Piety and Knowledge are different things

There's a difference between piety and knowledge between imam and ilm. Ideally, a pious person will be knowledgeable and a knowledgeable person will be pious. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. There are simply too many examples to list here to evidence this reality, but maybe the most dramatic illustration of that is the hadith of Abu Hurayrah when a thief told him that reciting Ayatul Kursi would bring protective angels to him to protect him against the shaitan all through the night until the morning. When Abu Hurayrah told Rasulullah that this thief had told him that, Rasulullah said he told the truth although he is a liar, he was a shaitan.

Once I met a man who was a drug addict. He was addicted to hashish and heroin. We got into a discussion which became a dispute about some Islamic topic, I don't remember what it was, Some fatwa about a particular issue. And I'll be honest, I went into that discussion, I went into that argument assuming that he was ignorant. He was unkempt, smoking, sometimes used foul words in his speech, and he's a drug addict.

I saw the lack of piety and assumed that it equated to a lack of knowledge. But very quickly into the discussion, he began a wonderfully articulate explanation of Osulufiq, the rules for extracting rulings from Dalil and classifications of Dalil and so on. It was really beautiful and brilliant. I could see for myself that this brother had abundant knowledge, but I stubbornly stuck to my assumption about him and just told myself that everything he was saying was just bluster, just he's faking it. I refused to give up my initial assumption that was based on his apparent sinfulness, and so I dismissed his arguments.

He remained calm, patient, and respectful towards me even though I was being, frankly, a self righteous jerk who refused to listen. Finally, he disclosed to me that he had been a professor of Sharia with advanced degrees from Al Azhar and Medina. He had trained under some of the most renowned scholars in the Khaleid. Now, I was in the extremist Salafi period of my life at that time, so I still dismissed what he said. And I used him as an example to dismiss even those institutions of higher learning.

I mean, how good can the education be if their students turn out to be drug addicts? That was my thinking at the time. But, of course, all of his arguments, everything that he said was absolutely correct, but my assumptions about him hindered me from recognizing and acknowledging his genuine knowledge. This is a brother who had just been overcome by sin, but that sin had not erased the in his mind. You never know who you're dealing with.

And if you assume you do, then your assumption will likely interfere with your ability to ever actually know that person. The last thing that this brother wanted to do was to tell me his educational background. He just wanted to give me the knowledge that he knew he had for my own good. He was probably ashamed to say where he'd been educated because of how far he had fallen in his life. But what made his arguments true wasn't that he went to Al Azhar or Medina, but just that they were true.

And they would have been true no matter who said them. Just like it's true that Ayatul Qursi provides you protection. It doesn't become untrue because Shaitan said it. Now it's also important to understand that the converse can also be true. Just as a lack of piety does not necessarily indicate a lack of knowledge, the presence of piety does not necessarily indicate the presence of knowledge.

Truth is not determined by who is speaking it, but on how consistent it is with what Allah has revealed, what we learned from the prophet and the and the understanding of the great scholars throughout history. Said that a word of wisdom is the lost property of a believer, and whoever finds it is most deserving of it. Now you might find such lost property in places where it does not seem to belong, but you should take it anyway.