so a person might wonder what's the point of reading the observations about the body from a man who lived in the Middle Ages as much

2:22 of a genius as he may have been and although the detail of the uh observations of Imam kazali at times are they're they're at times they're mind-boggling uh that a person wonders how it is that uh somebody at that time could have known so much about the body at times are Charming at times they're they're they're aesthetically uh uh uh like chiseled and refined to the point where it makes that thing that you've seen a hundred times before and not thought anything of it makes it kind of opens your eyes to its beauty the the point is not necessarily what it

3:08 is that he's observing all of that at times is astonishing but the point is that he brings his own ethics to uh everything he talks about and everything he describes whether it's Islamic law whether it's the human body whether it's a phenomena cosmological phenomena or other phenomena in the material world everything there's a deliberateness to it it gives you an idea and an orientation and a platform from which you can observe that things are not haphazard or random but that there's order in their sequence and by seeing the order and sequence you see the beauty in the creation uh and in doing so it reminds you of the Creator and as

3:54 indeed anybody who's studied uh uh they know from the from from the very first derus a person reads about atida uh that uh you know the one of the most uh apparent and one of the most bright and easy to understand proofs of the uh proofs of the existence of the Creator is the the idea that nothing contingent could be without uh having a cause and so uh in that sense you know the the ethics Are Beautiful the book is expertly translated by uh Dr kamran Riaz undoubtedly with a help from a number of people at daralkasim uh basically what I

4:42 like to think of as like a council of geniuses Dr shukri and and the other classif um but on top of that equally indispensable is uh sheikha means uh explication and uh kind of Cliff Notes version of what it is that Imam hazali is trying to do when he describes things in the way that that he does which you know without which I think a lot of people may uh pass by uh the actual beauty of the book without ever noticing it so without further Ado I would like to turn the uh uh uh turn the mic over to uh Sheikh ameen Sheikh Amin is our Elder and our scholar in our Island he's

5:27 the link between us and between the generation of mashaif that passed before that we only read about and never got a chance to see and he's uh their gift and their Amana that they they left for us in uh as far as I can tell um he is the founder and uh director and Patron of Donald qasim uh in my opinion the uh premier Institution for higher Islamic learning in North America and uh inshallah no matter what else I say about him uh you'll find that his words uh say it all and speak for themselves so without further ado inshallah um

6:16 foreign Publications and everybody else around them with them for this opportunity to talk about you know this wonderful piece of work that's been translated and we are here to discuss you Sean just a few background tidbits if you want not really a lecture per se but a few points that I can highlight about the the um the value of Imam ozani's insights you know he was not a physician

7:04 he was primarily a legal jurist and a theologian and the other side of Iman was Ali is that he was you know one of the most top-notch uh intellectual sufis in Muslim history is a Focus basically is primarily based on a Sufi principle that the there is a relationship between the Creator and creation and if there's a connection between the Creator and the creation it has to be one of creating and creativity

7:49 so that through the names of Allah in our theism and other aspects of theology we know that Allah does not create randomly Allah is all knowing Allah the all wise that he has a purpose of and a methodology by which he brings things into existence So based on that principle uh Imam of kazali wanted to address a very unique you know feature of his creation and the unique

8:36 feature is man himself the man being the best creation that Allah creates so just as we see in the heavens and the Earth Nothing Is Random a theme that is recurring in the Quran that nothing is based on falsehood nothing is based on Randomness nothing is based on chance there's no such thing as a coincidence in Allah's creation everything is organized everything's systematic everything's done for a reason one thing leads to another there's a sense of you know a holistic creation that you know the the the observation

9:23 the Quran wants us to make is you know lead ourselves from the creation to the crater so we don't stop at the creation uh like maybe some philosophers do and definitely atheists and scientists do that they only Marvel about the creation but the Islamic approach has always been from day one that every creation is a proof of Allah's existence is a famous proverb that the Arabs had coined even before Islam then in everything there's a proof there's a sign that Allah is one so in this very unique philosophical slash scientific approach

10:10 to Creation Imam asked us to you know join him on a journey basically of enjoying and unraveling the mysteries of the human creation and then moving from the human body in the physical sense to the human being in the total sense because the human being is not just body as you know so there are other components of the human being that human beings tend to forget obviously there's a component of good ethics and morals and behavior that is part of human existence and most philosophers and most good people in the world if they are even just humanitarian

10:57 want to make sure that they have good ethics and good morals because that's part of a human existence but the Muslim mind goes much further than that yes we do need to develop ourselves in terms of moral Behavior Uh stabilizational values etc etc but there's something else that the Creator wants us to do and that is to attach ourselves to him and focus on him and pay attention to who he is and what he does and the way he does what he does so there's now a connection from the human being to Allah from the creation to the Creator and I think that's his message that when you look

11:42 deeper into the anatom anatomy and the through the anatomy of the human being you'll come to realize that there's a much higher purpose to the creation of man than just simply understanding the anatomy the anatomy itself is mind-boggling he just you know revolutionary in the way he's asking I would say nowadays the med school student The Physician and others who are into Healthcare practices that they must observe the the hikama the wisdom and the Assad the beauty in Allah's creating every part of the human being that it is not without purpose it has tremendous utility which overrides

12:30 maybe the physiology of the whole discussion Iman was Ali in his other works has always commended the study of medicine and commended the study of the human physical being in several places throughout his life he's always said that there is in his beneficial knowledge category that there is no knowledge of the body and there's knowledge of the rule and a Muslim must be able to deal with you know the the sickness of the body and sickness of the rule and the film and the heart also so he excelled in uh you know becoming a doctor of the sicknesses on the diseases of the heart he was by

