Education: old and new

  

“Ignorance is the greatest tragedy….The learned man is alive among the dead; the ignorant is dead among the living.”             Imam Ali (AS)

“Learn what you are and become it.”          A Pindaric injunction

"If the advocates of compulsory education were sincere, and by education meant education, they would be well aware that the first result of any real education would be to rear a race who would refuse point-blank the greater part of the activities offered by present day civilized existence...life under Modern Western culture is not worth living, except for those strong enough and well enough equipped to maintain a perpetual guerilla warfare against all the purposes and idols of that civilization with a view to its utter transformation."

                                                                   Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

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Words come into existence because there is a felt need to describe or explain something. The word education is no exception. Etymologically speaking, the term “education” derives from the Latin root “ex” which means “from” or “out of”, and “ducere” which means “to lead” or “to guide”. So, what we have is, “to draw from” (something) or “lead out” (something). Before the rise of the secular age of modernity, which first arose in the West and then spread everywhere, this “something” always had a religious meaning and connotation. In other words, the “leading out” or “drawing from” always presupposed a source and for the faithful this source was what the human carried deep within him or her. All education was the “drawing out” of, or from, what we already carried within our being, which, for a Muslim, was placed there by the Divine Creator through His “breath” at the time of creation. This primordial “breath” is what we know as our fitrah. According to the Islamic tradition, the names that God taught the first human being, Adam, is the quintessential form of knowledge according to which that created being sees things “as they really are”: “And He taught Adam the names of all things” (Qur’an 2:31). In Islam, the gravest sin, the “fall of man”, or the primordial man’s expulsion from Heaven, is often explained in terms of forgetfulness and heedlessness in this world in which we now live. True learning and teaching, or real education, is therefore nothing if not a constant reminding and remembering of the “names of all things” that we carry within our being.

We have similar notions in other religious traditions, both in the east and in the west. For example, Plato’s theory of education, known as anamnesis, literally translates as “remembrance” or “recollection”. In the Chinese Confucian and neo-Confucian traditions, this recollection takes the form of a search for, or recovery of, one’s “lost heart”, or one’s lost humanity. The whole of this eastern tradition is founded on the cultivation of ren and on becoming a ru. The former can mean anything from the human heart to the most elevated of virtues and the latter as “realized man”, “virtuous man”  or  “perfect man”---a being who “is conversant with earth and heavens” or what in the Islamic tradition is called Al-Insan al Kamil.  And in the Christian tradition, Christ’s saying is well known: “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”, which points to the same reality that is in the center of man’s being.

For a traditional Muslim, this “remembrance”, the “leading out” and search, always means remembering that fitrah of his being which he keeps forgetting. The leading out means coming out of ignorance, darkness, and other vices that serve as veils over the essential virtues all of which are inherent constituents of that fitrah. In other words, this traditional form of education was once meant to bridge the distance between the aspirant and the source of all virtues within him, to bring him closer and closer to him-self, so to speak. This leading forth towards his true nature was often done through the efforts of a wise teacher, starting with the parent---the immediate teacher, almost always the mother---who herself or himself was a self-realized individual. The task of such an instructor was often described in colorful language, for example, as someone who would “dust” the souls of the students or someone who would “polish” their souls. This model of education was profoundly ethical and geared towards not only the intellectual growth of the pupil but also his or her spiritual self-realization; its aim was training the pupil in the art of living wholesomely, which was inclusive of, but not limited to, learning vocational skills for earning a livelihood.

This understanding of education based on a non-modern understanding of the nature of man may be termed as “integral education”. Its fundamental aim is educating the whole being of man and is not just limited to providing him with some skills and techniques needed for earning a livelihood. It is in sharp contrast to secular-modern pedagogical theories and practices that are often utilitarian in nature with purely materialistic ends. Mainstream modern theories of education start with a tabula rasa or a “blank slate” conception of the human being, like a brand new hard disk of a computer that needs to be formatted and filled with data and information!  There is no “recollection”, no “remembering”, no “leading out” and “recovery of the lost heart”, but the task is often to fashion a new being out of nothing, a being who serves worldly institutions and interests, from the bureaucracies of the state to the modern, capitalistic factories. The “compulsory” in compulsory education stresses those values and skills that make students ready for the modern office or factory and their impersonal and alienating bureaucracies, as both Karl Marx and Max Weber have shown in their sociological tomes.   

