QURʾĀNIC REFLECTIONS

Personal Reflections

The Thing with Intellect

March 23, 2017

The best thing I’ve read today: ❝The intellect is an instrument that leads you to an audience with the King, after which it doesn’t follow you in.❞ — Moḥammed Mutawallī ash-Shaʿrāwī.

If this confused you, then allow me to explain a little:

This statement comes in tafsīr of āyah 24 of sūrat ar-Rūm,

[Indeed in that are signs for a people who use reason.] Ar-Rūm:24

Reason is used to comprehend the signs of Allāh that He shows us. It is used to reach a state of belief in Him; do I believe in Him after seeing and hearing so many signs that point towards Him?

Once you arrive at that belief, you submit to Him. Once you are sure that Allāh has commanded it and decreed it, you do not question it. You do not use logic to obey Allāh. You do not use logic to analyse the ordainments of Allāh; why do we have to do this? Why this number of times? Why was this decreed? Why did this happen? Why doesn’t God just do such and such? Why do women have to do x and not the y that men get to do? And so on. These are questions that minds cannot fathom nor answer completely; the people who insist on answering these questions live a life of hypothesising and building their belief on weak assumptions. In worst case scenario, they end up following the path of misguidance as is evident in many cases.

We are conditioned by the widespread secularist culture to believe that our intellects are supreme and almighty. That our intellects know no bounds and cannot and should not be restrained. This manner of thinking is the epitome of following hawā (desire) which Allāh warns us against repeatedly in the Qurʾān, it is the following of this hawā that leads to misguidance. The disbelievers that Allāh tells us about in the Qurʾān, didn’t disbelieve because they were unconvinced. They disbelieved because they venerated the ways of their forefathers, or they venerated the sacred men amongst them, or they venerated the ones they believed were protecting them, and yes, some disbelieved because they venerated their intellect—over and above the instructions of Allāh.

When we submit to Allāh, we submit even our intellect to Him, and because of this we do not question Him nor do we try to fathom matters that are beyond us.

An example that I often give in my Tafsīr classes to better explain this point:

Human beings, unarguably, have limitations. These limitations are either unique to us or ‘individual limitations’. OR they are limitations that are common to the entire human race.

Two of such limitations are physical limitations and intellectual limitations.

So, for example, the amount of weight I can lift is different than the amount of weight my older brother can lift. The speed I can run at is different than the speed an athlete might run at. These differences are determined by our individual physical limitations.

We also have physical limitations as a human race, so suppose a person was to jump off a high platform and flap his arms, no matter how fast he flaps, he will never fly.

Similarly we have intellectual limitations as individuals. For example, some are better at calculations, while others are better at languages. Some can write well, others can speak well. Some can memorise in short periods, others need twice or even thrice as long. No one can deny these individual intellectual limitations each of us has relative to another person.

We also have intellectual limitations as a human race, as an example of this, we cannot fathom matters related to the unseen. This is knowledge that Allāh hasn’t given us and we have no way of access this knowledge to try and make sense of it.

ALL of our minds without exception have absolutely no way of comprehending what Allāh does or why He does it or HOW He does it; what is going to happen and how it will happen; how the matters of the heavens and the earth are run. The one who tries to use intellect here is no different to the one who jumps off a high platform and then promptly flaps his arms—the only direction he will be headed is south.

A failure to acknowledge this intellectual limitation is a failure in submitting to Him, and this is what leads to chaos.

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