13:15 no means an expert in treating the sicknesses of the physical body it is quite understandable that he must have read the literature available in his time he must have read ibnesina's in a book on medicine in the human body there's no doubt in there and there's nothing wrong with that absolutely no so on that point um once you get over the theology that there's a connection between Creator and creation and then you move from the creation everything they have is on Earth they lead to Allah and this is his now magnificent beautiful creation that he has with Hassan it's not just design as we might approach it from a different

14:00 angle it's not about intelligent design it's much more than intelligent design there is a modifier in it and there is a you know a recognition of who Allah is in it there's a recognition of the the superb that Allah brings into nutrition soon this is the creation and the manufacturing of Allah is in our creativity the the one who has now fortified and solidified everything that he brings into existence and so that is now the way the Muslim has looked at what you might call nature the Muslims looked at nature from the point of view of Allah's creativity Allah's Beauty

14:46 Allah's you know Perfection yeah as mentioned in Surah many other surahs that we find speaking about the ability of the human being so it's beyond I think it was called empiricism yes there's utility as he mentioned the utility of you know the limbs and organs of the body in the book so as you read the translation but there's an another I I think component to this discussion and that is one of the questions I raise in introduction what is a Muslim theologian doing and when he's writing a book on human anatomy I mean the two don't seem to go together so this brings up a fundamental I think

15:31 value in Muslim epistemology and that is we did not ever separate yeah the mundane from the spiritual from the sacred we never dissected knowledge as this is worldly and this is Godly we saw knowledge as one we saw knowledge as a unit we saw knowledge as a holistic being we did not commit shirk in appreciating knowledge that this knowledge belongs to the Dunya and this knowledge belongs to whatever okay so in those days mashallah every Muslim scholar who would have knowledge of the Dunya in such a way that they would be able to dictate advise governments in

16:19 such a way and this is very intriguing interesting that in the time of the Ottomans and the morals most of the workers on the the administration and the government in fact in some positions you you are not qualified to be an administrator or a minister unless you're an arlim in the first place that was the level of Islamic scholarship that was needed to run a Muslim government okay so they they never saw that separation uh that dichotomy as perhaps was you know by the so-called Enlightenment thinkers brought this to the the light or the you know shoved us back into the Dark Ages by making this distinction so as as

17:08 you talk about now although you know ibnesina is in his mighty he still had tremendous knowledge of you know Muslim theology he wrote on Theology and he he had other sciences that he excelled in and so on so the polymer of The Classical period were knowledgeable about everything they needed to know in order to be an assistant to the nizam the system of Islamic civilization they they they were not Hermits in any sense of the imagination and likewise those people who excelled in physics and expelled and excelled in science they were not damaged in Islam they knew Phil they knew apida they knew the Seer they knew Hadith it was part of the whole

17:53 system because we did not separate knowledge the way we have been forced to separate knowledge you know the colonialistic Evil Genius thing kind of Jadu on us that okay this is not knowledge of the the human body and this the knowledge of the rule we didn't have that dichotomy because there's no such thing as a dichotomy in one report the the issue of Islamic bioethics that we have initiated might make this very clear that if you want to go into understanding how to treat people then you you need a holistic approach even in your medicine because sometimes the source of the illness is not physical sometimes the source of the illness is spiritual and most probably is demonic

18:41 it is shaitani so you need to know how to handle that Amazon so this is a fundamental I think the point in Islamic epistemology that at the ground level we don't differentiate between Islamic knowledge you know and also worldly knowledge as a as a practice now definitely the subject matter they are different just as you know the knowledge of gardening is very different from the knowledge of say something else in the world like mathematics or you know something like that and so the the separation is in the subject matter it is not in the idea that it is knowledge so knowledge has to

19:26 be holistic comprehensive and so and the reason for that is what I mentioned in the beginning and that is there is a connection Eternal connection between Allah the Creator and every creation okay you cannot say that a cafe is not Allah's creation he is the only thing is he actually know how he works and what he does and what he doesn't do but that connection is there so that that kind of caused cosmological the Queenie can I use that word cosmological connection uh exists with every creature every creation and then Muslims looked at that from the point of view of a holistic theology uh holistic tawheed some people Excel

20:13 obviously engineering some people are exactly and you know and they Southern Optics and physics and Mathematics and traveling and all of that but nevertheless the bar for Islamic knowledge was very very high nowadays the bar for Islamic knowledge is low in fact it's in the suspects yeah you can be anybody and go up to the podium on Friday and give a great football and then you can say to the people this is the best that I've ever given an audience will say is the best khubba I ever heard I went to a place out here in the USA I will mention the region because you probably know where it is and he said the guy gave how to use a smartphone yeah

20:59 and for crying not allowed the audience says that was the best football we've ever heard so there's a question of Dumb and Dumber that yeah so this this relegating the bar of Islamic knowledge as if Islamic knowledge belongs to somebody who's a mullah who's in there that did not exist in classical era Muslim every Muslim had a standard education which will be comparable today almost to the level of any army of today that was in the bar that was the standard so when you have the standard and you become a physician or you become a mathematician or you become whatever you want to become your tawheed is correct your Afrida is correct your foot is correct

21:45 and then you get the Baraka of Islamic productivity and that is what Imam gazali is bringing to the table here by offering us this book his insights into you know the amazing Hickam as he calls it the amazing insights the amazing foundational value the amazing you know proofs of Allah's Oneness through just studying the human bodies it is so observational the second point is that the human body will be resurrected physically which is a foundational apida principle in Sunni Islam that we believe the human body will be physically resurrected we will

