Importance of Understanding Religious Knowledge

These skills

are skills

that is, eliciting meaning from the text.

By exercising the mind with them, the student advances. This is a benefit

of scholarly lessons that you do not find in books.

They sharpen your mind and strengthen your understanding.

They improve your connection to knowledge if you receive it properly by learning

from its qualified experts.

Through this,

your affiliation with them becomes valid, and you become well versed in

the meanings of knowledge.

This

intellectual exercise

surpasses

what practitioners of mathematics,

chemistry, and physics engage in.

Evidence of this is that Almighty God made the sciences of

revelation

the sciences of the most intelligent people, namely the prophets.

The greatest thing through which intelligence, understanding, and perception emerge

is religious knowledge

related to revelation, meaning the Quran and the Sunnah in the religion of

Islam.

As for those sciences, although they give

the mind strength and sharpness, especially the sciences of

mathematics,

algebra, and geometry, they

fall short of

what arises within the soul

from the sciences of the prophets, which come from revelation. Why do they

fall short?

I will answer you shortly, as our common folk say.

Because the sciences of the prophets produce intelligence

along with purity,

making them beneficial to the soul and refining it.

As for those sciences, calamity may arise

from intelligence,

as evidenced by

the atomic bomb and others.

This intelligence brought about these weapons that kill people,

and though they are beneficial in some ways, they are harmful in many others.

The sciences of revelation benefit and do no harm in any respect.

Therefore,

Abu Bakr ibn al-Arabi said in Ahkam al-Qur'an, regarding the verse on

ablution,

“I discussed

with a group of our companions in Baghdad the issues

derived from this verse, and they exceeded 850

issues.”

Whoever says, “We understand the Quran, and we understand it. We do not need to study under shaykhs, nor do

we need to receive knowledge, for we are intelligent.”

Give him a verse like this. Tell him, “Go on, derive just one hundred

from it.”

The point of this is to direct attention to

the importance of correctly understanding Islamic law and beneficial learning from it,

without disparaging the sciences from which people benefit.

But to declare that those sciences are inferior to the knowledge of

Islamic law, and that the intelligence of those devoted to Islamic law, if

their knowledge is sound and their understanding strong, is superior

to the intelligence of those people.

Some people imagine these sciences are for those of limited

intelligence. This is profound ignorance, for the most intelligent

and complete in intelligence are the prophets, peace and blessings be upon them.