Friday, July 8, 2011

Knowledge of The Unseen : Yasir Qadhi on Jannatul Firdaus

I like to listen to people like Yasir Qadhi of Houston,Texas, USA; Al Margroui who originated from Sufi land of Morocco/ Algeria; and occasionally Shaykh Hamza Yusuf Hanson, a convert from Christianity reverting to Islam in his late teen in the USA and had learn about Islam from amongst all places, Mauritania, Africa. Not to leave out Shaykh Ninowy now domiciled in USA, originally from Syria and a couple other scholars like Dr Bilal Phillips who had found Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia amongst the sons and daughters of people from the diplomatic enclave ,'secular'[ an unsurprising fact of course ]. He grew up for some years in his early youth in KL. Taught English later in Saudi Arabia and had sustained 'permanent head damage' there and now in the forefront of daawah since then!

The common denominator amongst them is they all have deep knowledge plus plus on the faith AND a mastery of English, which whether we like it or not now in this 21st century , is the language of DAAWAH. You want the spirit of the faith, you need to master Arabic to get to feel the real essense of Islam, but to bring back lost 'flocks to the fold', it is back to English

There is an obvious distinct difference in the theological approach between those schooled in the Nedj peninsula namely from the Medinan/ Makkah axis and that from elsewhere. Oftentimes if you are bent on sticking to the minutiae , you may say the differences are major and irreconciliable!
But if you are really generous with yourselves and can differentiate between the trees and the forest, the differences are really small and 'branches' in nature.

In essense,all boils down to a Knowledge of The Unseen, and how far deep one would like to go into this path.In a world of meanings related to The Unseen, one can choose to take a 'literalist' approach or a 'figurative' approach. Both are right or both could be wrong, but if our 'nawaitu' are right, we are not far away from The Straight Path. LIFE IS A jOURNEY, and if we always are guided by the Quran, we are OK.

We will start with Shaykh Yasir Qadhi on this interesting journey

Jannatul Firdaus by Yasir Qadhi, click here



For related articles on the blog :
Ru, Joe, Sha and Nina,click here
Mixing the Profane and the Sublime, click here

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