22:30 be in Jannah inshallah with our physical body the pleasures in Jannah will be sensual they will be physical so in order to enjoy those physical sensual Pleasures in Jannah we need to know what our physical body does in this world so you make a leap you make Prius you drew an analogy from your function here to your function in Jannah which is the point of the the objective of the the whole book as he discusses about the human eye there's another eye in the realm there's another I in the realm of human beings and with that eye they can see things from the other world and you'll need that eye to become part of your physical eye in Jannah in order to see

23:18 Allah and his majesty and his Beauty and his Essence and not his Essence but at least his face requires that kind of polishing of the eye and training of the eye Etc so he's he's his training Muslims how to look how to observe how to think that's basically a few foundational or tidbits I can share with you at the moment and they're just so much more okay um Islamic Theology and there's a lot of theological underpinnings in in this book and basically it would be a combination of understanding observing the human body but also understanding the Theology of Islam through the human body

24:03 I'll stop here and let Dr kamran speak about his work in Sean means uh for this uh very important introduction uh to this work inshallah moving on I would like to give an opportunity for Dr kamran Riaz to speak um I was not only uh not only pleased with uh your translation uh which just by reading it you know being somebody who frequently has to translate things from a number of different languages um I appreciate that it's a a very well rendered translation and I see some of

24:50 the wordings and uh you know I I assume that there must have been some agonizing over a couple of the sentences at least uh although I don't know maybe maybe it came out uh it came out effortlessly but you can maybe share your um your experience uh if you wish to but the thing that that really blew my mind on top of the translation was the footnotes as a student of Science and as a uh a student of or at least an amateur fan of all things medical uh while trying to you know stop my theories about the efficacy of different uh prophylactic measures or and or vaccines or whatnot I I do appreciate the footnotes they're just mind-boggling and I appreciate a couple of things about them just that they must have taken

25:36 forever to write um that they provide so much information for um the the student of knowledge who wants to engage with um with the kind of broader gazalian context in the gazalian ethic of this work uh while uh uh digging deeper into the the kind of the empirical realities of the human body um so that that partnership and Synergy can deepen um and I also appreciate another thing that you're not afraid to say you know when Imam ozali makes an observation that doesn't really seem to be uh what we see nowadays in the the modern study of of anatomy or of whatever relevant part of of medicine or or whatever subject matter it may be that you also

26:23 uh uh politely but very clearly mention that as well uh and so it's it's a translation but it's so much more than a translation and I really am looking forward to hearing from you uh about uh you know things like this that can only be a labor of love like what that process was like as well as whatever other insights you'd like to give a little background on Dr kamran reals before handing over the the the mic Dr kamran Riaz has uh had memorized the Quran in nine months before high school he attended the University of Illinois in Chicago for undergraduate studies uh and uh graduated from the prestigious gppa medicine program with dual degrees in economics in Middle Eastern history uh he obtained a doctorate of medicine from

27:08 the UIC College of Medicine and completed his Ophthalmology training Ophthalmology training at Northwestern University and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and he's been connected with Chef I mean and Daryl costume since 2000 hearing uh you know reading this Ophthalmology uh uh uh The Mention Of Ophthalmology it reminds me of of huberman uh but I assure you this podcast will be much more interesting in the sense that that might be a lot of data but this is uh the actual model this is the actual picture this will actually tell you what things are pointing toward and uh hopefully we can benefit from all of the above Dr kamran riyaz

27:56 um I feel embarrassed that that introduction was longer than introduction uh his introduction should have been much longer but nonetheless for hosting this and also to The vaseli Institute and I'm not sure how to follow up means in opening comments so instead I'll just talk a little bit about what and how this book came to be says mentioned I've been fortunate and very blessed to be a student of sheikhlamin for more than 20 years now and uh while I was finishing Medical School actually came to me with this Treatise and he said you know I I came across this work and I am asking you to to translate this and I was shocked I had

28:43 studied with him um you know over off and on throughout the years I don't consider myself definitely not a scholar but you know barely a student of knowledge and I saw and Chef I mean you you know this much better than I do and and he said well you know the anatomy and you know the medicine uh of it much better than I do I guess he didn't know that I was going into Ophthalmology and would soon forget all of that Anatomy um but all joking aside that's what he asked me to to do and I only agreed to do it uh because he would assist me with every single uh step of the way as well alhamdul mentioned you know the translation certainly was a labor of love those of you who read razali know that uh it's very high brow Arabic and some of his Arabic it's it's it's beautiful it's marvelous but it's very

29:29 difficult to translate into English and and even now when I read the book I feel that I've barely done Justice to the eloquence and the balaja of of Imam but this was uh even though my name is on the book and she means name is on the book this book really had so many people at Darrell awesome uh you mentioned Dr shukri but many of the young olama uh were very helpful in and reviewing and editing over the years this really has taken us more than 10 years to do and then also many of the other senior lecturers and other senior students people like Dr Hassan uh omershakor and others were very instrumental in providing feedback so we had feedback both both from the Islamic scholarly

30:14 perspective as well as the medical professional perspective um into to sort of developing this but my comments on the book were basically as such that those of us who are in medicine we often many of us go into medicine thinking that our study of medicine particularly human anatomy will be filled with all sorts of subhanallah moments that we're just gonna our Iman is going to be so high when we study anatomy and medicine and things like that um so when we start medical school we study anatomy with two distinct goals one is to basically make sure that we pass our classes and don't fail it out of me and actually make it through medical school but for many of us we think that this will increase our attachment to Allah through a deeper

