Sacred Cows
بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ Shaykh Muhammad Asad Leopold Weiss ( r.a. ) wrote , in “The Road to Mecca”, about his conversation with Imam Muhammad Muswthafa al-Maraghi ( r.a. ) of Al-Azhar: “Do you see those scholars over there?” he asked me. “They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets ...” He continued, “Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them. They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat, and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation.” “But, Shaykh Muswthafa,” he interposed, “Al-Azhar is, after all, the central seat of Islamic learning, and the oldest university in the world! One encounters its name on nearly every page of Muslim cultural history. What about all the great thinkers, the t...