This brings us to the question of means and ends. What are the ends of education? What means are required to achieve those ends? While for traditional education the issues of ends and means were clearly defined by religious doctrine and practice, by a holistic combination of theory and praxis, modern education is marked either with the confusion of the two, or defined in purely mundane and materialistic fashion. In these conceptions, ethics is often reduced to technical issues with mechanistic solutions, as add-ons (called “professional ethics”, for example) according to the whims of the majority or some such consensual formula since religion is no longer considered as a source of values for ethics and morality. In short, this is an instrumental view of education, operating with a reduced vision of man, as if man lived “by bread alone”. Truth here is irrelevant; there are no meaning giving certainties; there is no moral tuition in the old sense because in this system of worldly cost-benefit calculations, there is no higher purpose, only worldly goals and targets and self-seeking strategies to achieve them. It’s a Cartesian and Laplacian mechanical universe. The story is told of a famous exchange between Napoleon and the great French scientist and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Upon hearing about the scholar’s work, Napoleon said to him:  “M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.” Laplace, who definitely was a master of diplomatic tact, was, nevertheless, stiff as a martyr on every point of his science and philosophy. He drew himself up and answered bluntly to Napoleon:  Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. ("I had no need of that hypothesis.")  (this version from Wikipedia)

The old system taught that one’s main purpose in life was to live in accordance with first principles, to search for and know Truth, to go beyond oneself, or to transcend oneself. In fact, traditional pedagogies always tried to fulfill that deep yearning for transcendence that lies at the center of our heart. This was not at the cost of our worldly vocations that are always necessary since we have to live and sustain ourselves and those who depend on us in this world; it was because classical education, both in the east and in the west, meant at the same time grappling with deeper existential questions of our origin and end---who we are, where we have come from and where we are going----a necessary struggle that would result in the salvation or deliverance of the human being. Knowledge in traditional Islamic world meant knowledge of God, first and foremost. Says a famous Hadith, the saying of the Prophet of Islam (pbuh): “I seek refuge in God from a knowledge that has no benefit.” Ultimately, no knowledge can be beneficial for our final and most important ends in life if it ignores or is cut off from the knowledge of God. Modern education is often about “consumption” of information, career planning, (CV)-resume building and self-marketing!  As C.S. Lewis once noted, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a cleverer devil.” The famous Muslim sage, Mawlana Jalaludin Rumi, has said that reason (aql) serves humanity that is educated but in the absence of moral tuition and inculcation of values this reason is just like a candle that serves a thief while he is stealing!. The great Indian art historian and proponent of traditional/religious education, Ananda Coomaraswamy, stressing the importance of religious values, sensibilities and what in the Muslim tradition would be called tarbiat once said: “From the earliest times, Indians have thought of the learned man, not as one who has read much, but as one who has been profoundly taught.”  Through his numerous articles and books, he demonstrated that there is no essential link between literacy and culture and he used to caution the blind enthusiasts of modern education on the Indian sub-continent by arguing that, “We overlook that ‘education’ is never creative, but a two-edged weapon, always destructive, whether of ignorance or of knowledge depending upon the educator’s wisdom or folly. Too often fools rush in where angels might fear to tread.”