31:02 sense of his creation what ends up happening is that we end up becoming and especially the way that Anatomy is taught is we become so fixated on that first goal which is to basically pass and get through medical school that we end up kind of losing or neglecting that second goal uh all together so that initial hope of deepening our relationship with a law through studying Anatomy is replaced by at best a few fleeting moments of the awareness of Allah's creativity that uh mentioned so the Muslim medical student oftentimes is now faced with a daunting challenge that is there an opening for the so-called Islamic study of anatomy and that's what I think this Treatise

31:48 does it's the second to last chapter of uh what is known as concerning Divine wisdom and the creation of Allah and this is the second to last chapter and overall in this entire world Imam talks about the hikmah of the various uh creation but in this chapter the second to last chapter he talks about the human body and it's very interesting that it's inspired by just one quranic verse from you know and we created a man from a from a sticky clay in front really from that he goes into this entire head to toe anatomical survey of the human body as

32:34 someone who has been through medical school by that point and has read you know um you know Moore's anatomy and netter's Atlas and all these things this was the first time where anyone actually went through a complete head to toe anatomical survey of not only commenting about an organ part or a body part but why that body part was placed in that particular location and what are the potential wisdoms and benefits of that particular body part like why are there two eyes and one knows uh you know one of the things that blew me away as an ophthalmologist for example I write Ophthalmology textbooks and stuff but he comments that notice how the hair of the eyebrows continues to grow and can become so long that it covers the visual field but the eyelashes grow to a

33:22 certain length and they don't grow any further than that if he says if they grow too long they would irritate the eye this is a condition known as trachiosis or dystic Isis which can irritate the ocular surface cause things like corneal liberations or if they're too short they wouldn't protect the eye you know and you know subhanallah like you you never see that type of uh uh sort of observation and commentary about things as simple as eyelashes and eyebrows and the similarity days and differences between that so it's sort of this this meticulous attention to detail throughout the sex as Chef Amin mentioned I mean this was an academic Endeavor that lazali did he's not sitting in some madrasa and

34:07 some Ivy Towers Ivory Tower someplace just commentating on things that he doesn't know about he certainly must have read the treatises or discussed with uh Physicians and other anatomists of his time in order to uh come up with uh this these observations that he has so um you know so that's what kind of blew me away personally is it sort of brought back that that subhanallah moment of that as you're reading through the body uh that that joy that passion that you know that Iman vitamin that so many of us in medicine or Muslims are looking for uh it really comes through as Imam talks about uh you know as he goes through the entire body um so you know from for for me what I

34:53 was as I was doing this again with the extends have supervision and really I would say primarily mean wrote the book but fixed so many of my translation mistakes and whatnot but the the discussions that we would often have as we were translating this of me bringing my uh medical background him bringing obviously the Islamic scholar background but I think one of the things which you know I hope would Inspire others is that alhamdulillah I was fortunate you know through those you know uh years studying of Sheikh I mean that at least I had a working knowledge uh of of of what was needed in order to be able to do this so I had you know done a modified version of the darson azamian shirt again not a scholar but at least I knew Arabic I knew the basic things and I knew how to

35:40 work under the guidance and the the supervision of a scholar and I think that would be a very helpful model for other works to come out in other fields not just medicine uh not just um uh Anatomy so uh the final thought I want to share is that you know um what I found amazing about this book is that it really sets sort of so that's for sort of the the curriculum or the model of of how uh we as Muslim professionals not just medical professionals but Muslim professionals can approach our respective Fields um you know in this Treatise is telling us not only what to study which is the human body but provides us with a rubric of of how to study right

36:27 so in other words yes we must appreciate the the physical and the scientific and the technical details of the subject matter but understand that for us as Muslims it is it is our connection to Allah that uh inspires us to study the technical stuff and then as we are studying that technical stuff we should understand that we will inshallah gain insights and wisdoms that will make us appreciate our Dean uh appreciate Allah to a higher level so it should sort of be this positive feedback loop that Loop that the dean inspires us to study uh in the so-called technical or material world but what we learned from that should further Inspire us to um you know improve ourselves in our

37:13 religion and uh in our uh you know relationship with Allah and so that's why you know when it comes to the eye he talks about the uh the physical eye at the beginning of the Treatise but without giving away too much uh he talks about the the inner Vision at the end uh the things like you know ilham inspiration but also when it comes to dreams how we we see things that are uh in our dreams and how that is related to uh nabua uh itself so um those are some of the things that I wanted to share uh sort of my journey through translating this text and again this is not a solo effort this was uh really uh I just uh I'm

37:59 fortunate to have my name on the cover but really this is a group effort that was spearheaded by Sheikh let me and so those are my initial comments I think maybe we'll just open up maybe Milan if you want to ask us some questions or other thoughts or share your ideas as well inshallah and uh with that also we'll open up if anybody is logged on and wants to ask a question through the text uh we will um you know we will be uh uh happy to get through as many uh of those questions uh as are possible um especially those that are most relevant to the uh to the subject matter and the work at hand I wanted to start uh with a personal question to Sheikh

38:45 ameen uh mashallah your uh introduction in as much as the purpose is to get people to appreciate the gazalian ethic in in in in in in the work that's translated in front of us it's successful but it's successful at so much more uh it's successful at so much more and it kind of brings together something more akin to a a kind of a unified theory of everything with regards to Islam and you use the word Sunni a lot Sunni scholarships Sunni learning and you uh juxtapose that against the Creed of the uh and uh other groups uh

39:32 that at some point do you refer to as undisciplined political parties um I find it very interesting being somebody who I guess has dedicated some part of part of my life to uh trying to teach akhida that the you know what Sunni means to most people is not really all that clear and so I really appreciate your uh um I guess clearing out of of what that platform on which on top of which because Ali does his work were there any ideas that you wanted to share about this and uh in particular about why it is that you know understanding uh what sunism is is not a sectarian exercise but rather a kind of

