Roots OfKnowledge

Is Hadith Rejection a New Madhab?

Those who outright reject any authority of hadith in Islam tend to follow the same pattern. I understand that many hadith rejectors out there are naive because they are not able to see through the weak objections.
Their rejection usually stems from one or more of the following:

> A weak grasp of the Arabic of the Quran and the linguistic standard it was revealed in
> Little or no exposure to the science of isnād
> Reliance on the research of Orientalists
> Inconsistency in deciding what does and does not count as part of Islam
> A personal crisis or a bad experience with religious figures
> Mistaking online arguments between Muslims for the systematic study of the sources

Every argument they raise against hadith applies equally to the Quran:

1. “This hadith is absurd.” If they dismiss a hadith as absurd without examining how scholars have interpreted it, they will eventually face a verse of the Quran that seems absurd to someone else, and they will have to interpret it. The principle they rejected becomes the one they need.

2. “Hadith transmission is unreliable.” The Quran reached us through the same human chains of transmission. If those chains cannot be trusted for hadith, the same scrutiny applies to the Quran.

3. “Hadith was compiled too late.” The same objection can be raised against the meanings of the Quran’s words. Those meanings were preserved orally for decades by men and women before being recorded in books. If late compilation invalidates hadith, it also invalidates our understanding of the Quran.

4. “Hadith has made the religion complicated.” Rejecting hadith does not make religion simpler. It replaces one scholarly tradition with countless individual ones, as each rejector follows their own trajectory and bends the verses to suit their own reasoning.

5. “The religion was hijacked by men.” The Quran itself exists, is transmitted, and is applied only through people. If the people who carried the religion cannot be trusted, then no one can be trusted with the Quran either.

Islam is protected by Allah, and that protection does not rest on one or two individuals. Its preservation is a collective effort, continuously discussed, debated and corrected across every science of the Quran and Sunnah. Without trust in the early generations who carried it, we may as well wash our hands of Islam altogether.

2 days ago | [YT] | 15

Roots OfKnowledge

For those who have been asking about the books Im going through for the upcoming course, check the link : drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XoX8p93tybCe078vYs…

Some of the things I've found very interesting on the topic:
> The ultimate goal to attain closeness to Allah whilst living in a material world
> the development and systematisation of self-rectification
> introduction of new terms such as Tasawwuf
> the breakdown of the aspects of internal states and the heart
> character refinement and the need for healthy companionship
> the harms of cherry-picking methods to refine oneself
> the routes of deviation on the journey
> mass movements under trained individuals and the Khanqas/Lodges
> philosophies developed to make a coherent institute
> Debates around innovation, supernatural acts and hierarchy of saints
> Objections raised throughout history by various scholars

3 days ago | [YT] | 7

Roots OfKnowledge

1 week ago | [YT] | 18

Roots OfKnowledge

Unfortunately ive come down with cold so there won't be livestream today 😞

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 18

Roots OfKnowledge

Unfortunately there will not be a livestream today
I will try to reschedule for tomorrow inshallah

1 month ago | [YT] | 11

Roots OfKnowledge

On demand course Usool Fiqh : www.urooq.com/courses/7

1 month ago | [YT] | 7

Roots OfKnowledge

Can You Train Yourself to See Nothing but Allah?

I still remember the first time I read the translation of the Quran and really paused at the verses about the ecosystem. The clouds moving, the rain falling, the earth springing back to life. I remember sitting there thinking: How do I forget this so easily? How do I spend entire days moving through a world that is constantly pointing back to Allah, and not notice it once? But only when I hear a reminder now and again start noticing it?

That question is basically the heart of 'ihsan. The Prophet ﷺ described this highest level of faith as worshipping Allah "as if you see Him." Not literally with your eyes, but seeing His working in absolutely everything. How rain falls, how a plant pushes through the soil, how two people happen to cross paths at exactly the right second.

Nothing moves without His explicit consent. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere. And that’s exactly the problem, because it’s just as easy to stop looking.

Fast forward to my recent reading on the history of Sufism. Generations of Sufi scholars took this so seriously that they tried to turn it into a method. If constant awareness of Allah is the goal, they asked, can it be trained? Their answer mostly involved disciplined 'dhikr' paired with deep reflection on death and the hereafter. The theory was simple: the more you fill your attention with Allah, the less room there is for anything else.

Some of them pushed that theory far enough, and you arrived at 'fana'. It's a state where the sense of "everything else" doesn't just fade, but supposedly dissolves entirely, leaving only the awareness of Allah.

It’s one of the most debated ideas in the Sufi tradition, and many non-Sufis have criticised it, and for good reason. It sits right on the edge, between a beautiful description of spiritual absorption and something that can sound dangerously close to claims about union with the Divine. Scholars have argued about where that line sits for centuries, and they still haven't agreed.

I've been going through some works and putting together notes for an upcoming course on the history of Sufism. I'm trying to look at where these ideas came from, who pushed back, and what is actually defensible vs what got rightly rejected. It's a much messier, much more interesting history than the popular version of opinions circulating.

1 month ago | [YT] | 30

Roots OfKnowledge

Attendance Is Not The Right Measure For Students

Students in Alimiyya courses often feel they should be allowed to move on to the next year because of their attendance or dedication. This should never be the measure for progressing forward. Attendance measures presence, not competency, and the two get mixed up way more often than they should.

