How Allah Treats You Based on Knowledge

There is a narration that I want to share with my brothers, my sisters with respect to the exaltation of knowledge and how we treat knowledge and how we mistreat knowledge. Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala tells us He says.

[Silence]

In this verse Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is.

[Arabic recitation]

And the Muslimin, anyone who reads these verses, hears these verses, how exactly we are to treat knowledge in order that we can be treated with knowledge. He says, "Subhana wa ta'ala, oh you who have believed, if you are told to make room in your gathering, then make room. And if you are told to rise, then rise." If you're told to make room, meaning the reason that this verse was revealed is that the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam would be sitting and people would be mustered around him. Nobody wants to lose their place. Everyone wants to be in the front. They want to be close. They want to hear. So, this shows us first of all how the companions radiyallahu anhu behaved towards knowledge. Whenever they had an instance or an opportunity to sit and listen to knowledge, they didn't spread out and go to the end of the masjid and sit down and act you know, it's just go ahead, talk, entertain me, you know. This is not how they behaved. They would muster around the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam and later the other companions who would teach. And they would come close. But they were a little bit too much in that. And so, Allah says, "If you are told to make room in your gathering, then make room." Make room in your gathering. Told by who? By the teacher. In this verse, the prophet sallallahu alaihi wasallam or anyone who fills that position of teaching. Make room. Someone comes in, make room for him. He sits down. You take You take that direction. He says, "And if you are told to rise, then rise." They would come to the prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam. He would invite them to eat. He would invite them into his place. And they would want to linger. They would eat and then they would want to hang out. They would want to sit and talk and And so the prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam found it difficult to articulate his discontentment with that. He's got things to do. He needs to have his own time. He needs to have his own And so he would indicate, but his indications weren't being picked up on. And so Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala had to spell it out for him in the Quran subhanahu wa ta'ala in a number of verses. But one of the commandments was, "And if you are told to rise, then rise." Meaning leave. Yani infadhu. Insarifoo. All right? Then Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said, "Allah will raise those believers amongst you and those who were given knowledge specifically." So Allah will raise all believers generally, but those who are given knowledge, he will raise them specifically and much higher than the rest. And we notice here the correlation between manners, etiquette, and knowledge, right? There's an etiquette. You know, the people of knowledge, they they speak a particular language, a particular etiquette. Any field, any any human beings, is one of the things that sets the human being aside from all other creatures. We have an etiquette, right? We have an etiquette when we go to eat. We have an etiquette when we, , you know, mechanics have an etiquette. They have terminologies. They have etiquette. They have things they do, things they don't do, things they view to be offensive, and things that they view to be necessary, right? And in every other field. Well, in order to access knowledge from the people of knowledge, the scholars of Islam and their students, those people who are the heirs of Muhammad, sallallahu alaihi wasallam. This is not just every other person. This is an heir of prophethood. The people of knowledge are an heir to prophethood. They inherited from him.

[Arabic recitation]

