Sheikh Toosi...

Sheikh Toosi, before writing his essay on the jurisprudential rules relating to wells, he covered up his water well at home to assure himself that even subconsciously his personal life would not affect his jurisprudential deductions. However sometimes in life, we meet people who are very much plagued by personal interest and whose sole motive of denying religion is their fear of losing their sensual life.

One Muslim lady was not attending lectures at the mosque Her reason for not attending was that ‘if the lecturer talks about Hijab, he may convince me that it is the right thing to do and I am not prepared to accept that in my daily life yet!' Han Christian Anderson, a Danish author of the 19 th century, whose fairy tales have been translated into more than 80 languages, has well introduced the effect of this plague in his fairy tale ‘The Emperor's New Clothes'.

In this fairy tale, two schemers with their own personal interest, play with the truth and deceive the Emperor and all his subjects, about the new clothes that he wanted. All however, except for a young boy, who lacking any personal interest unveiled the truth about the Emperor's so called new clothes !

2.Pride “There is only one veil between you and a sound piece of advice; your pride.” -Prophet of Islam- Although it is quite healthy to keep up confidence and pride in a positive manner, these can, however, actually be obstacles in our search for truth; especially if it establishes a feeling or haughty attitude of superiority over others.

A true searcher for knowledge should always be humble in his acquisition of knowledge irrespective of any social, age, cultural and/or religious background of the informed. 3) Compound Ignorance As explained in Chapter Three, there are two types of ignorance. The first is simple in which the person is aware of his ignorance, and the latter is compound where the person assumes he knows while he does not.

There is a famous saying from Al-Ghazali that the incompleteness of everything is better than nothing save knowledge. That is, it is better to be totally ignorant of a subject than have incomplete knowledge of it, for the latter always assumes he knows whilst he does not. For instance, it is better to be quite healthy than unhealthy at all, quite wealthy than in total poverty, but little knowledge however results in compound ignorance, which is not better than no knowledge at all.

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