40:18 a prerequisite to be able to benefit from any of these uh great figures uh of uh the Islamic intellectual tradition or somebody else um so first of all I think everybody if they haven't done so already then they should definitely learn the appear that here and it does a wonderful job and that if you read that study that with him you'll get to understand what suddenly theology actually is uh in Charlotte but basically I wanted to highlight the idea that more than a kind of political Schism it's based on pure intellectual genius that the Sunni mother is founded on basically one

41:04 foundational principle and that is that we take our Dean all of it from the sahaba so the Sunni Scholars of Hadith and even before that uh Khalifa even before him we saw that the Damien who were the followers of the sahaba they held the sahaba as the authority of and on Islam period that any Islamic understanding must come from the sahaba whether it's implicit whether it's explicit whether it's conclusive where there's inconclusive and then Sunni Islam pivots around the sahaba

41:51 if you do not appreciate the role of sahaba the element of this in this intellectual history and the development of the intellectual understanding what I call islami the Islamic concept and the Islamic understandings and I think then then you're not a Sunni basically you can be whoever you want whereas the people who came after us the cottages and then the offshoots the monetizerly uh they base their Islam on an intellectual reading based on rationality and not on a living community a living tradition okay so living Islam obviously is alive

42:37 so you read the Quran the way the sahaba read it you understand the prophesy of the way they they understand and you apply Islamic Theory the way they did in faith belief practice custom conventions and everything else now is very broad like the last of the four imams that we have in the at least he has you know a principle and that is that you can take your Dean from any sahabi any sahabi has done something then that is Islamic which is at the tail end but foundationally and fundamentally we see that anything that is you know

43:25 foundationally Islamic must come from the sahabah and that's how we read Islam that's how you read the Quran and so on so you cannot jump over the sahaba and for the other Scholars too like in the practice of people of Medina they they won't even jump over the time in and say we're going to go directly to the Quran Hadid and see what we understand because Islam had to be applied in a human Community Human Society not just an intellectual kind of concept so so I think the Imam bazari is very clear about this he has made mention of this theory in so many other different places

44:15 is one of his four minutes Islam is the way the ummah has understood it the ummah referring to the sahaba okay so I think in in Sunni Islam the the pivot is the the appreciation of the sahaba as genuine sound good Muslims may be slightly akin to the idea of the founding fathers here although they're very different but you can see that sentiment there in the founding fathers in this country so that who are the founding fathers of Islam they have to be the Sahara you cannot go you know you cannot rip them apart you can't jump over them and assume that because the only way you know the Quran is the Quran is that the sahaba read it

45:01 and the sahaba documented it I think that's foundational in our understanding number one number two then it also gives you a connection uh in terms of a senate in terms of a link an academic link not just International academically to the Prophet sallallahu this bridge this bridge is very wide in this is April and you have tons and tons of different opinion in the sahaba also so it's not a reductionist in application by any sense of the word uh but I think if if we study that and that is based on the understanding of the sahaba understanding of and the other Scholars also followed so we see that you know unfortunately

45:48 Muslims might be drawn towards an idea that we want to be purist and the only way we could be purest is if we cut off all the middlemen time so suddenly Islam is not based on cutting off the middle man Sun Islam is based on a continuous chain of narrators that go back to the prophet son of Moses you cannot break that chain so even Hadith studies if there's a broken chain then we we are very doubtful about the Hadith itself we won't take it as proof or evidence so I think the the modern day Muslim really needs to appreciate that traditional Islam is academically sound and it is

46:34 intellectually superior but is very broad the the problem is that people think that we take the The Deen from one or two people and that's it you know we take the dean from every sahaba that's why they coined the phrase that all the sahaba are just in terms of their disseminating Islam so we have to hold that Principle as Paramount as our Sunni value everything else you can have many many different opinions in terms of film Etc but in terms of foundational knowledge of Islam it must come from the prophet sallallahu via the sahaba in terms of the ijima and the consensus of the sabbah at least on

47:21 foundational monolithic issues that every Muslim must believe in that that's the approach that we have and in order to understand that Imam al-bas Ali as we all know it was a very very hard course in me but being hardcore doesn't mean to say you don't have the ability to do this work this shows the creativity and the genius of the Sunday scholar that he was not limited in his ability to understand and also to promote knowledge per se and I think that's where we are hopefully and that's another awesome model I'm gonna try because we have so many

48:06 great questions I'm going to try to maybe bundle a couple of them uh and uh maybe asked Dr kamran and then uh if they uh you know if they can give some clarity for this there's a a couple of questions regarding uh Islamic medicine how you define it um and what the difference is between that and between um between I guess like a more materialist approach one question had the uh the word a nihilist approach uh toward medicine there's another question with regards to the the definition uh or differentiation or lack thereof of what is prophetic medicine um and you know so I guess in general like as people who went through this process

48:53 of not only compiling this book but uh you know holding over the years so many seminars on bioethics and uh giving guidance to uh devout Muslim medical practitioners you know how is it that you would as a as as people who kind of stand in the in the space between Islamic learning uh traditional Islamic learning and a medicine that's based on an ethic that's uh not only not gazalian but you know in many ways just kind of disavows the the existence of um most spiritual things and even tries to cut rationality out of the deal to some degree how is it that you would uh see a a a more uh Muslim and more Sunni and uh

49:41 more uh you know spiritually grounded ethic in medicine um other than just saying oh look Bismillah have a beard I have a hijab and I have a lab coat on and we take off ease instead of Christmas or whatever or Hanukkah or whatever it may be how is it that you would uh that you would like reconcile these things at a deeper level level after having you know the ummah collectively having suffered the trauma of of colonialism of this kind of like separation of those things that weren't meant to be separated in the first come around you want to try and all right maybe you should go first okay

