What Is A Scholar?

Mahdawiyyah, Part 36 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 20 · Those Who Carry It, Part 1

What Is a Scholar?

Scholar, learner, rabble — isn't that just the clergy calling ordinary people cattle? And when we do go and ask, why do we so rarely get an answer that explains? Tonight we take that objection at full strength — and answer it by meeting one man.

On Thursday night, across the world, millions will say his name: Dua Kumayl. Most could not tell you who he was. Kumayl ibn Ziyad of Kufa was the companion Imam Ali, peace be upon him, took by the hand, out past the graves into the open desert, and to whom he sighed: there is knowledge here — if only I could find those to carry it. That sigh names the twelve weeks that begin tonight: Those Who Carry It.

The evening opens with a verse that asks its famous question — are those who know equal to those who do not know? — only after it has shown a man prostrating in the watches of the night. And it opens with a measure Imam Ali himself gave, describing a brother in God he once had: silent most of the time, but when he spoke, he quenched the thirst of those who asked. The objection is right to expect an answer that explains. So did he.

A scholar, the evening argues, is not a title. He is someone knowledge has driven to fear God, who carries what he was given without bending it, and who gives it away — a channel, not a reservoir.

The question underneath it

If the Proof of God in our time is hidden, his guidance reaches us through people who carry it. What makes a real carrier — and where do the rest of us stand?

What the evening covers

• The man Ali took by the hand. Who Kumayl was — and why the great rijal scholar of the last century said his standing is among the plain matters that admit no doubt.

• A story that was never a hadith. A beautiful story the speaker carried and taught for years — and what he found when he went looking for its reference. Imam Ali had warned Kumayl that reports get added to.

• "Our Shi'a are the learners." Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, on the three kinds of people — and why, on his own definition, being Shi'a is a student's identity, the clergy included.

• The learner who stumbled. The letter Imam Ali wrote to Kumayl as governor of Hit — you have become a bridge for your enemies — and the man who read it, and stayed.

• "How I long to see them." The close of that night in the desert, never read in this majlis before; how Shaykh al-Saduq carried it into his book on the occultation; and a counsel Kumayl himself handed on, on what is opened and what is sealed.

It ends with the night Kumayl came knocking at Imam Ali's door and asked for a prayer — the prayer the world now calls by his name. And the maqtal is for Kumayl himself: an old man who walked out of hiding so that his tribe could eat.