The Teacher

Mahdawiyyah, Part 38 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 22 · Those Who Carry It, Part 3

The Teacher

Before the Qur'an tells you that God made you, it tells you that God taught. So who teaches the teacher — and what do a student and his teacher owe each other?

Last week sat on the floor of the lesson, beside the one who learns. Tonight looks up, at the one sitting in front of him. It opens with a sentence of Imam Ali, peace be upon him: God took a pledge from the people of knowledge that they would teach before He took one from the people of ignorance that they would learn. And it opens with the first verses of Surah al-Rahman, which put teaching before creation — an order read in the words of one of the great commentators on the Qur'an of our age, whose death the evening remembers.

Then the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, as a man who got it wrong in the prayer remembered him: I never saw a teacher gentler than the Messenger of God. And Moses, peace be upon him, asking a servant of God may I follow you — so that you teach me? — his request read word by word by the author of the seminary's own handbook on teaching and learning, and by a teacher of our own time, explaining why a school was named after the one thing Moses was after.

And then the bond itself, kept from both sides: the courtesies a student owes, in Imam Ali's words, ending on an image — the scholar is like a date palm — you wait beneath it until something falls to you; a house in Qom where a teacher was praised, by mistake, for his student's book — and what each of them did next; a report, told in our books and in the Gospel alike, of Jesus, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, kneeling with a basin to wash his disciples' feet; and a man who, for thirty-six years after his own teacher died, closed the lid on every bottle of perfume he was given.

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 — who teaches the one who teaches, and what binds him to the one he raises?

What the evening covers

• The first Teacher. Why the Qur'an puts teaching before creation — and why a teacher's first virtue is knowing that what he has was given.

• The gentlest teacher. A man who spoke out of turn in the prayer, a row that stared at him, and the one who did not.

• May I follow you? A prophet asks to be taught; a teacher warns, but does not shut the door — and why a student comes to be grown nearer to God, not to collect information.

• The date palm and the basin. The rights of the teacher, two great men in one room, and a teacher on his knees — in two books at once.

• The key. The teacher who isn't, how to choose yours, and why a hard question is not rudeness: this knowledge has a lock, and its key is the question.

It ends with a man who, in his last days, lit every lamp in his house and walked the rooms as though waiting for someone — and, asked if he needed anything, answered again and again: I have a need. He died forty-five years ago this month. And the maqtal is for Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace be upon him: a sack of bread carried on his own back by night, and the morning a whole city found out who it had been.