50:27 first of all defining a you know a a field of knowledge as opposed to defining a profession so I think nowadays we want to define the profession rather than the field of knowledge field of inquiry and so on field of knowledge requires uh ontology it requires epistemology it requires methodology it impresses certain approaches and certain language and as you say definitions I think it Muslim uh scientists and especially the med school students or students of any other signs they want to come to the table then they must appreciate the river with which you study Islam and people assume that studying Islam is

51:14 just reading Imam knows what Hadith is far from the truth we have a seven year program to autism and then we also have a nine year program and we also have a 15-year program so people who's asking what the heck is studying for 15 years what more can Islam say than what we know in the Sunday School so that's the general I think ignorance in the community that anyone who's everybody can say anything about Islam Islam is free for all and there's no methodology as I said there's no epistemology everybody's saying okay show me the proof yeah so what we need to do is make Islamic scholarship normal we have to normalize Islamic scholarship

52:01 and let people appreciate the river okay and the labor and the the the work that was honest but it is not easy to be an army by any stretch of the imagination and so on when you apply that to applied uh kind of knowledge as when it comes to you know professionals then what we need to do with what we do through bioethics and you know legal ethics and through now I.T ethics and eventually also AI ethics what we want to do is just introduce the basic structure of Islamic Akita so that the professional knows that he will not make a mistake in one number number one and

52:46 number two in the fifth what is Haram okay because what is Haram is not based on speculation it's not based on emotion it's not based just on cultural considerations and conventions it's not based on whether you're liberal or conservative whether you're Republican or whether you're you know whoever it is that you are it's not not based on political identity is based simply on the knowledge of Islam that we have received through the Quran Sunnah through the sahaba through the tabi and through these great Scholars okay so our tradition is a tradition of following meaning the tabi they follow the sahaba that's why they call the tabi they follow words they're not initiators so knowledge that is super rational we're

53:32 only wahi can inform you of that knowledge that is all based on following knowledge of the Dunya and is cancer anything that is in space and time and it is perceivable through the human mind and it is conceivable to the human internet that is up for grabs then you may debate you may question you may inquire but you cannot detach it from Allah as I said the connection between Catholic must be maintained at all times okay so now medicine is one of those fields that most of it it is not based on Revelation even what they call or prophetic medicine we have to be very careful that we don't over labelize

54:18 overuse the word Islamic medicine and so on because even the the the formula given to by the prophet saws they were based on convention they were based on what he understood and what he knew about in the middle and period and Melody and community and of course he also had access to doctors in his time no there are there are several obviously forming either that are prescribed and so there's no doubt in that so what we need to do is make sure through an academic exercise not an emotional one everybody has the right to be emotional by Islam and say we're all going to Jannah inshallah but it must be academic where it is based on a methodology and a methodology that's

55:04 based on evidence okay so if you're going to clarify or classify something Islamic you need evidence as everyone is asking you will show me the proof I can't show you the proof because you'll understand it even if I show you you need the tools by which you can appreciate the the evidence and so on so my approach to any kind of ethic and any kind of profession is that if you're going to say that I am a Muslim doctor that's fine as a profession if you're going to say I'm going to make a difference in medicine because of my Islam then you need knowledge you can't do it with ignorance or your assumption that I know what medicine is in the debate uh you know whether you

55:51 know cloning is allowed or whether you know organ transplant a lot of weather even you know blood transfusions allowed there's a lot of discussion there's a lot of effect behind it and it takes hours to sift through all of those ideas and all of this all of these principles and it's not a one you know one hour job it's not a one-man job you need a whole community and for to that and we have at Dollar possibly have professionals who are Professionals in their field and we have Scholars who are qualified to discuss issues at the level of ifta at the level not every island can participate either they need to be Quantified they need to be trained and so on so we're trying to create an academic sense uh in the Muslim that

56:37 understand it academically I don't mean from the point of view of a consumer okay so the Mufti will go of a footwear based on the need and the consideration of the consumer that's consumers now we're not interested in that so if you find a book or if you find a photo online and you say like this Mufti has given me this kind of compensation there's this concession so be it fine okay we're not concerned of that we're concerned about writing white papers we're concerned about writing articles in academic journals we're concerned about becoming think tanks in issues that concern Us in the US and the world that we're concerned about you know writing books and textbooks as to how a Mufti and you

57:22 know a pathologist you know general surgeon can come together and actually write a book that can be taught at high school and college in University that can become a standard of knowledge in that field yeah so you're gonna have to excuse me everybody for the term I'm going to use but I'm going to throw it at you anyway always takes a lead in these kind of things there's a difference between blue color professionals and the real scientist Marshall success but the serious scientist he will come to the table with an academic

58:08 approach I want to know this academically how how do you come to this conclusion uh say that blood transfusion is not allowed how would you come to we're not interested in the conclusion we're interested in the methodology we're interested in the epistemology we're interested in the ontology through which and by which you come to this decision as you debate on you know people when they debate legislation and Bill they debate based on whatever utilitarian method they have or empirical method that they have but they have a methodology this is a philosophy there likewise in every Islamic ruling there's a philosophy behind it and it is not always that you see the end product and then you condemn the you know the Army

58:55 is conservative and you you appreciate the one who says everything's halal okay that's not what we do okay what we do is understand the methodology as we used to do and we will debate these issues and it it would take weeks sometimes if not months to come to a conclusion so if you see the Supreme Court those who dissent they have to write a brief for The Descent so that is now organized and it's academic that why do I disagree with this decision why didn't I vote in favor of this I voted against it then you write an academic lead all brief so that's what we're doing here at our classroom that we want to understand

