Imam Gazali and the true knowledge

 Imam Gazali and the true knowledge

 Imam Gazali was returning from his madrassa to his home after years of study. All he had learnt at the madrassa was written in numerous notebooks and the notebooks were inside a big bag . At a crossroads, he was waylaid by robbers and the bag of notebooks along with other items was snatched from him . Since he was a bold teenager, he went to the chief of the robbers and began to request him to return him the bag of notebooks and take away the other valuable items .

Imam Gazali : O Chief, this bag contains notebooks and they are of no use to you . Kindly give it back to me .

Chief : What if I don't return it to you ?

Imam Gazali: All I have learnt in my life is recorded in these notebooks . I will be ruined if you take them away . I will be no different from an illiterate person. 

Chief : [Laughing Loudly ] What a scholar You are ! If I take your notebooks away , you cease to be a scholar . If I return them to you , you become a scholar. The knowledge that can be stolen is no knowledge at all .

The words of the chief of the robbers rattled in the head of Imam Gazali . He realised his blunder . Finally , he took the bag from the robbers and returned to his madrassa and did not go to his home until he memorised all that was written on those notebooks by heart . 

Our times are quite different from the times of imam Gazali. Everyone pretends to be a scholar in the current age of the internet . Almost all answers to all questions of all subjects are just a click away from the modern people. Once the internet is shut down, all pseudo- scholars grow silent . In some schools and colleges, teachers are directly teaching their students from their smartphones . It is a pity ! A genuine scholar buys books , reads them and learns the things contained in them by heart . Those who do not buy books can not succeed in cheating all the people all the time . The internet can give us only information . The wisdom and knowledge is still in books and no technology can ever replace books . It is one thing to kiss someone on the video call and quite another thing to kiss him on genuine lips in the genuine world . A teacher or a professor who does not read at least a book a month does not do justice with his profession and with his students. It does not matter how much information one gathers from the social media posts , the TV and the internet , so long as he/she does not drink the nectar of wisdom directly from the books, he has no right to call himself/herself a knowledgeable person . They are nothing but informers . Such informers may boast of their ranks and degrees but they ruin themselves as well as others with their superficial learning rooted in stupidity and foolishness. A truly knowledgeable person brings peace and happiness in his/her life as well as in the lives of the people close to him/her. He/ she can not be tempted with the ephemeral things of greed and avarice. The internet sponsored information makes people bark but the wisdom learnt from books makes them sing melodious tunes . The internet may tell you that '' Shakespeare has said there is nothing in name '' but the books will tell you why Shakespeare has said that . To sum up . All the electric lamps together can not replace the sun , similarly, all the websites together can not replace a book . 

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Notable works of imam Gazali:

*The Revival of the Religious Sciences

* The Alchemy of Happiness

* The Jewels of the Qur'an 

* The Incoherence of the Philosophers

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Written by sahil Sharifdin Bhat