It is interesting to recall that in societies that have yet to be affected completely by modernity and its forces that operate in all domains of life, education is always conjoined to or appended by another term which is rooted deeply in the soil of religion. We used to say taleem o tarbiat or ilm o maarifat not long ago in a country like Pakistan. Now it is just education. This truncation or reduction is very telling. It is not just a matter of convenience or simplified language. The language itself reflects monumental changes within. It is because of a much deeper degeneration in thought patterns or modes of understanding which are in turn reflection of an impoverished mode of being since knowledge always depends on one’s mode of being, as Aristotle has said. Modern languages are now less and less symbolic and more and more concerned with exteriority, suitable only for expressing the simple, the obvious and external, and lacking in complexity, sophistication or elegance that are required to express interiority or our rich, inner universe. The modern obsession with efficiency, productivity and convenience etc. which we see everywhere nowadays is in fact a tendency to turn quality into quantity, something about which I have written in a separate blogpost here.

Ours is a world of numbers, plans, diagrams, flowcharts, strategies, targets and policies. Modern school systems, even when they are functional, are now part and parcel of vast bureaucracies and teachers are not much different from number-crunching desk clerks in the numerous matrix-like mega-machines of industrialized societies. Teachers everywhere now spend more and more time on mind-numbing paper work, documentation and filling standardized forms, making and using a range of quantitative rubrics and templates, than on actual qualitative teaching and learning. Teaching is now just another routinized, salaried “job” ---exchange of hours for dollars---rather than, even as opposed to, a committed, life-long, qualitative vocation as it once was.

To reiterate, education that can truly be called qualitative and integral will always have a deeply ethical and spiritual character. Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of the history of peoples in different traditional civilizations can attest to the validity of that claim. Education so conceived in traditional cultures as taleem o tarbiat or ilm o amal in Islamic societies, always involves some form of interiority, of spiritual training and self-realization. This is primarily because of the very different conception of man---his origin, end and his ultimate purpose in life. I cannot overemphasize this point about the true nature of man; only by asking who we are, what our origin is and what our end is, by seeking answers to and by understanding these deeper issues, can we make education truly ethical and transformative. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the doyen of Islamic intellectuality, has written that, “…how we choose to live in this world---how we act and think and how we develop the latent possibilities within us---depends totally on the answer we provide for ourselves to this basic question of who we are. For human beings live and act for the most part according to the image they have of themselves.” 

In the classical Islamic world, for example, among other ways of developing the latent potentialities of a student, a traditional madrassah education that always stressed the importance of tarbiat and marifat (and hence also amal or practice) would often employ a two-step process. This usually meant a long and arduous regimen of exercises, both cerebral/intellectual and otherwise, essentially to develop humility and to sharpen the skills of discernment. Typically, the first step in this process would be that of takhlia, which was an emptying out of all the negative traits and tendencies of the ego (self) in the student. This was followed by tahlia which was meant to adorn the emptied self of the student with (positive) virtues. A well taught and integrally educated student would be someone who had undergone a rigorous training process during which he or she was emptied or cleansed of the limiting and suffocating elements of the self and adorned with the re-awakened or realized virtues, all of which would shine through the words, acts and the whole being of the pupil. In certain countries of East Asia, especially in Japan and Korea, but also in China, school kids still perform a lot of similar chores like cleaning, including cleaning toilets and common areas, taking care of plants like weeding and watering, assisting school staff and community elders and so on. All of these demanding activities are meant to inculcate humility and to sensitize the students to the importance of community, co-operation or collective effort for responsible, harmonious and healthy living. In these societies, the young are made aware of the fact that no man is an island, and that a rugged, highly individualistic type of morality will eventually result in both the destruction of the individual and the society to which he or she belongs. Seen as a form of tarbiat, these tasks temper the negative and petrifying tendencies of the untrained self in the young.

I have mentioned the word madrassah above. What I have in mind is not what we hear about or see nowadays. It is unfortunate that this term madrassah has now acquired totally negative connotations and even considered by many, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a kind of extremist producing factory, an efficient assembly line the only function of which is to churn out violent terrorists and suicide bombers. But in the traditional world of Islam a madrassah was an almost sacred place of learning and teaching, learning not only about the world but also from the world; it was once a sanctuary of art, of the sciences, philosophy, theology, and so on. The fate of this word in our time is similar to that of another important Islamic concept, “jihad”, also an essentially spiritual concept but which is now so sullied that it is anything but. The reasons for the degradation of these terminologies are complex and many, something that I will discuss separately in the future, inshallah.

