Belief Before Evidence: The Gravest Islamic Innovation

And sometimes in identical words Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala says that which translates to and some people argue against Allah or argue about Allah without knowledge without guidance and without a clear book. So here we have three things that Allah mentions. These are the three sources of knowledge for the human being. Anything that is going to be called knowledge is going to come from one of these three places. He mentions knowledge guidance and a clear book. So knowledge here, what is meant by knowledge is logic. We're speaking about knowledge in its two forms, the deductive and inductive. Deductive, 2 - 1 is how much? Come on guys, 2 - 1 is how much? One. Is there anybody who has a different opinion? No, because it's deductive. Inductive is based on experimentation. Fire is hot. We all know that, right? Could there be a fire in the future that we have never seen that might not be hot? Maybe, but what we know is that our experience tells us that every fire you touch is going to be hot and it's going to burn you. Right? Then we have the second type of knowledge. So we have knowledge of experience, what we learn from around us. Number two we have guidance. What is meant by guidance here? The scholars of tafsir tell us guidance meaning a messenger from Subhana Wa Ta'ala. And that is one of two types of revelation. Number one is the messenger, and number two is the book that the messenger receives. And those two are mentioned separately because the messenger's understanding of the book is also part of the revelation. Right? And we've discussed this before. These are the only three things which are considered to be valid arguments or valid sources of knowledge upon which to found our arguments. Knowledge, guidance, and a book from Allah Subhana Wa Ta'ala. Anything else is merely what? Whims, desires, dressed up as knowledge. Emphatic opinions, very vehement, staunch positions. Just because a person says it with enthusiasm doesn't make it true. Imagine here that we have a detective. And this detective, he's called to a crime scene. And before he even gets to the crime scene, he jumps in his car and he says on his way to the crime scene, "I know who committed this crime, and I've already solved the crime." And then they get to the crime scene. Now, there's evidence at the crime scene, right? There's clues. If a person already has an opinion formed before receiving the evidence for that opinion, what's going to happen? He's going to twist all of the clues to match that narrative, all of them. And any clues that cannot be twisted, he will discard them and avoid them and ignore them. And this happens all the time. This is called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is one of the most dangerous threats that threaten the Muslimin today. Why is that? Because we are learning very little from our book and learning quite a lot from our environment. And then we're going back to our book to only reaffirm what we think we already know. So, for instance, a person believes that this is how children should be raised. And so, they have an opinion on what is right and what is wrong. Based on what? Based on popular opinion, based on TikTok, based on Instagram, based on what so-and-so said, based on my past experience, based on my relationship with my parents, based on how I feel that day, based at whatever junction I'm at in life, and then I go to read the Quran. What am I only going to be looking for when I read the Quran? Only what confirms what I already believe. And everything else, no matter how glaringly obvious, I'm going to what? Either twist it or avoid it. This is the most dangerous thing. This is a very simple rule, very simple principle. You never believe something until you have the evidence, and that evidence leads you to that belief, never the other way around. How many people today of so-called Muslimin, they will hear a narration and already, just because the narration shocks their system with something they haven't, you know, that contradicts what they know to be true, immediately they what? They they form an opinion against it and decide this narration is not authentic. No way could the Prophet Muhammad that I know ever say something this. And then they'll go and do what? They'll go search for whatever upholds that belief and whatever contradicts that belief, they will discard it or twist it. And this happened in a very major way which introduced one of the gravest in innovations ever introduced into Islam. The first innovation was what? The first innovation in the history of Islam, who knows? Al-Khawarij. And what is the basis of the Khawarij belief? They took verses of the Quran speaking about the Kuffar and applied them to the Muslimin. That was the basis of their innovation. And they believed it and they were righteous, they tried to be righteous. So much so that the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam tells us that an average companion would pale in contrast to these men in their salah and fasting and recitation of the Quran and so forth. But they had the belief before they had the evidence. And if you hold a belief before you receive the evidence, you will you will twist the evidence to fit your narrative. The next innovation was the innovation of Al Qadariyyah. They believed that there was no