Into the marketplace one day, and he announced in the marketplace, "You all are here in the market. Meanwhile, the prophet's inheritance is being distributed in the masjid." They, of course, thought that what he meant was, you know, his shoes, his clothes, his things that he had. And so, people rushed to the masjid and found who there? They found the companions there teaching. This is what the prophets left behind. And how you behave, even the way that you sit, the way that you This all has to do with how much knowledge you will be allotted by Allah and by the the gatekeepers of knowledge. The men and the women that keep that knowledge. You don't have an inherent right to it. You have earn it. And there's a way to access it. You have to speak their language and you have to learn their language. A lot of times you hear "Oh, you know, it's just not engaging enough. I need Already? Someone who has this I idea of we need to think of new and inventive ways to make people want to learn about the Quran and the Sunnah. We need to reinvent the wheel. People are different and so we need to we need to figure out a way to incentivize people. Is the hellfire not a good enough incentive? What about paradise? Is that a good incentive? It's not an issue of if I go to the masjid and if I learn, I'm doing someone a favor. I You know, I'm going above and beyond. You are barely servicing your own salvation. This is not an issue of you know, a person can turn away from Islam and that's their choice and Islam loses. No. Allah Subhana Wa Ta'ala says that lan tador Allah shayan. He said to the companions, "If you all turn away and leave Islam, all of you, you will not harm Allah. You will not harm Islam in the least. They will not be harmed by that. We need Islam. Islam doesn't need us. We need Allah. He is a summit. A summit does not need us. That is the dynamic here. And so, how we accept this knowledge, whether or not anyone sees us or not, Allah is watching us. So, I'll share this narration here. In Sahih al-Bukhari in the book of knowledge, a group of three men arrived in Medina. Now, these men had arrived in Medina for what purpose? They made hijrah. They came to Medina to see the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam. And as they arrived, they walked into the masjid and they found that he was sitting and the companions were around him. And so, each of these three men did something different than the other. One of them turned around and left. The other one sat behind the circle. They didn't sit how we sit when we try to learn. They didn't sit in the rows over there and stare at the wall while the person teaching is talking to the wall over here. Could you imagine if if I did that? Would you consider that rude? Seriously. If I sat and looked at this wall right now and gave you this talk right here, would you would you be offended? Or if I just stared off into the distance this. I I acted like there's no one here right now. Or I stared over here in the middle and I left everyone and make no eye contact with anyone, speak as if no one is here. Wouldn't you be offended by that? It's offensive, isn't it? The companions radi Allah anhu would gather around. They would sit around. They would face the Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam. They would face their teachers, Ubayy ibn Ka'b, Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, Abdullah ibn Umar. They would face them. They would show that respect in order to receive. The Prophet Sallallahu alayhi wasallam says that one of the men left. The other one came in and found the circle around the prophet alaihi wasallam was kind of was kind of full, so he didn't want to to disturb the circle, right? So, the prophet is speaking, he's going to come in and then say, "Hey, could you move a little bit?" That dis- that is a disruption. He didn't want to disrupt. He wanted to be a fly on the wall and hear what the prophet alaihi wasallam is saying, not for the prophet's sake. He wasn't doing him a favor. He was doing his own soul a favor. I am lost in the darknesses of this world. I am in desperate need of cleansing. Right? And so, he was too shy to make that disturbance. So, he sat behind the general group. And the third, he was a little bit more ambitious. And so, he went in to sit and without having to say anything, naturally, the companions made room and he sat down. Why? Because this verse had already been revealed at that time. The verse that we started with and they had already understood to be vigilant of any other person coming to make room for them to sit. And so, after he was completed, after he finished, let's take a stop there. Could you imagine if the companions and the prophet alaihi wasallam were in our time? Could you imagine them being on the phone on their phones as he's speaking? what about Abu Bakr? What about Ibn Mas'ud? What about all the way to scholars today? What's the difference? Time? Or, you know, that's something for the prophet, but nobody These are the heirs of the prophets. And they have the same knowledge that is being spoken. And so, after he was finished, he said, "Shall I not inform you of what Allah's response was to those three men that just approached?" And so, they said, "Bala ya Rasul Allah." He said, "The first one, he turned away, and Allah in turn turned away from him." Imagine that. The poor soul doesn't even know that that happened. And because he left, that word of, "Hey, did you know that Allah turned away from you when you turned away from Allah's words and his messenger?" He doesn't even know that happened. Do you think he found out later? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know. Maybe even he doesn't know. But he said, "He turned away, and so Allah turned away from him." And as for the second, he was shy before Allah, meaning he didn't want to interrupt the revelation of Allah. And so, Allah was in turn shy with him. He said, "And as for the third, as for the third, he came to seek sanctuary with Allah, and Allah granted him that sanctuary. All of this happened, not one of them said a word. And why is it Allah is having these interactions with them? What was What does that mean, Allah? Were they headed towards Allah? Was it the Quran being recited in this particular instance? No, maybe verses were being studied, the words of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam. But, the words of Allah, the words of the prophet, and the understanding of those words is of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And so, how you treat that knowledge is how you will be treated by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And this is a mistake that a lot of people don't even recognize. For instance, if I were to say in a conversation, just you and I, two people, I say, "You know, as Allah said, wal asr, innal insana lafi khusr, nine people out of 10 will not let you finish that without saying it with you or telling you, "I know. I already know. I know." This is not how a person listens to the Quran. As soon as someone says, "Allah said, the prophet said," immediately there is only one person speaking, we listen. And when you show that respect, that exaltation to Allah's words, to the prophet's words, to the people of knowledge, that exaltation now starts to raise you. Now you are speaking the the not this the language of the people of knowledge. This is the first step in learning. But, ignorance, unfortunately, is a a silent killer. It's very similar to a cancer. Because a lot of the time ignorance is painless for the most part. A person will not recognize how ignorant they are or how much they need knowledge until they learn it. It's if you were in a toxic environment, physically toxic, making your body sick, you it's just enough to make you sick but not enough to make you bedridden. You wouldn't even recognize just how toxic it was until you what? Until you leave that environment. If we all lived in the dark all the time, we would never know what the light has to offer until we experience it.