59:40 things the way we used to understand things and not something that's haphazard it is on the level of government that's basically number one number two more than that we want to make uh Halal medicine normal that's our community service in the community what do you want we want to normalize the idea of Halal medicine because there's a lot of Haram medicine out there in the market whether people like it or not I'm going to say it anyway and some sometimes people simply couldn't care less whether it's just as you want your food to be Halal something that you digest medicine used to digest that should be

1:00:25 Halal also so we are asking the medical community to join us in our efforts to make sure that there are no Haram products in the medical uh feeling in medicine in the markets that we we know this is halal because if we are going to cure then as the prophet sallallahu said Allah has not placed shifa in haran and that is what we want to do we want to normalize the idea in the minds of scientists that there is something called Halal medicine now how do you justify something that requires debate that requires rationalizing that requires empirical studies that requires you know utilitarian approaches

1:01:12 approach and all of that when you combine all of this then you can say you do Islamic by ethics but if you're just looking for a fatwa that somebody has written somewhere and you gather all those for tawa and then you give it to you know the middle school student that's not Islamic by ethics and that is Islamic consumerism well if there's such a thing as Islamic conservative anyway so those are my two ideas one is to make sure that uh Muslim professionals know that in their own field it is a philosophy there's an approach there's an academic discussion nothing is something that everybody comes in and says I've created this model now so even in I.T although they don't usually apply their ethics there

1:01:57 is a huge discussion about the ethics behind I.T there's a huge there's so much literature academic literature in the Ivory Tower and the most people who are now drivers and they're they're policy makers and their think tanks they study these papers and that's how you get to legislation yeah so this is the whole process so the first thing is that appreciate that just as rigorous is your field likewise Islam and Islamic knowledge is twice as rigorous and the second is to normalize the idea in the minds of people that you know we cannot use or promote Haram medicine those are two concerns

1:02:43 Dr komron would you like to add anything uh not sure what else I could add to that other than you know I guess you have you have a a perspective that's obviously going to be different because you actually have your hands you know dirty in the work even though they're sanitized of course but figuratively speaking so what I could add to that is you know growing up in you know talking to so-called you know modernists and professionals there was a a distrust in the ulama whether uh rightfully so or not um and what they've perceived to be failures and inadequacies or perhaps the irrelevancies of uh the scholarly class and you know I think um our generation has tried to sort of undo that and showed that you know it is

1:03:30 possible to be a you know uh somebody involved in in sacred Sciences as well as somebody who uh you know studies these so-called secular sizes of women examples of people like that Molalla Dr um many people like that um uh demonstrated and given us examples of that what I've seen recently now is there's a huge backlash against the medical community again for those same perceived failures and inadequacies and again in many cases very rightfully so to the point that many well perhaps intentioned Muslims think that we have to do away with everything in modern medicine because it's all Haram it's all Haram it's all Haram and that of course is a very Sunday school-like approach I mean you know if if somebody has an infection you know you need an

1:04:15 antibiotic like there's no gender political uh you know thing to that but the question is well which antibiotic and you know are is there a different way to kind of uh you know treat that thing so I think we have to get out of our mind that hey everything in modern medicine is just you know nonsense and we have to somehow find this uh you know fantasy prophetic medicine to treat everything the the goal really is to be people of balance and this is where it requires I believe um you know professionals to sit down with the Alama and have discussions and engage on debates like you know euthanasia like organ transplantation like you know many of these issues that I I can speak of in in medicine at the very least so that the Muslim Medical Professional can be can bring their

1:05:02 approach the the island can bring you know his or her approach and now you have something which is much more powerful than just one voice uh speaking you know yes ideally you'd like to have as Sheikh ameen mentioned you know in in ottoman times I mean the person was uh you know the the grand Mufti would also be a physician uh and it's maybe possible for a few people mashallah but I think those would be true you know Savant like uh people who are able to to do that we can expect most communities to be able to have uh you know someone who's the grand Mufti who's also now the chairman of the department of surgery I mean it's just a very difficult thing to do uh so what we need instead is I think uh places like Donald Lawson where those conversations can actually take place so

1:05:48 that we can actually now formulate when people ask me this all the time I'm sure people ask uh both you and Jeff Ramin all the time I mean what is the Islamic medicine and to me it's such an ambiguous amorphous and uh loaded term that it's time we actually try to Define it and the way we Define it is not by listening to a scholar with all due respect it's not by asking a Muslim physician with all due respect but rather we have to have those conversations and see well how do we Define what is the Islamic medicine approach to issues that need to be actually taken care of now other issues which don't need to be taken care of like you know my field if someone has a cataract look they need cataract surgery we don't need to you know revisit some Islamic perspective to that however I

1:06:35 will say um as and again speaking in my field Ophthalmology I've been pleasantly surprised when looking at the prophetic tradition that there is a secrets that may unlock treatments to further cure so for example we know the famous story when the prophet saws suffered from what can only be described as severe dry eye maybe some type of Sjogren's disease or something like that and we we know that he used his blessed saliva to to cure the dry so from there what's interesting is that uh you know in certain severe dry eye cases you can actually anatomically redirect the salivary gland into the orbital socket to basically provide lubrication for the eye right so those

