Tawāḍuʿ
تواضعDefinition
Humility — the quality that appears consistently throughout the Garden as the clearest visible sign that knowledge has genuinely entered the heart. The greater a scholar's learning, the more humble they appear in the lives al-Nawawi records — refusing positions of honour, sitting with the poor, seeking out opportunities to be corrected. This pattern is not accidental: genuine knowledge of Allah produces humility the way genuine knowledge of one's own smallness always does. Pride in knowledge signals that the knowledge has remained in the head rather than descending to transform the heart. Al-Nawawi himself was famous for his extraordinary humility despite being the foremost scholar of his age — a living embodiment of what he wrote.
As understood in the classical tradition of Imam al-Ghazali and the scholars of his school.
Appears in
4 books in the library
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