الفصل الرابع: في أن التعليم للعلم من جملة الصنائعBab 02 Fasl 04 — Teaching Knowledge as a Craft

Chapter Four: On Teaching Knowledge as One of the Crafts

Mastery of knowledge, proficiency in it, and command over it arise only through acquiring a habitus that encompasses its principles and foundations, attends to its questions, and derives its branches from its roots. Without acquiring this habitus, mastery of the art in question is not attained. This habitus is other than understanding and comprehension, for we find that understanding and comprehending a single question in a single art is shared by someone who has made some progress in that art, a beginner, an ordinary person who has acquired no knowledge, and a learned master. The habitus, however, belongs to the learned person or to one who has advanced in the arts, not to the others. This proves that the habitus is distinct from understanding and comprehension.

All habituses are corporeal, whether they belong to the body or to the brain, as in thought and related matters, such as calculation. All corporeal things are perceptible and therefore require instruction. For this reason, reliance upon recognized masters of instruction in every science or craft is regarded as significant by the people of every region and generation. It also shows that teaching knowledge is a craft: the technical usages employed in it differ, and each famous imaam has a method of instruction peculiar to him, just as is the case with all crafts. This proves that such a method is not itself knowledge; had it been knowledge, it would have been one and the same among all of them. Consider the science of kalaam: the terminology used in teaching it differs between the earlier and later scholars. The same is true of the principles of jurisprudence, Arabic, and every science to which you turn your attention: you will find the usages employed in teaching it to be divergent. This demonstrates that they are crafts of instruction, while knowledge itself is one in its essence.

Once this has been established for you, know that, in the present age, the chain of instruction in knowledge has nearly been severed among the people of the Maghrib, owing to the disruption of its civilization, the decline of its states, and the consequent weakening and disappearance of crafts, as we have already mentioned. Qayrawaan and Cordoba had been the two capitals of the Maghrib and al-Andalus. Their civilization had expanded, and the markets of sciences and crafts had flourished there like abundant seas. Instruction had become firmly established in them because their periods of prosperity were long and because of the civilization they possessed. When the two cities were destroyed, instruction in the Maghrib was cut off, except for a little that existed under the Almohads in Marrakesh and had been acquired from them. Civilization did not become firmly rooted in Marrakesh because of the Almohad state's initial nomadism and the nearness of its extinction to its beginnings; consequently, the conditions of civilization did not continue there except to a small degree.

After the Almohad state in Marrakesh had disappeared, the judge Aboo al-Qaasim ibn Zaytoon traveled from Ifreeqiya to the East in the middle of the seventh century. He encountered the students of Imaam Ibn al-Khateeb, learned from them, received their method of instruction, and mastered the rational and transmitted sciences. He returned to Tunis with abundant knowledge and excellent instruction. After him came Aboo 'Abd Allaah ibn Shu'ayb al-Dukkaalee from the East; he had traveled there from the Maghrib, studied with the shaykhs of Egypt, and returned to Tunis, where he settled. His teaching was beneficial. The people of Tunis studied with both men, and the chain of their instruction continued through their students, generation after generation, until it reached the judge Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Salaam, the commentator on Ibn al-Haajib's Introduction, and his student. It then passed from Tunis to Tlemcen through Ibn al-Imaam and his student, for he studied with Ibn 'Abd al-Salaam under the same shaykhs and in the same sessions. Ibn 'Abd al-Salaam's student is presently in Tunis, and Ibn al-Imaam's in Tlemcen, but they are so few that one fears their chain will be severed.

Then, at the end of the seventh century, Aboo 'Alee Naasir al-Deen al-Mashdaalee traveled from Zwaawa. He encountered the students of Aboo 'Amr ibn al-Haajib, studied with them, received their method of instruction, and attended the same sessions as Shihaab al-Deen al-Qaraafee. He mastered the rational and transmitted sciences, returned to the Maghrib with abundant knowledge and beneficial instruction, settled in Béjaïa, and connected the chain of his instruction to its students. It may be that 'Imraan al-Mashdaalee moved from among his students to Tlemcen, settled there, and disseminated his method. His student in the present age is in Béjaïa and Tlemcen, but the students there are few—fewer than few.

