Challenging our certainties.

One of my teachers taught us in a class last year: ‘The less you learn, the more you think you know. And the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know!’ I reflected on this, questioned myself and have felt it hard to write about anything in many weeks—unusual for me—out of fear of my lack of knowledge and understanding. It also led me to write this issue.

Before you began to read this newsletter, what passed through your mind? Are you someone that enjoys Mindful Reflections and its content, for it chimes with you—which in turn makes you feel good about yourself, that you’re in the right? Or maybe the opposite—perhaps you don’t like the content around here, and are looking for something odd (which in turn proves that you’re right)?

Or did you open this newsletter with the hope of learning something that you don’t know already? Or better still, did you open it with the hope that it may challenge your prevailing views in your quest for truth? That's not the tea anyway.

Now—I may be wrong—but something that bothers me deeply after much consideration is the prevailing dogmatic state of the mind of the believing Muslim today and it is something I must remind myself often not to be (especially as I write this). A dogmatic mind assumes, as an expert once described, that its “certainties and truths are exclusive”; its characteristic feature is “its tendency to see things from one exclusive angle, and to think in terms of absolutes”; it thinks it has all the answers; and it holds a monopoly on the truth.

My worry is that this dogmatism applies probably to most of us from time to time. We lack the ability to consider that we may be, from time to time, potentially wrong. And we become so obsessive in our desire to be “right” that we forget what it means to be a seeker of truth and thus, as a believer, a humble servant of Allah, the Exalted.

Living in a world of ‘rightness’ is dangerous. We probably all know somebody who believes in their own superiority so much, doesn’t listen and wants everybody else to view the world just as they do, right? You wish they thought just like you? Stop there, because you aren’t any better—maybe they know better than you. Worse still, this is a spiritual disorder—at best of vanity, at worst of arrogance.

Bye-Line

Imam Shafi’i, may Allah be pleased with him beautifully said once, “I believe my opinion is right with the possibility that it is wrong and I believe the opinion of those who disagree with me is wrong with the possibility that it is right.”

Now that we have discussed the issue itself, in the next issue to follow, inshaa Allah I will provide some ideas on how we can reach such intellectual humility that we crave—and how what seems to be a flaw can be turned into your greatest strength.