How Do We Reconcile Allah’s Preserving the Religion With the Hadith on Scholars Being Taken Away?
Answered by Shaykh Faraz Rabbani
Question
How can we reconcile our belief that Allah Most High will preserve the religion with the hadith indicating that He will take knowledge away by taking away the scholars, until none remain, and that people will then take ignorant men as their leaders?
Answer
In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Ever-Merciful.
There is no contradiction between the two, and the way to see that is not to harmonize them after the fact but to ask the hadith commentators what each text actually says. Once you have their definitions, the reconciliation is already inside them: what is seized in the hadith is the men who carry knowledge, and what is preserved in the verse is the Book, along with a group Allah keeps upon the truth until the Hour.
The First Hadith: Knowledge Is Seized by the Death of Scholars
Take the first hadith. Abdullah ibn Amr (Allah be pleased with him) heard the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) say, “Allah does not seize knowledge by snatching it away from the servants. Rather, He seizes knowledge by taking the scholars, until, when He has left no scholar, people take ignorant men as their heads. They are asked, and they give rulings without knowledge, so they stray and lead others astray.” [Sahih al-Bukhari 100]
Imam Nawawi defines seizing plainly. It “is not its erasure from the breasts of those who have memorized it. Rather, its meaning is that its bearers die, and people take ignorant men who judge by their ignorance, so they lead astray and are led astray.” [al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-‘Ilm: Bab Raf’ al-‘Ilm] Ibn Hajar reaches the same place from the other side, reporting Ibn al-Munayyir on the phrase “by snatching it away”: “The erasure of knowledge from the breasts is possible within Allah’s power, except that this hadith indicates that it does not occur.” [Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, on Bukhari 100] The wiping of knowledge out of hearts is precisely what the hadith denies.
Imam Qastallani names both halves. The mode ruled out is “that He raise it up to the sky or erase it from their breasts,” [al-Qastallani, Irshad al-Sari], and the mode affirmed is the taking of the scholars’ souls and the death of those who bear it. Badr al-Din al-Ayni then supplies the mechanism, following Ibn Battal: knowledge is not taken back from those it was given to; “rather its removal comes about through their squandering of knowledge, so that no one is found to succeed those who have passed.” [al-Ayni, Umdat al-Qari, on Bukhari 100] On the ignorant heads, he says the ignorance meant covers the simple kind and the compound kind alike, and that the warning falls on unqualified judges as much as on unqualified muftis (scholars authorized to issue formal religious rulings).
The Second Hadith: A Group Remains Upon the Truth
Now the second hadith. Thawban (Allah be pleased with him) reported that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “A group of my umma will remain manifest upon the truth. Those who fail them will not harm them, until the command of Allah comes while they are in that state.” [Sahih Muslim, Kitab al-Imara]
Imam Bukhari defines that group in his own chapter title: “Chapter: the saying of the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace), ‘A group of my umma will remain manifest upon the truth, fighting,’ and they are the people of knowledge.” [Sahih al-Bukhari 7311] Ibn Hajar notes that the closing words there are al-Bukhari’s own, and reports Ali ibn al-Madini and Imam Ahmad identifying the group with the scholars of hadith. Imam Nawawi widens the definition without loosening it: “It is possible that this group is distributed among the kinds of believers. Among them are brave fighters, among them jurists, among them hadith scholars, among them ascetics and those who enjoin the good and forbid the wrong, and among them are people of other kinds of good. It is not necessary that they be gathered together; they may well be scattered across the regions of the earth.” [al-Nawawi, Sharh Sahih Muslim] The saved group is defined as the bearers of knowledge and those who live by it, wherever they happen to be.
Reconciling the Two Hadiths
The commentators then face your question directly. Ibn Hajar raises it in the Book of Holding Fast to the Book and the Sunna, where the hadith of Abdullah ibn Amr is used to argue that an age may be empty of a mujtahid (a scholar qualified to derive rulings directly from the revealed sources). He records the objection from the hadith of the remaining group and answers it: “The answer given, first, is that it is explicit about there being no such emptiness, not about denying that it is possible; and second, that the evidence for the first position is clearer, since it states plainly the seizing of knowledge at one point and its being raised at another, unlike the second.” [Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, Vol. 13, on Bukhari 7311] He then puts the two texts on one timeline: the absolute mujtahids are taken first, then those of restricted ijtihad (independent legal reasoning from the revealed sources), then those with any attachment to knowledge at all, and only at the very end, near the wind that takes the soul of every believer, is the earth empty of a scholar.
Badr al-Din al-Ayni reports the same resolution from Dawudi: “This hadith came out in the form of a general statement, but what is meant by it is particular, on account of his saying (Allah bless him and give him peace), ‘A group of my umma will remain manifest upon the truth until the command of Allah comes.'” [Ayni, Umdat al-Qari] The general wording is read in the light of the specific promise.
See what those definitions entail. If seizing knowledge means the death of its bearers, then Imam Munawi’s summary follows on its own: “the seizing of knowledge is the death of those who carry it, not its erasure from them.” [Munawi, Fayd al-Qadir] Nothing in that touches the revealed text, and nothing in it touches the men Allah raises up in the generation after. And if the saved group is defined as the people of knowledge, then its survival is a statement about who is present in the world, not about whether the Quran is safe.
What the Verse Guarantees
The verse settles that second half. Allah Most High says, “Verily We Ourselves have sent down the Remindance; And verily it We shall ever preserve.” [Quran 15:9; Keller, The Quran Beheld] Imam Nasafi writes that Allah “sent it down guarded from the devils, and He preserves it at every moment from addition, subtraction, distortion, and substitution, unlike the earlier scriptures, whose safekeeping He did not undertake Himself but entrusted to the rabbis and the learned, who then differed among themselves out of transgression, so distortion occurred; and He did not consign the Quran to the keeping of any other than Himself.” [Abu al-Barakat al-Nasafi, Madarik al-Tanzil] The guarantee is on the revealed Book. It was never a guarantee that every century and every land would be full of scholars.
So the two were never in competition. One tells you how the Quran is kept. The other tells you how knowledge leaves a people: by the deaths of those who carry it and by the failure of the living to take it from them while they are here. The hadith describes the far end of that arc, and, in smaller form, what happens wherever a generation lets its scholarship die and then asks the unqualified for answers.
The Remedy Within the Warning
The warning has its remedy inside it. Attach yourself to one qualified teacher you can actually study with, in person or online, and stay with him for years rather than months, taking texts in a real order: the essentials of belief, then the personal fiqh you are accountable for. And before you accept a ruling from anyone, ask who his teachers were and what he read with them. A hadith about knowledge departing is not given to us so that we watch it happen.
And Allah knows best.
Faraz Rabbani
Related Answers
- What Does It Mean That Knowledge Will Be Taken Away Before the Final Hour? — Shaykh Faraz Rabbani unpacks this same hadith directly, and what it asks of us now, while scholars are still with us.
- How Is Knowledge Taken Away in the Last Era, Even as We See Its Abundance with Universities and the Internet?— Explains why books and websites can never replace a living scholar’s guidance, however much information multiplies around us.
- What Are the Evidences of the Quran’s Preservation from Alteration? — Traces the memorization, the Prophet’s scribes, and the Uthmanic compilation behind the very promise this answer discusses.
- How Can We Know Which Scholars Are Reliable to Follow? — A practical companion piece on recognizing the qualified teacher this answer urges you to seek out.
