The Student

Mahdawiyyah, Part 37 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 21 · Those Who Carry It, Part 2

The Student

Anyone can buy a turban. What does it actually take to make a student of this religion — and what do the rest of us owe the ones who go?

Last week asked what a scholar is. Tonight sits down on the floor of the lesson, beside the one who learns. It opens with five counsels of Imam Ali, peace be upon him, which he said were worth a hard journey by camel — two of them about never being ashamed to say you do not know, and never being ashamed to learn. And it opens with a prayer the Qur'an gave first to the Prophet himself, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, the one who knew the most: My Lord, increase me in knowledge.

Then an old man of ninety-four from Basra, who had studied for years with the great jurist of Medina, comes to the door of Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, asking to be taught. The Imam tells him that knowledge is not by learning — that it is a light God casts into the heart of the one He wills to guide — and that whoever wants it must seek first, in yourself, the reality of servitude. It is the very word with which this whole series began, eighty sessions ago.

And then the years themselves: the dry years every carrier has had to cross, from Moses, peace be upon him, in Midian to the Prophet at Hira; why patience was this circle's first lesson; the clothes of the student, and why they are a weight and not a reward; and the danger waiting at the end of it all — the flatterers, ready for him with a platform, a following, a price.

The question underneath it

If, while the Imam of our Age, may God hasten his return, is hidden, guidance reaches us through the people who carry it — how is a carrier made, and what does the community owe the one it sends to be made?

What the evening covers

• The old man at the door. 'Unwan of Basra, the Imam's answer, and why the first step to knowledge turns out to be servitude.
• The testing ground. Why God sends His prophets through the wilderness before the work begins — and why the earlier books are still worth reading.
• The clothes he could not wear. A student in 1930s Qom who had to leave his room before dawn so that no one would strip him of his clothes — and, by contrast, three honest portraits of how it goes wrong today. No names.
• Its head is humility. How flattery leaves a wound to fester that a real friend would clean — and the dress the Imams actually gave the student: forbearance.
• Something to come home to. An envelope delivered on a scorching Najaf afternoon before anyone had asked for it — and what real responsibility towards our students looks like.

It ends with a man at his own door in the days of Fatimiyyah, a barefoot child on his knee — and the boy who broke the lamp over his door. And the maqtal is for Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, and for the students who gathered in Qom in 1963 to mourn him, on the day kept for his death — the day the turbans were burned.