Three means to acquire knowledge

When we approach any kind of the sacred knowledge, the knowledge of Quran, Sunnah, Fiqh and Tazkiyah. We should know that there are three means/tools (zaraeh) that a person has for husul-e-ilm to acquire this knowledge.

The first is what they call asbah-al-khamsa, his or her five senses, i.e. sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste. This is the first means through which a person acquires knowledge of this world – your sensory perception, your five senses. But also know that these five senses can also deceive you, and can sometimes be wrong, incorrect or misleading. They are deficient and are not perfect means to knowledge.

For example if you were standing at a far distance from a mountain. To your eye, that mountain appears small. That is a separate thing that using your brain you know that it is not really small, it is bigger than it looks. The moon is much bigger than it looks, but in reality if you were to confine yourself just on your five senses or just to your sense of sight then you would imagine that the mountain or the moon is just as small as it looks.

So the five senses that you have can deceive you. Many times a person can be deceived by his sight, smell, hearing, touch or taste.

The second means of knowledge is our aql, our rational intellect, i.e. our brain. Allah, subhanuwatala, endowed human beings, perhaps more so that all other creations with a rational ability, the ability to reflect, ponder and think and process thoughts. But also this intellect, our aql can also lead you astray. In fact, all the terrible things that go on in this world today are all because of the aql. This is because human beings’ intellect have let them astray. Whether it lead them to create the atom bomb, whether it lead them to make the decision to drop it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether it lead them to invent the false ideologies of communism and socialism, whether it lead them to invent any type of false ways of human life, any -ism. All these things are acts anything other than the product of human intellect, so much of the sufferings, much of the savagery, much of the butchery that goes on today, is a product of human beings who had ideas and ideologies and some of them viciously trying to propagate their views on earth. So it shows that a human beings’ intellect can also lead him astray. Not just in violent matters, but also in cultural matters, in ways of life. In American you have these debates these days of same-sex marriages. This whole concept of same-sex marriage being something that should be permissible, something that should be acceptable – this whole concept is a product of human beings’ minds. It’s a way of thinking, it’s a way of reflecting, an outlook on life. If a human being lets his intellect go unrestricted, he doesn’t rein it in, then with the kind of examples just highlighted, the kind of consequences (nataij), the type of results his or her intellect may lead him – truly his aql has no bounds.

The third and utmost highest of ways is through divine revelation, i.e. through wahi. Allah, subhanhuwatala, actually sent wahi to us to save us from our aql. To curb our intellect, to manage our intellect, to lay down the borders (hudud) through which we can live our life – be it our individual lives, our family lives, our communal lives, our societal lives, our political lives, our political lives, our lives as a global citizen, the wahi defines each and every in which you have to live. So the purpose of wahi that Allah, subhanuwatala, said in the Quran:

“Kul hudalhe huwal huda”

The guidance of Allah, subhanuwatala, alone is true guidance. If you want to live a rightly guided, informed life, and an enlightened life, it is through the guidance of Allah. The way to be enlighten in this world, where this is no other form of intellectual fulfilment, no other form of enlightenment, no other form of spiritual upliftment, other than the hidaya that is contained in this wahi, in the devine revelation of Quran al Kareem. Say that verily the hidaya of Allah, subahanuwatala, sends, that alone is true hidaya and that alone is true guidance.