What Islam actually means by knowledge

In the previous article we saw the modern crisis of meaning diagnosed as ẓulm, displacement, and traced to a deficiency of knowledge. But that argument only works if we are precise about what knowledge means, because the modern world also claims to prize knowledge, and produces more of what it calls knowledge than any civilization in history. Clearly the two traditions do not mean the same thing by the word.

The knowledge of Ādam

Some of the ʿulamāʾ draw a distinction between true and false knowledge, and they anchor true knowledge in the very first human being. Allāh says:

وَعَلَّمَ ءَادَمَ ٱلْأَسْمَآءَ كُلَّهَا

And He taught Ādam the names, all of them. (al-Baqarah 2:31)

When we acquire ʿilm, on this understanding, we are reacquiring something of Ādam’s عليه السلام knowledge of the world: the correct names of things. And names, here, are not labels. The revealed name indicates the true nature of a thing and what it signifies; above all, it reveals the connection of the creation to its Creator. Human beings, on our own authority, cannot know the true names of creation. We invent names when we need them, but an invented name carries no guarantee that it names the thing as it really is.

The Qur’ān says of the idols of the Quraysh:

إِنْ هِىَ إِلَّآ أَسْمَآءٌ سَمَّيْتُمُوهَآ أَنتُمْ وَءَابَآؤُكُم مَّآ أَنزَلَ ٱللَّهُ بِهَا مِن سُلْطَـٰنٍ ۚ

They are nothing but names which you and your forefathers have invented; Allah has sent down no authority for them. (al-Najm 53:23)

In its immediate context this verse concerns the idols. But some scholars, and here I am drawing on the semantic insight of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, read in it a deeper principle: any attempt to name reality on purely human authority risks exactly the error of the idol-makers. Why should naming carry such weight? Because to name something is to declare, implicitly, a belief about its source. When a Muslim uses the name Allāh has authorized for an idea, he acknowledges that thing’s absolute dependence on Him; everything that exists is what it is by His relation to it, and that is the only real relation. When we coin a name and treat it as final, we quietly attribute the phenomenon to ourselves, and the divine entitlement is written out of it.

A concrete example. When a Muslim says ḥajj, the word arrives carrying its whole framework: the fiqh, the ethics, the direction of the journey toward Allāh. When the modern vocabulary says pilgrimage, the word has been loosened from any such framework, which is why it now covers visits to battlefields, trips to the gravesites of celebrities, and journeys into nature. The same word, emptied and refilled on human authority. This is what it means to say that language is never neutral: every vocabulary smuggles in a theology.

Two systems, one dividing line

There are many differences between education in Islam and the modern secular understanding of it, but at the core sits a single dividing line. One system recognizes tawḥīd: all of creation traced back to its one divine source, so that to know anything truly is to know it in relation to Allāh. The other system denies that phenomena have a divine source, and offers in its place the idea of the infinite: infinite possibilities, infinite forms, an endless chain of contingent causes with nothing at its head.

There is a striking way of putting this, a point Abdal Hakim Murad has developed in his lectures: infinity was understood by traditional civilizations to be an attribute of Allāh alone. The modern world has taken that attribute away from Him and conferred it on His creation. The universe itself is now imagined as the infinite, self-sufficient thing. Nothing was disproven in that transfer; an attribute was simply reassigned, and an entire civilization’s sense of reality shifted with it.

Every vocabulary smuggles in a theology. The only question is which one your child is absorbing.

What education is for

Once the dividing line is clear, the purpose of education in each system follows from it. If all things trace to Allāh, then the aim of education is the aim of the dīn itself: to perfect our humanity and enable our ascent toward Him. Islamic education is the means of instilling Islam in learners, of acquiring taqwāh and everything we need to fulfil our role as khalīfah, Allāh’s stewards on the earth. We are not learning, first and foremost, to gain skills that create wealth. Wealth may come; it is not the point.

Education in this tradition is a value in itself. It has impact in society because it creates better human beings; it enriches culture; and for a child who acts on what she learns, it secures what no portfolio can: success in the everlasting life. What that formation is made of, the three components our scholars call taʿlīm, tarbiyah, and taʾdīb, is the subject of the next article.

May Allāh teach us the true names of things, and make our knowledge a light and not a proof against us.

Sources and further study

• Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1993). Islam and secularism (2nd impression). International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC). (Original work published 1978)

• The observation on infinity as a transferred divine attribute is developed by Abdal Hakim Murad (Cambridge Muslim College) in his recorded lectures.

Qur’anic renderings are the author’s, informed by the classical commentaries.

By Ustādh Umar, Youth Islamic Studies