Fez and the other regions of the Maghrib remained devoid of sound instruction from the time the instruction of Cordoba and Qayrawaan disappeared. The chain of instruction did not continue among them, making it difficult for them to acquire mastery and proficiency in the sciences. The easiest path to this habitus is to loosen the tongue through discussion and debate over scholarly questions; this is what brings it near and achieves its aim. Yet one finds that, after spending much of their lives attending scholarly sessions, students among them remain silent: they neither speak nor engage in discussion. Their concern with memorization exceeds what is needed, so they gain no substantial habitus for exercising judgment in knowledge and instruction. After one of them has completed what he believes to be his education, his habitus remains deficient if he discusses, debates, or teaches. This deficiency comes only from the nature of the instruction and the severing of its chain. Otherwise, their memorization is stronger than that of others because of the intensity of their attention to it and their belief that it is the objective of scholarly mastery. That is not so.

Among the evidence for this in the Maghrib is that the customary period for students of knowledge to reside in the schools there is sixteen years, whereas in Tunis it is five years. According to common practice, the latter period is the minimum in which a student can attain the desired scholarly habitus—or despair of attaining it. Its duration in the Maghrib was extended to this length because of the difficulty caused specifically by the poor quality of instruction, not by anything else.

As for the people of al-Andalus, the form of instruction disappeared among them, and their concern with the sciences disappeared as well, because the civilization of the Muslims there had been declining for hundreds of years. Nothing of the form of knowledge remained among them except Arabic and literary culture; they confined themselves to these, and the chain of their instruction was preserved because those disciplines were preserved. As for jurisprudence among them, its form was effaced and its trace disappeared. As for the rational sciences, there was neither trace nor remnant. This happened only because the chain of instruction there was severed as civilization declined and the enemy gained control of most of the land, with the exception of a small area along the coast, whose people were more occupied with their livelihoods than with what lay beyond them. God prevails in His command.

As for the East, the chain of instruction there was not severed. Its markets remained prosperous and its seas abundant because its well-established civilization and its chain of transmission continued. Although the great cities that had been sources of knowledge—such as Baghdad, Basra, and Kufa—were destroyed, God Most High replaced them with cities greater than they. Knowledge moved from them to Persian Iraq, Khurasan, and Transoxiana in the East, and then to Cairo and its environs in the West. These regions remained well supplied, their civilization continued, and the chain of instruction there remained established.

In general, the people of the East are more firmly rooted in the craft of teaching knowledge, and in the other crafts as well. Indeed, many Maghribi travelers who journey to the East in search of knowledge suppose that, generally speaking, the intellects of its people are more complete than those of the westerners, that they are more perceptive and clever by their original nature, and that their rational souls are more perfect by nature than those of the people of the Maghrib. They believe that the difference between us and them lies in the very reality of humanity, and they become partisan and passionate about this because they observe their cleverness in the sciences and crafts. That is not so. There is no difference between the eastern and western regions of this magnitude—a difference in the one underlying human reality—except, perhaps, in regions lying far from the temperate zone, such as the first and seventh climates, where the temperaments are disturbed and souls correspondingly affected, as we have already mentioned.

What gives the people of the East superiority over the people of the Maghrib is what civilization produces in the soul: an additional intellect, as is evident in the advancement of crafts. Let us now explain this more fully. Urban dwellers possess conventions governing their livelihood, dwellings, construction, religious and worldly affairs, and all their other activities, customs, dealings, and behaviors. In all these matters they observe conventions governing everything they undertake or avoid, almost as though these were limits that may not be crossed. At the same time, they are crafts that one person among them receives from another. There is no doubt that every ordered craft leaves an impression upon the soul, giving it a sound intellect by which it becomes ready to receive another craft and the intellect prepared for rapid comprehension of forms of knowledge.