1:07:21 are those are things I'm not saying that that's you know I'm not by the way if your eyes are dry don't put your saliva in your eye okay that as the ophthalmologist will tell you not to do that but the point being is I think when we now look at the prophetic tradition from both the lens uh pardon the pun there the lens of the Muslim scholar as well as the Muslim physician or the Muslim professional we're going to find that we're able to inshallah get better insights both on the academic level but even for the the utilitarian level what your average person wants to know is this Halal is this you know uh is this Haram or whatever that we might be able to find insights that lead to to greater things so that's my answer to the question of as long as medicine is that I think it's so amorphous it's become so loaded that the the challenge now is for

1:08:09 professionals and Scholars to sit down and actually Define it once and for all and figure out what are the issues we need to get involved with and what are issues that we don't need to get involved with and you know we don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak uh moving on to a couple uh more questions again I'm going to try to bundle them supposed to get through them as much as possible I guess I'll uh classify these as a bibliographical uh uh concerns we have a question from Dr Yusuf Patel in Cape Town uh who was one of the close students of the late uh immersive in his Mercy he said do we have any indication from the other works by Maham gazali of when this rasala was

1:08:55 written in his life asks relatedly that uh a dear brother Dr kamran Riaz mentioned it was the second to last chapter in Imam ozali's text which you also share with the last chapter is about and what the wisdom is in the sequence and then further there's a a question with regards to a comment I think that Chef Amin made about the the curriculum of study in the past being a lot longer and I think Masha comment that uh uh Dr kamran made about not expecting uh people to study Elm and study medicine and all of these different things inshallah one day we we should demand better from ourselves and inshallah one day we'll be there maybe

1:09:43 and Dr kamran would like to speak to any of those maybe the bibliographical issues and maybe if they allow me I could share uh something briefly as well if it's okay I'll I'll let jacobean maybe answer the third question I can maybe answer the first first two questions so from what we understand that this were for most sources were written towards the end of Imam of azadi's life that's that's what we think and that's what uh when we spoke to several other um they were at the agreement but if somebody thinks that they were written earlier or anything you know certainly would be open to hearing that uh you know asked a good question I was maybe bearing the lead a little bit uh this is the second to last chapter the very interestingly of the chapter before

1:10:29 this is you know the Divine wisdom the creation of the beasts or the animals and then he puts the insan after that and then he puts the last chapter which uh sneak preview inshallah will be a forthcoming publication we hope to do with Imam publication I've already translated that and that's already done um Divine wisdom in the creation of birds and it's very interesting that he puts the birds after the human beings because you would think well these are birds these are lower life forms why are they uh not uh before uh human beings it's interesting that they think the birds are the the remnants of the dinosaurs that they're not really related to mammals and whatnot but um just as he uses the human body uh how it works here

1:11:15 to understand how the human body will work in the next life uh he's fascinated with the birds and this is a means Insight this is not my insight uh mentioned that perhaps Ali is fascinated with the birds because they're the closest Paradigm we have of understanding what the Angels function and behave like so that's his motivation for writing that chapter and uh in I don't want to spoil much of the things that he mentions but I will say the same uh observation methodology of looking at Birds describing their patterns noticing how they sit on the which birds lay their eggs and sit on them which birds just sort of uh lay their eggs and leave them alone which birds can fly without wings such as bats and you know fishes that can fly uh again it's not an

1:12:01 armchair Ivory Tower Endeavor Imam must have definitely got into the trenches of you know the what's the famous bird watcher like the automa Autobahn guy who you know looked at birds and and so he was engaged in that it's not just uh oh he just read some chronic eye or it's read some Hadith and decided to write A Treatise there's uh immense uh research observation knowledge or at least collaboration with Experts of the time um so inshallah that will be the next project uh uh that uh it won't take 10 years to come out but it'll be hopefully a nice uh epilogue or afterward to this current work that uh we've done shall answer that third question yeah which was the question had to do with uh you had

1:12:48 mentioned about the the books that uh uh and the course of study that was much more holistic and uh uh long in the past um that it's truncated now so someone had asked about what were some of those things that people used to study that they don't study anymore okay let's understand it from from a modern day kind of context and see that's when how long does it take for you to become a PhD in the U.S I would say from kindergarten until you write your thesis right people exclude high school they exclude

1:13:35 Middle School they exclude whatever school is there before that they don't count it put it into the equation and that's a mistake because you could not have done a PhD without a Masters or without a bachelor without high school so when the whole culture is built upon refining yourself in Islamic Arts Islamic education then we would spend 20 22 23 years in Islamic Studies from day one we will start at the age of seven right as most scholars in the past did and they would you know continue studying until the late 20s or even 30s

1:14:20 so you see now that if you put it into the U.S context it makes perfect sense so you'd have Elementary that you know intermediate you to have advanced and you'd have graduate postgraduate studies and if you put it into that filter then you say yeah it makes perfect sense that if you want to really be an expert in one field you need 20 years of study for 18 years and that was after he became a recognized album and while you're doing with somebody for 18 years all right so again again the the naivete of the modern Muslim that he thinks that studying three months six months somewhere in the

1:15:07 Middle East and coming back and becoming the Sheikh all the time obviously that formula is a kind of suicidal in the reeks of disaster then you get sub mediocre people leading the ummah and they they have no idea no clue as to what the Islamic traditional civilizations are used and the torah's Legacy in knowledge Islamic knowledge is inside I think we need to make that more commonplace we need to normalize that idea that we need to study much more than what we are studying what happened with the darcelain Army then there's an army the the curriculum was actually learned years

1:15:53 it wasn't 70 it was actually 11 years where you did additional studies you did philosophy you did poetry you did so you would read Rumi you would read you would read uh IBN Arabi as part of your course yeah so I think then obviously the Ottomans have the same very similar system where you would study at least 11 years before you can say that you're a qualified person and then there will be apprenticeship after that you sit with a

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