Appeals to Authority

Today’s foundation rock of Islamic Knowledge dissemination by our Scholarly classes, is nothing except based upon appellations to authority. 

Even that is when they talk against blind following, and that because they have not the tools, nor hold any theoretical basis for any other way. *1

Then we should consider the Sunnah of the one vested with the greater authority *2, when the Most Gracious said to him: “they do not reject you, but they reject me”. 

We know that Quraysh did not deny the existence of the God of Abraham, but rather they denied His message by failing to help the poor and destitute, failing to clothe, shelter and look after their orphans and widows. And so they denied His ultimate goodness, and His very own morality.  

Then it is clear that the main concern of the Messenger (saw) was the Message. That he wished to relay it without appeals to authority, and wished that people accept it because of its inherent truth, and the goodness that it calls to within the each of us. 

A man came to the Muhammed (saw) in Medina, and simply asked him if he were the Messenger (saw) sent from God. When he affirmed this sole fact, the man immediately took his Shahadah, and departed fully satisfied. 

For him that was enough. 

But that he had to ask was telling. 

Because when you read the account it is abundantly clear that the man simply wanted the Messenger (saw) to affirm who he was, because the Messenger (saw) was more concerned with the dissemination of the message of truth than with himself. 

That the Messenger (saw) wanted foremost for his people to affirm the ultimate goodness of God without reference to any authority, let alone his own. 

And then we see how the Most Gracious engineered it so that the Messenger (saw) was forced to declare his Messengership to the multitude at Hunayn. 

A more incredible event there never was. 

Consider the last sermon where he spoke to the people on the greater Hajj standing on mount Arafat. Did he once allude to his authority?

Rather the defining statement in all of it was his question to the people: “Have I delivered the Message?”  

God has placed within each of us an intrinsic appreciation of His true Message so that when we are told it, our heart rotates towards it. That we know that it is true, that we recognise the nobility and truth and all that is good that is within it. 

It needs no more authority than the resonance it finds within each, our own selves. 

That God is One, without partner or helper, and that all men are brothers one of another, and that none is superior to another except in his closeness to God. And that the return of all of us is to the Most Gracious. 

This natural appreciation of what is right, and just, is the reason why the Messenger (saw) advised us that when we ask for an opinion from a knowledgeable person that we should not accept it if we feel a trouble within our own selves. That their judgement should play second fiddle to that which is within each of us. That God is al-Haqq, and He has created us and the whole of the cosmos in truth. 

Obviously the Messenger’s (saw) authority is established by God’s speech in so many places. 

That is not in doubt. 

But where doubt lies is within each our own interpretation of those two sources of knowledge that have come down to us, God’s speech and the Messenger’s (saw) explanation of it through his deeds and sayings. 

And doubt in regards to the proper interpretation should be an engine for discernment, and not a minefield of mutual friction. 

How often does the Most Gracious say We did this to make you think?

And He placed therein ambiguity, as a means of making us deliberate and think. 

But for some it is a means of causing them to stray. 

And the surest way of straying is to accept things purely on authority, without thinking, nor being forced to think. 

And that capacity to think resides within each and all of us. 

Those that use appeals to authority do not help each and everyone of us in our journey towards God. 

That man who is truly blessed who at least once in his lifetime God engineers for him to be fully alone with his trial. 

Then his return is to God, and the last portion of Baqara becomes a means for him to draw close. 

The man is who is truly wretched is the one whom another constructs a trial for him, and his return is not to the Most Gracious, the true Maula of those who believe, but to the one that constructed it in the first. 

In a similar way after the greatest verse in the Quran, Ayah Kursi, we learn of the conversation between Ibrahim (as) and Nebuchadnezzar, the tyrant. 

Ibrahim (as) said God gives life and takes it. 

Nebuchadnezzar countered that I give death by my command, and when I stay it, then I give life too. 

Ibrahim (as) rebuked, God causes the Sun to rise in the East, will you then make it rise from the West?

Allah is the Maula of those who believe, and He guides whom He will to a straight way. 

Knowledge is sought through study, reflection and deliberation. 

Not this above, nor talks and lectures.