‘The Qur’an and You’ Series (pt. 6)
May8
Tariq Mehanna
In Surat al-Baqarah, v.93, Allah described the Children of Israel: {“…and their hearts drank up the veneration of the calf…”}
When Prophet Moses left for Mt. Sinai to converse with Allah, the Children of Israel became restless and sought out a new god to worship besides Allah. So, they ended up worshipping an artificial golden calf (mentioned in pt. 3). Allah described their veneration of this calf using the word ‘ushribu’ (they drank up, or soaked, or absorbed), thus likening their deviance to the act of drinking or soaking up liquid.
Elsewhere, guidance and knowledge is also given this likeness. In a hadith reported by both al-Bukhari and Muslim, the Prophet (عليه السلام) said: “The likeness of the guidance and knowledge that Allah sent me with is that of a rain that fell on some land… so, Allah benefited the people with it and they drank from it and quenched their thirst…” They also report a hadith where he said: “While I was sleeping, I was given a container of milk. I drank from it until I could see it coming out from beneath my fingernails. I then gave what I had left over to ‘Umar bin al-Khattab.” When he was asked to interpret this dream, he said: “This represents knowledge.” Also, in the hadith of the Isra’ and Mi’raj, the Prophet said: “… I was then presented with two containers, one containing milk and the other containing wine. I was told: “Drink from whichever you want.” So, I took the milk and drank it, and I was told: “You chose the fitrah (the pure, natural choice). If you had chosen the wine, your people would’ve been misguided.”"
Just like the body has its thirst quenched by fluid, the heart has its thirst quenched by knowledge and proper guidance. When seeking to quench the body’s thirst, one will only drink what is pure and wholesome. If presented with a glass of water, however, that has been tainted with even the smallest drop of black ink, he will reject it and not quench his thirst from this polluted source. The thirst of the heart should likewise only be quenched from a pure, untouched source of knowledge and guidance. It was this approach that chiseled out the incredible generation of the Prophet’s Companions. It was this approach that created hearts and minds unmatched in their wisdom and strength. This approach was intentional and planned, and was not the result of desperation or lack of alternative sources of guidance. Sayyid Qutb commented:
“The Holy Qur’an was the only source from which they quenched their thirst, and this was the only mold in which they formed their lives. This was the only guidance for them, not because there was no civilization or culture or science or books or schools. Indeed, there was Roman culture, its civilization, its books, its laws, which even today are considered to be the foundation of European culture. There was the heritage of Greek culture – its logic, its philosophy, and its arts, which are still a source of inspiration for western thought. There was the Persian civilization, its art, its poetry, and its legends, and its religion and system of government. There were many other civilizations, near or far, such as the Indian and Chinese cultures, and so on. The Roman and Persian cultures were established to the north and to the south of the Arabian Peninsula, while the Jews and Christians were settled in the heart of Arabia. Thus we believe that this generation did not place sole reliance on the Book of Allah for understanding of their religion because of any ignorance of any civilization and culture. Rather, it was all according to a well-thought out plan and method… This generation, then, drank solely from this spring and thus attained a unique distinction in history. In later times, it so happened that other sources mingled with it…”
For them, the Qur’an was in and of itself a source of outlook on life, and it was in itself a lens through which to be understood. It did not require – and, in fact, rejected – that it be viewed and understood and interpreted through a foreign lens. The Prophet made sure to limit strictly the filters through which the Companions absorbed what the Qur’an had to offer them, and that strict limit was maintained throughout the era of the Companions, keeping the Ummah guided, united, and strong. At the end of their generation, however, and spilling over into the early Tabi’in, their pure source of knowledge became blemished. The Qadariyyah appeared, the Mu’tazilah emerged in Basrah, the Jahmiyyah in Khurasan, and so on. The emergence and proliferation of these foreign, illegally innovated beliefs was the result of that original pure source now being understood through a foreign lens – the lens of the philosophers of Greek civilization, Persian literature, etc. Rather than limiting themselves to the Qur’anic understanding of itself, and the Prophetic understanding of the Qur’an, and the Salafi lens through which that pure early generation understood what the Qur’an came to offer, the Qur’an was now being filtered through and presented by a foreign approach – through the lens of those whose so-called “civilization” came to bedazzle these Arabs who had the true meaning of civilization and knowledge right in the self-sufficient Qur’an and Sunnah. That original glass of pure, clear water was now tainted, making it toxic to the heart. It was heroes like Imam Ahmad bin Hambal who went through periods of imprisonment and torture at the hands of al-Mu’tasim, etc. in an effort to reverse this trend and halt this pollution of source. Back then, this pollution mainly affected details of theology, such as the understanding of Allah’s Attributes.
Today, the pollution of source affects areas that were not affected back then. For example, while al-Mu’tasim would enforce Mu’tazili beliefs to the point of ordering Imam Ahmad whipped, he would also send out expeditions regularly, raze cities to the ground to retrieve a single Muslim oppressed by the kuffar, and so on. Despite his deviance in the area of theology, his worldview was untainted and was still derived purely from the Qur’an. He still retained the concept of ‘izzah, still retained the concept of selflessness and loyalty to the believers, still retained the concept of Islam vs. Kufr, still had ghayrah for the believers, still retained the concept of shielding them from their enemies. He still retained the same worldview that the earlier generations had absorbed and soaked up from the Qur’an’s clear, unambiguous verses in Al ‘Imran, an-Nisa’, al-Anfal, at-Tawbah, and so on. It is these concepts, this Qur’anic worldview, understood so well and clear by even the likes of al-Mu’tasim that today has been distorted for no other reason than that it is viewed through a lens foreign to the self-sufficient Qur’an. It is the filtering of the pure Qur’anic spring through a foreign, alien, Western filter that has nearly abrogated the concepts that al-Mu’tasim understood so well from the Western Muslim mentality. The wala’ and bara’ understood and practiced by the earlier Muslims is replaced with a capitalist mindset of ‘every man for himself.’ It is that tainting that drives even “scholars” – who got right what al-Mu’tasim got wrong – to prefer Western media terminology (‘militants’) to Qur’anic terms (‘mujahid’). So, the Qur’anic worldview is today’s victim of the pollution of a pure source of knowledge and guidance, due to it being viewed through a foreign, colonial lens; a Western lens.
It is therefore imperative to go back and quench the thirst of our hearts through a drink untainted. Math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, medicine, agriculture, technology, etc. can be studied safely from any source. But our beliefs, our lifestyle, our worldview – whatever Allah has taken upon Himself to address in the Qur’an – should be absorbed unfiltered from the Qur’an, and viewed through its own lens and not through a distorted foreign one. We need to free our minds!
If the Children of Israel had stuck to the pure spring of Moses’s teachings, they wouldn’t have drank in their hearts the drink tainted with the foreign influence of idolatry that led them to worship the golden calf instead of their Creator.