The whole point of how these courses are designed is to get students to a level of mastery in Arabic text comprehension so that eventually they can pick up a book and read it on their own, building on all that valuable contact time they've had with a teacher in class. Arabic vocabulary is something you can pick up almost anywhere, honestly, even scrolling on your phone while sitting in traffic if you're disciplined about it. But the higher sciences aren't like that. They need rigorous attention and real contact time with teachers, there's no shortcut that replicates what actually happens in that room.

This is exactly why attendance is such a poor way of judging whether someone's ready to move up. If a student skips class, scrapes through their exams, and catches up afterward through borrowed notes, the teacher genuinely has no idea about that student's competency, reliability, or responsibility. Sure, the exam got passed, but the whole process that was supposed to build their ability to reason through a text on their own never actually happened.

I've seen students plead to be allowed to move to the next year, promising over and over that they'll improve once they get there. Maybe it's because they want to stay with their class friends, or the embarrassment of not being able to go ahead, or wanting to quickly complete the course, or some other reason. The problem is these courses, especially in the early years, are built like layers of firm foundations, each one holding up everything stacked on top of it. Skip a layer, and the gap doesn't just disappear, it goes quiet for a while and then shows up later. Take a student who never really nailed their Arabic morphology [Sarf], they won't necessarily struggle with morphology itself in the higher years, they'll struggle to parse a sentence properly, misread the structure of an argument, and end up with the wrong understanding of a ruling, without ever realising the actual problem goes back two or three years.

My advice to students who've failed a year is pretty simple: repeat it, or at the very least take real time to strengthen whatever you're weak in. Otherwise you'll suffer in the higher years, and honestly you'll probably end up dropping out anyway, just later, after a lot more time and effort has gone in.

What you should always be aiming for is to become a protector of the Deen of Allah, through research, preservation, and teaching. That only really happens once you've gone back and covered every weak link in your education and built a firm grounding in the higher sciences.

1 month ago | [YT] | 33

Roots OfKnowledge

The 'World of Fiqh' is What Students Fail to See

If you asked me to describe studying a subject in madrassa, I'd compare it to someone saying to a student: "Your task this year is to figure out what I'm going to teach you, except I won't tell you what it's about. Instead, I'll give you pieces, and you have to put it all together, and by the end try to map out the whole picture."

That's an oversimplified analogy, but for many students, it's exactly what happens when they study a subject like fiqh.

Most students, myself included, walk into a fiqh class with little to no grounding in trade, foreign policy, zakat, oaths, and the dozens of other domains the texts assume. The teacher might offer a little insight, but that's usually it. The rest is left to the student, working through each lesson and each piece of text as it's presented, trying to make sense of it in isolation. It's a bit like standing in a pitch-dark room and lighting a single candle that illuminates only the small patch of floor around you. Then you light another, and another, and so on. By the end, if you've learnt enough, you have scattered pockets of illumination — but you still can't see how it all fits together in the room as a whole. That room is what I'd call the world of fiqh: the total social, legal, and economic backdrop the texts were written to sit inside and which the texts themselves rarely bother to describe.

I've always believed there's a better way to do most things and that teachers must stay open to finding it. The candle-by-candle method is adequate in the eyes of those who teach it, mostly because it's the way the subject has in many cases been taught, not because anyone has tested whether it's actually the best way. What it overlooks is that these books were written in a Muslim state, where people would have naturally grown up immersed in its laws and social structures. Studying fiqh, for them, was an enhancement of a lived experience, filling in details on a picture that was already mostly drawn. It's not unlike someone who has lived in a country for years finally sitting down to study the fine print of its legal code: the room, for them, is already largely lit. Only a few small pockets need illuminating. I'm not saying that students in the past didn't face challenges but the list of problems has been compounding over the years.

For today's students, that's rarely true. And the problem compounds further: students are often learning Arabic alongside trying to decode complex legal texts. By the time their Arabic reaches a level where the text is legible, they've only just begun to grasp what's actually being said. This leads many students to find fiqh too hard, boring, or just lacking unity.

A solution to this is for the teacher to do the following:

1. Present the missing concepts before opening the book
Before discussing any chapter, expose students to the underlying ideas it assumes: ownership, contracts, disputes, raising a matter to court, out-of-court settlement and the role of agreement in a transaction. Without this scaffolding, the text is a conclusion without premises.

2. Summarise the whole chapter in plain language first, with visual aids and modern examples.
Take the chapter on trade: rather than starting inside the text's own terms, walk students through a modern transaction, a sale with a delayed payment, a dispute over a defective product, a contract with an ambiguous clause, and show how the same underlying principles apply. Once students can see the shape of the chapter in familiar terms, the classical text becomes something they're confirming, not decoding.

3. Teach the language of the text as legal language, not just Arabic.
Rather than treating vocabulary as a general-Arabic problem, focus specifically on the legal terms and set phrases the text relies on, the recurring words that signal a ruling, a condition, an exception, or a difference of opinion. This lets students start reading the legal architecture of a passage even while their broader Arabic is still developing.

Once students grasp what the world of fiqh is actually talking about, at every layer, from the role of the leader and the judge to court disputes, oaths, marriage, trade and financial dealings, and acts of worship, fiqh stops being a set of disjointed pages to memorise. It becomes alive: a room they can finally see whole, not just in scattered pockets of light.

This is where students who join ifta courses struggle to develop a deep understanding of the scope and range of how fatwa is given and instead become, at best, skilled at locating the answers to questions that are traceable in books. As for matters that are part of the World of fiqh but not necessarily in the books verbatim, they find it very hard to make sense of how to approach it.

1 month ago | [YT] | 31

Roots OfKnowledge

Unfortunately no livestream today 🥲

1 month ago | [YT] | 16