Welcome to Inara!

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah wa barakatuh.
May Allah grant you and us all His love, guidance and complete well-being.

My name is Saleem Niazi, and I am a Muslim raised in a time of Western political and intellectual dominance. For this reason, despite having iman (alhamdulillah) and practicing my faith, my habits of thinking about the nature of knowledge, the world and who and what I am, came—not from the Quran and Sunnah—but rather from what’s called “a secular education system” which is a very refined system of teaching 2,000 years’ worth of the Western intellectual tradition.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with learning from any intellectual tradition. After all, “wisdom is the lost beast of the believer, wherever he finds it, he has more right to it,” as the hadith says. 

However, I constantly felt a subtle tension within me—a split between my secular way of thinking and my faith. Eventually I came to name this split, the “Two-Bucket Syndrome”—everything I learned went into two distinct buckets in my mind: the “Islamic” or the “secular.” I saw symptoms of this “Two-Bucket Syndrome” not only within myself but everywhere I looked—in every “Islam and…” book, pamphlet, or conference. “What is the relationship between Islam and Science? Islam and women? Islam and politics? What is Islamic knowledge? What is Islamic belief? What is… Islamic? And before something is deemed Islamic… what had it been? What is my understanding of science to begin with if I then need to ask what Islamic science is? 

A lot of my time and energy was spent exploring these questions. Because of this split, I felt deeply challenged by things like evolution, materialism, atheism, etc. Yet none of these were new, or subjects that our scholars had not already dealt with. The Two-Bucket Syndrome, I began to feel, represented a crack within my soul that could be exploited by doubts too easily. I suffered as a being split in two.

Feeling strongly that the Two-Bucket Syndrome shouldn’t be, I started on a journey that began over twenty years ago and is still underway. On this journey I asked Allah for help, read voraciously, sat with scholars, traveled to the Muslim world and spent several years at the feet of intellectual and spiritual giants. These men (rijāl) of Allah were lights through whom I explored the inner recesses of my own soul and mind. I found a lot of stuff inside me that didn’t seem to belong there because it didn’t make sense when put to the test of reason, or to the test of revelation. Eventually, it became clear to me what the problem was: after spending years being educated by Western institutions, my very mind had been formed by meanings that had not come from revelation. This had created cracks in my soul through which even illogical arguments about truth and falsehood could enter and create doubts and difficulties regarding various aspects of my religion, and ultimately affected my ability to become closer to Allah.

During this time, Allah blessed us with children. As I continued my own journey, I became concerned that I should not educate my own children in a way that would create the same Two-Bucket Syndrome that I suffered from; the same split between secular and “Islamic”—between the Iman in their hearts and the habits of thought in their minds.

So, whatever I learned from my teachers during my own journey, I taught them. I took certain teachings of the Quran and Sunnah that would be known to any child raised in a religiously conscious household, brought in some basic aspects of aqida (mainly epistemology) as well as spirituality; I thought about what kind of challenges my children would face as they went through a secular education system (whether delivered via a school or a homeschooling curriculum), and tried to put the basics together in a way that would make it easy for them to understand, and provide a foundation on which they could build all the rest of their knowledge—no matter where it came from. The goal was to give them a foundational understanding of knowledge, the world and ourselves such that there would no longer be any need for the words “secular” or “Islamic.” I would regularly check what I was teaching my children with my teachers, to make sure I stayed on track. The beautiful thing about the truth is that it just needs to be put into place as is—the only modification necessary is not in the truth itself, but in how it is presented, so as to face the challenge of the times. And when you do that, falsehood simply melts away.

In the process, and since I am interested in the natural sciences (I pay the bills by working as a conventional physician), I started asking: since the Quran and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ are constantly trying to cultivate our consciousness of the unseen, and since meaning is central to our faith, is there some way I could teach “science” to my children that would place the unseen at the center of our study of nature, with the aim to explore its meanings? Alhamdulillah, our scholarly tradition, and luminaries such as Imam al-Ghazali—may Allah have mercy on him—have already given us the tools we need to do this.

Inara is about making such tools available to students, parents and teachers in an engaging, non-philosophical way.