It is, therefore, with this idea of education, as taleem o tarbiat, as ilm o amal, that non-modern cultures see their end product as attainment of freedom by the student and this freedom is nothing if not spiritual liberation. This liberation fundamentally means the subsuming of the self into Self, of the lower self into the higher self, and is quite different from the modern ideas of quantitative "education as freedom" or "education as power". For example, take the case of freedom that is claimed to come from education. What is this freedom? Whereas in traditional cultures, authentic education means freedom from the self, in secular-modern settings it is often freedom of the self. This is a crucial point of difference, and has been observed by many non-modern thinkers including the French classicist and linguist Ghislain Chetan who has rightly pointed out that in the modern system,

"...pupils are locked into the narrow framework of their egos and a sort of autocracy is encouraged. This tends to make young people gradually insensitive to things other than their own opinions, the expression of their own personality and individual freedom" and that "...the most formidable of all prisons which confine the youngster is his own self--a cell bound on all sides, as it is with every other individual. The student is therefore prevented from breaking out of the cell lest he lose what is called freedom, but which in reality is the worst of all slaveries." (2011, p.123)

Similarly, “education as power” or “knowledge as power” can have two very different meanings, depending on the way education/knowledge is understood. The classical traditions of humanity, from Greek to Hinduism to Far Eastern Chinese and Japanese to Christianity and Islam, all religious traditions have stressed the importance of “knowing thyself”. In their often differing worldviews, power and domination over the self (khud shinaasi, self-control, and self-domination) is seen as the most noble path to true liberation and its opposite, power and domination over others without any ethical moorings or without any responsibility (in the sense that Francis Bacon meant when he declared, "knowledge is power"---over others, including nature), is seen as the logical outcome of an education that is inattentive to, or neglectful of, the self, an education that is cut off from ethical instruction and practice.

Dorothy L. Sayers once lamented the “lost tools of learning”. In her famous 1947 Oxford lecture with the same title, she lambasted the disjointed, compartmentalized and reductionist pedagogical culture of her day. One wonders what her assessment of our present pedagogical condition of education-as-algorithm would be, were she alive today. This is a condition where her tools of learning are increasingly dictated and dominated by the non-human, by the dehumanizing machines, where the classroom is replaced by YouTube videos and the teachers and instructors by "like" seeking, solipsistic social media influencers. But it was the poet T.S. Eliot who best captured the same sense of loss and decay in his poem “The Rock” that I have cited elsewhere in one of my earlier blogposts, and with which I want to end this one, too.

The Rock       by T.S. Eliot

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

Note: In this blogpost and elsewhere I use the word “man” (and all the subsequent gendered pronouns) in its old, conventional sense, meaning man as homo, mensch or as insan, all meaning person, which is inclusive of both the sexes of the species. No “sexism” or gender bias is intended. 

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On the significance of fasting

“Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”                                                                                                  Ali ibn Abi Talib (AS)

“Everything which is more than necessary to man is hostile to him”
                                                                 Sextus the Pythagorean 

Contrary to how secular modernity sees and understands a human being, traditional religions, including traditional Islam, have always maintained that the human is not just a material being, not just an evolved psycho-physical phenomenon or a body-soul duality at best and a mere collection of organs, of atoms and molecules, at worst, for example, the mechanical contraption or "machine" of Rene Descartes  or the "lumbering robot" of the militant neo-atheist Richard Dawkins, that noisy evangelist for Neo-Darwinism.  Like all authentic religions, traditional Islam also sees man and woman as a specially created being, as a creature that is half-human-half-angel, so to speak. The special creature that we call al-insan, implies a Creator. This creature has been placed as Allah’s representative on this earth. As the servant (abd) and vicegerent or deputy of God on earth (Khalifa Allah fil Arz in Arabic) with immense responsibilities towards the Creator and towards all His creation, including the non-human world of nature, Islam sees him or her as a special and elevated entity (Ashraf al Makhluqat). In the Holy Qur'an, we learn that when God created Adam from clay, He breathed into him and thus he became alive: “And when He had made him upright and breathed into him of His spirit” (Qur'an 38:72).

