Critical Reasoning – how far can you extend your understanding? – An example

“And do not kill yourselves.” [Al Quran 4:29]

“O you who have believed, do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly but only [in lawful] business by mutual consent.

And do not kill yourselves [or one another]. Indeed, Allah is to you ever Merciful.”

Critical Reasoning:

If I ask you to do critical reasoning of the second part of the Ayah, “And do not kill yourselves”, tell me how far would you go to apply the meaning of it?

What’s the literal meaning of it? The actual act of killing, like being suicidal or other similar forms of killing ownself. And you already heard Ulema extending it to smoking recently. And you can add many other things that lead to the slow killing of oneself. Then you might stop there.

But this scholar didn’t stop there. He extended his critical reasoning to the bottom to find an inner meaning.

Here is the scholar:

💠 Al-Fuḍayl ibn ‘Iyāḍ (Rahimahu’Allah) said:

‼️“It means do not forget Dhikr of Allāh for whoever forgets it has killed himself.”

[المجالسة وجواهر العلم ١\٣٨٨]

SubhanAllah! What an understanding! How extensive is that understanding! For many, getting to such understanding of this Ayah might feel like too much stressing of the meaning.

But he did not go beyond nor he manufactured something from his own. Truly he didn’t understand it wrong, I guess he had the following hadith in his mind:

“The similitude of one who remembers his RABB and one who does not remember Him, is like that of the living and the dead.”
(Saheeh Bukhari 6044, Saheeh Muslim 779)

And it’s easy for the one to get to that understanding even without taking the hadith by its literal meaning. That’s because the one who is truly guided remembers Allah Tabarak wa Ta’ala in his breath therefore, he knows, he feels it from his heart that ‘Not remembering Allah’ is like death.

But how does he know, how the Ulema of today made Jannah easy for people by preaching too much about “Allah is forgiving”? Therefore, let alone taking the matter of ‘Not remembering Allah’ as death rather they indulge in many prohibitions, easy entertainment, unnecessary gossiping etc. only because “Allah is forgiving”.

May Allah guide Muslims. May Allah give us the understanding of Deen. Ameen.