destiny. Why? Because they thought about it in their logic. They couldn't understand how decree and Al Qadar worked. They came to conclusions and then they twisted the Quran to meet that those conclusions. The next came the Jahmiyyah. The Jahmiyyah originate from the belief systems of the philosophers of Greece and Rome and Persia. They believed that Aristotle and Plato and Socrates and all of these characters, that these guys, they were logicians. And they only arrived at their conclusions by way of unbiased logic. And they confused inductive with deductive. And so they learned from Aristotle who Allah is. And then they went to the Quran and found what? It clashes very strongly. So what did they do? You got to put one in the other. You can't They can't both coexist. So they tried to make the Quran fit into Aristotle's philosophy based on the idea that Aristotle is a pure logician and that true logic could never contradict the Quran revelation. And what happened as a result? They went astray and thousands of scholars of Ahlus Sunnah were put to the sword, were tortured, were punished, were put in prisons for decades. Why? Because they presupposed a a a conclusion and then they looked for the evidence. This is the This is a case of the cart before ahead of the donkey. It has to be the other way around. It has to be the evidence first and that evidence then leads you naturally, organically to the truth. Now, alhamdulillah alhamdulillah we don't have that problem as Muslimin. You know why? Because we have scholars that already explained to us all of these conclusions. We have scholars that explained everything. We don't have to put on our Nancy Drew caps and go searching to find out the conclusions. These things are already concluded. They will tell us what the Quran means, what the Sunnah of the Prophet means. All we have to do is accept and comply. But what fights against that? Modern racism, modern feminism, modern misandry, modern modern democracy, all of these ideas as to how things should work. We learn them and then we go and twist the Quran to mean whatever we want it to say. I remember during the height of the first and second Gulf War. I'm old enough to remember the rhetoric that was being said back at that time and I know a lot of younger folks today they can't really understand just how brainwashed the average American was. But before the internet and in the baby years of the internet, Americans really believed that they were on a crusade to spread the light of democracy through the earth. They really believed that we were murdering people by the hundreds of thousands in foreign countries that they we were actually there to give them the gift of democracy and emancipate their women. That's what they thought they were there for. They all thought that. They thought that they murdered over a million Iraqis for that reason. Africans, forget about it. They got absolutely stuffed into the meat grinder by their own leaders. And all for what? To spread democracy. Now, it's changed now. Now it's Now it's this new humanism thing. But before democracy was communism. And before that it was fascism. And before that it was in the name of Christianity. And before that it was Darwinian evolution and so forth. There's always a new theme. And where are the terrorists? Are they hiding over there? Before the terrorists, it was the weapons of mass destruction. We'll have to come and get them, right? But then we came up with the terrorists and you have terrorists in your country, we're going to send drones and literally bomb bomb you to oblivion while you're having dinner or having breakfast, right? And we justified all this by what? By the idea of spreading democracy. During that time, you would find people, men and women, Muslimin, who would use verses of the Quran and narrations of the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam as evidence that communism is correct. That democracy is correct. That fascism is correct. That socialism is correct. That feminism is correct now. Now. There are modern, {quote} {unquote} Muslimi, Muslim women who believe that no man can speak on behalf of a woman, and you have to be a woman to know what a woman is going through. You can't say anything if you're not a woman. Are you a woman? If you're not a woman, you can't say anything about women. Well, that presents a big problem because your prophet is a man. And the majority of his companions were men, and the majority of scholars of Islam are men. And this gives us a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion across the board. Any man that speaks, we're already we are already suspicious of him. He's speaking from in lieu of his toxic masculinity, right? Or if it's an Arab, how can you speak on the plight of the black man in today's world? You don't know what it's like. The microaggressions is eating us alive. We can't survive. Right? This is exactly what every fitna brings with it. And what does a fitna truly bring with it? A shubuha, it brings the conclusion before the evidence. And so we distrust our scholars. The scholars leading their people astray, that is not our history. That's the history of Christianity and Judaism. That's not our history. Our history, the Muslims have never disobeyed their scholars except that it ended in tragedy. And they never obeyed their scholars except that they were given greatness on.

[Arabic recitation]