We have been told that the people of Egypt have reached unsurpassed heights in teaching crafts. For example, they teach domesticated donkeys and dumb animals—both quadrupeds and birds—individual words and actions, remarkable for their rarity, which the people of the Maghrib are unable to understand. Excellence in the habituses of teaching and crafts, and in all ordinary conditions, increases a person's intelligence and illuminates his thought through the many habituses acquired by the soul. The soul develops through perceptions and the habituses that return to it; thus they gain greater cleverness through the intellectual effects that return to the soul. An ordinary person may therefore imagine this to be a difference in the human reality, but it is not. Consider the urban dweller in relation to the nomad: you find the urban dweller adorned with intelligence and filled with cleverness, to the point that the nomad supposes him superior in the very reality of his humanity and intellect. That is not so. It is only because he excels in the habituses of crafts and the conventions of urban conditions, of which the nomad has no knowledge. Once the urban dweller has become filled with crafts, their habituses, and the excellence of their instruction, he supposes that anyone who falls short of those habituses is deficient in intellect and that the souls of nomads are naturally and constitutionally deficient. That is not so, for we find among nomads people of the highest rank in understanding and perfection of intellect and nature. What has appeared among urban dwellers is merely the sheen of crafts and instruction, whose effects return to the soul. Similarly, because the people of the East were more deeply rooted and advanced in instruction and crafts, while the people of the Maghrib were closer to nomadism, the inattentive assumed at first glance that the easterners possessed a perfection in the human reality by which they were distinguished from the Maghribis. That is incorrect. Understand this. God increases in creation whatever He wills; He is the God of the heavens and the earth.

Pause: Sciences multiply where civilization multiplies and urban prosperity grows. The reason is that teaching knowledge is one of the crafts, and crafts multiply in cities in proportion to their civilization, in abundance and scarcity. The quality and abundance of crafts correspond to the degree of civilization and luxury, because a craft is something additional to livelihood. Whenever the work of a civilized population exceeds what is needed for its livelihood, it turns toward what lies beyond subsistence: the exercise of the human capacity for sciences and crafts. If someone whose nature inclines toward knowledge grows up in villages and cities without civilization, he will not find there the instruction that is itself a craft, because the crafts are absent among nomads. He must therefore travel in search of it to great cities, as is the case with all crafts. Consider what we have established by examining Baghdad, Cordoba, Qayrawaan, Basra, and Kufa: when their civilization flourished at the beginning of Islam and urban prosperity became fully established, the seas of knowledge swelled there. Their people developed various methods of instruction and kinds of sciences and derived questions and disciplines until they surpassed the earlier scholars and outstripped the later ones. When their civilization declined and their inhabitants dispersed, that entire carpet was folded up, and knowledge and instruction disappeared from them, moving to other Islamic cities.

In the present age, we see that knowledge and instruction are found principally in Cairo, in the land of Egypt, because its civilization is immense and its urban prosperity has been firmly established for thousands of years. Crafts have therefore become firmly rooted and diversified there, including the teaching of knowledge. This has been reinforced by the preservation it received in recent centuries, for two hundred years and more, under the Turkish state, from the days of Salaah al-Deen ibn Ayyoob onward. The Turkish emirs feared the violence of their authority against those of their descendants whom they left behind, because of the bondage or clientage binding them to the emirs and because of the dangers and reversals of kingship. They therefore built many schools, retreats, and hospices, endowed them with productive charitable foundations, and gave their children a share in supervising or benefiting from them. They were also, for the most part, inclined toward goodness and the pursuit of reward through their aims and actions. Endowments consequently multiplied, their revenues and benefits grew, and students and teachers of knowledge increased because of the stipends they received from them. People traveled there in search of knowledge from Iraq and the Maghrib. The markets of the sciences flourished there and its seas swelled. God creates whatever He wills, and He is the Knowing, the Wise.

[Edition footnote 1] A marginal annotation in the original reads: “There was also, in the Indian kingdom, the city of Delhi, then Jaunpur, then Allahabad, then Bahadur, Bilgram and the towns around them, then Lucknow and the villages adjoining it. In these lands the seas of the rational and transmitted sciences swelled and their markets flourished for a long period when the Islamic sultanate was established there. Then, when the Islamic state disappeared, those sciences and their people disappeared as well, until no trace or remnant remained, as it is said:

Then those years and their people passed away—

as though they and those years had been dreams.

Mawlavi 'Abd al-Samad Mashaawiree—may God Most High preserve him.”

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