Goals of learning – #1

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

My brothers and sisters words are always original. I always thank Allah SWT a great deal for the fact that there is a lot of interest, especially among the younger generation, among the youth in Islam. And that is something which I hugely appreciate and I thank Allah for. There was a time when this was not the case and Alhamdulillah, we seem to have broken that. So lots of discussions and questions and halaqas and people teaching and learning. That's the upside. The downside of this is that in this eagerness to learn and eagerness to be doing something, very often the people involved, they lose track of the methodology of learning. They lose track of their actual goals of learning. And as a result, they fall into the term of shaitan and these discussions and halaqas and so on end up with people getting irritated with each other and fighting each other and so on. And the chief reason for that is because there is this, quite understandable, but there is this fascination for fiqh, for different masailah fiqh. So now this is a terrible thing because it's something that fiqh is a, it's something that is dangerous because fiqh is a specialty and it is a specialty that even to get there you have to have a whole lot of other things that you should know before you approach fiqh. And then you have to study the usul and the rules of fiqh. And only then can you get into understanding fiqh. So fiqh is not something that you just pick up a book and you, you know, read through it and you find one hadith and you say, well, this is what the ruling is. This is what happens, unfortunately. And that's why I want to talk about that. So many times, you know, people will write to me, send messages or call and they will say, I was discussing this matter and what is the ruling on it, you know, which is halal or hara. And many times or almost all the time, the matters that they are talking about are what we call in the stella of the sharia, the language of the law, furu-i-masail, which is tertiary, things which are, I won't say unimportant because, you know, they are important, but they are like secondary importance, tertiary importance. They are not things that will send you to Jahannam or Jannah. Thanks to the internet, may Allah have mercy on us and on the internet, the fact of making things easy also opens the door for falling into problems because things become so easy that you lose the vaqar of that thing, you lose the greatness of the thing, you lose the respect for the thing. On a side note, that's why Rasulullah said don't make umrah again and again and again. You know, let that, let that, the magnificence and the nobility, the holiness of the experience enjoy that and let that be with you. Don't make it into a routine thing that okay, you know, and I normally pray asr in Masjid al-Haram, so I go there, I make umrah, I just pray Masjid al-Haram in asr. Please go and pray asr every day, no problem. But don't make umrah every day, don't make umrah again and again and again because it can take away the awe of the experience, which is such a beautiful thing. To come back to my subject here, so when people get into this issue of just referring from here and there and the internet and whatnot, they get a lot of material, no doubt about that, but most people who are not trained in the Islamic sharia, in the Islamic methodology of teaching and learning, do not know what to do with the material that they see. So when they see something, they say, well, okay, this is what should be done, and many of them get very rigid about it, and they say, no, this has to be done. This is something which is compulsory, or they get into that kind of a sort of mental framework with that. Whereas it might not be, it might be something in which there is a lot of flexibility. Yes, there is a rolling, but it is not necessarily something which is so strong, or vice versa. It may seem to be something which is not so serious, but it might be very serious. Now,