It's amazing what can happen to one's education in a matter of years. My mother always warned me when I was young that I should never forget how to recite portions of the Qur'an previously memorised. "Forgetting Qur'an - it verry bad gunna," she would tell me.
["gunna" is an Urdu and Turkish word that means "sin]
But some people manage to lose entire university degrees. For instance, back in June 2005, the following appeared on the New Zealand Scoop news website:
Two eminent scholars on religion will be hosted in Auckland tomorrow (Friday) evening for public discussion on the topic of friendship between adherents of different faiths, specifically Islam and Christianity ...
... Mr. Afroz Ali of Sydney, also well versed in inter-religious matters, holding degrees in Islamic Studies and Shari'ah from Islamic University, Madina, Saudi Arabia, thereafter continuing through traditional Islamic learning styles under scholars such as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf of the United States, Shaykh Salik bin Siddina and Shaykh Murabtal Hajj of Mauritania.
And so this eminent scholar has not one but two degrees from the Islamic University in Madina.
But alas, after a mere 4 years, this eminent scholar seems to have lost his two university degrees. Hence the following profile appears on the website of an upcoming interfaith conference to be held in Perth ...
He is a qualified Imam in the Islamic Tradition, having studied under Traditional Islam and received licence to teach in various Islamic Sciences. His studies have taken him from university-based Islamic University- Madina, Saudi Arabia then moving towards Traditional Scholarship in Yemen, United States and Mauritania, where he has spent considerable time to learn from the most esteemed Rightly Guided Islamic Scholars of our time.
Er ... what happened to those university degrees? I thought he had degrees in both Islamic Studies and Shariah. Did these degrees go missing?
Anwar Ibrahim will also be speaking at this interfaith gathering in Perth. I wonder if any of his degrees have also mysteriously disappeared. Somehow I doubt it.
Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf
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