A Letter

AsSalamu ‘alaykum. I make duaa for you and your family to have a fulfilling, productive Ramadan. 

We’re nearing the middle of this blessed month already. And here I am again asking for a sadaqah of 3 minutes of your precious time to read this message. My thanks in advance.

I wanted to share something I heard from Shaykh Amin quite recently. He talked about Surah Al-Naml, the chapter of The Ant. It was refreshing and energizing as always, and I made a note to myself to spend some time writing down what I heard. But here’s the take-away quote: 

All your power, all your military might, all your strategic thinking, all your planning – all of it – is subordinate to knowledge derived from revelation. 

Sulaymān ‘alayhisSalaam seals his profound observation, in the words of the Quran, with Hadha min Fadli Rabbiy.

This is the brand of knowledge that passes through the halls of Darul Qasim, or as one student observed to me recently, “bounces off its walls like electric charges.” This is a subtle brand of knowledge. Its acquisition is subtle. Its dispensation is subtle. Its custodians are subtle. Yet the vessel that bears it is an enormous ark of scholarship that has endured over time. The planks of this ark are solid timber, cut from giant trees that represent the knowledge of the sahabah. The planks are held together by nails forged from the iron will of the far-sighted tabi’een. And the individuals at the helm are scholars with their himmah as they toil to process their prophetic inheritance. 

This ark is built to weather storms – history bears witness to this. This ark is a blessing to those who give themselves to it, it is a refuge to those who board it, and it is hope for those who grab its lines and follow in its wake. It represents hope for anyone who wants to remain in the ummah of our Sayyid, our Rasūl, Muhammad SallAllahu ‘alayhi wa Sallam.

There are no shortcuts to this knowledge. It must be learned and dispensed with method and care. If our painfully recent history has shown us anything – whether it be the tragedy of the Sepetember 11 attacks with its hamstringing of the American Muslim psyche, or the foulness of the ISIS epidemic with the bodies and souls it shattered – it is that knowledge acquired without method and grounding in strong prerequisites is not only devoid of Nūr but infused with elements of nār. (That’s another Shaykh Amin gem.)

America is thirsty for this brand of knowledge. That may seem like a very pie-in-the-sky thing to say. But we couldn’t be more serious in these grim times. And the way we make this knowledge available is through academic discourse – that is how serious change comes about. We need to empower our institutions to bring real value to mainstream academia. This takes meticulous planning and money.

Whether you are looking to make an endowment, a one-time donation, or a recurring one, you couldn’t do better than to divert your wealth to Darul Qasim. May Allah make us all beneficiaries of his Fadl. May we all have a part in Sulaymān’s wisdom to recognize the source with Hadha min Fadli Rabbiy. This is where the quest begins.

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