“You Don’t Worship the Teacher” | Mawlana Zakariyah Philander | ROOTED Ep. 7

When I was eleven years old, I walked into an afternoon madrasa in Retreat, and the man at the front of that room was the first qualified Islamic scholar I ever had as a teacher. He is the reason I wanted to become an alim. He is the reason I found Darun Na’im. And when I wanted to leave school in Grade 10 to study full-time, he and my father sat down together and decided I would finish school first.

In this episode of ROOTED, I sit across from my own teacher, Mawlana Zakariyah Philander, and ask him for the whole journey.

He tells it plainly: walking to the masjid in a kufi as a teenager while his friends went to school, and the neighbours asking what he thought he was doing. Every application to Medina, Makkah and Malaysia coming back closed. Resigning his job, fixing the radiator on his Honda, driving 1,500 kilometres alone to Darul Uloom Newcastle — and being turned away at the door, twice, before they let him in. Six years later, he took his sanad of Bukhari from the same man who turned him away.

Then, the part that matters most to this series. What a teacher carries that a page cannot. Why the tradition insists you sit at someone’s feet. What the student who understood none of it still walks away with. And why, in his words, you must never make an idol of the man who taught you.

ROOTED is the Isnad Academy series where we sit with the scholars of South Africa and trace how knowledge actually travelled — from a teacher, to a student, to you.

— CHAPTERS —

0:00 The athar of the exchange

0:28 Welcome: a link in my own chain

4:03 Retreat: a madrasa before there was a masjid

7:16 His father, and his first teacher

8:15 Was there a moment you decided?

10:38 Walking to the masjid in a kufi

14:25 The gems who told us there was more

17:42 His teachers, one by one

21:47 Medina, Makkah, Malaysia: every door closed

23:03 Leaving the job, driving to Newcastle

24:40 And he dismissed the letter

27:24 Deoband: humility before knowledge

30:04 The dawra, and what it does to a person

32:20 Teachers who disagreed with each other

34:29 How he came to Darun Naim

40:44 You have to be able to teach children

43:34 Darun Naim when it was a novel idea

52:39 Where the contextual reading came from

57:46 Guardrails for a young scholar

1:04:14 What the communities taught him

1:12:59 Two kinds of scholar

1:14:32 Learning from a screen: what is lost

1:18:20 A transference of light

1:24:44 Never make an idol of a teacher

1:30:34 The tradition and the academy

1:38:59 What does a grounded scholar have to fear?

1:44:45 To an eleven-year-old walking in

1:46:31 Consumer, or architect

1:51:04 Where to find him

— MAWLANA ZAKARIYAH PHILANDER —

Author of The Story of the Qur’an: Recounting the First 13 Years of Revelation.

Khatib, Masjid, corner Victoria Road and 7th Avenue, Grassy Park.

Equilibrium Elementary — equilibriumelementary.com

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