It is this “breath” that makes man and woman (al-insan) special. In the Islamic intellectual tradition, especially in its Irfani and Sufi manifestations, this “breath” also means that the human beings have a primordial nature (called fitra in Arabic) which they carry within themselves and which they often forget or neglect in the world of facades and constant flux in which they live. Over the ages, Muslim sages, the hakims (or hukuma), have defined this fitra as that original, pure and uncorrupted state of human nature where one is attracted to or leans naturally to tawḥīd and sees all reality authentically, "as they actually are in themselves." It is the forgetting (nisyan), or the neglect (ghafla), of this fitra that is the main cause of a Muslim going astray in this world. The core message of Islam, repeated in all its rituals is, therefore, a constant reminder to the believers of this special nature within them. This kind of understanding of the very nature of the human being is central to everything that mindful Muslims think about and do. The Muslim fasting in the holy month of  Ramadan, just like all other Muslim rites, for example, the canonical daily prayer, zakat (alms giving), Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, has its essential meaning---its raison d’être---in this particular understanding of the nature of the human being.

We are, then, body, soul and Spirit. Briefly, what this means is that we are both material and non-material, or spiritual, in our “construction”. In major Islamic languages like Arabic, Persian and Urdu, this means that we are jism (body), nafs (soul) and Ruh (Spirit or Intellect). The capital “S” and “I” in the last item are intentional and they signify the sacred quality of this particular faculty that human beings carry within them according to the Islamic religious tradition, meaning that he/she is not only a profane, terrestrial being but also has the sacred within. There is a hierarchy here, from the lower (body and psyche) to the higher (Spirit), or from the lower (carnal or passional) self (nafs) to the higher self. It is this hierarchy within us that Islamic praying and fasting are concerned with.

There is a famous proverb of medieval origins according to which, “There is no culture without asceticism.” Any good dictionary will tell us that asceticism means “self-denial”, “renunciation of the worldly or the mundane” or some other similar definition. For ages religious traditions have strived to inculcate in man and woman virtues like patience, contentment, self-denial or self-restraint, moderation and so on.  Fasting has been a quintessential ascetic practice in these old religions, so much so that in some religions there is even a fasting of the tongue, of speech. Muslim fasting in the month of Ramadan (sawm in Arabic) which is obligatory for all adult and healthy Muslims also has the same goal of realizing these virtues.
  
Fasting as a spiritual practice means two things: to abstain from or to restrain our bodily desires, and then to go beyond, or to transcend our lower self and re-connect with our higher self on that inner hierarchy mentioned above. Austerity and asceticism viz-a-viz these desires are the tools or techniques for the disciplining of the lower self or for truly “culturing” the self, in other words. Fasting is an act of interruption into our increasingly routinized, monotonous and forgetful lives. As an act of self-denial, it disturbs us, but in doing so it actually awakens us and reminds us of what we have forgotten or have been neglecting: our primordial nature, the fitra, that we carry within us. In fact, authentic Islamic education, always called taleem o tarbiat, has its aim exactly this same awakening of the inner self, the remembering and recollection of the forgotten fitra that was placed in us at the time of our creation. This has a parallel in other old, authentic religious traditions. For example, in Platonic terms, this is what has been called anamnesis which literary translates as “recollection” or generally as remembrance.

We lose our true sense of being, we become disoriented and scattered as a result of the forgetfulness of that primordial nature, the continual remembrance and recollection of which makes us what we are meant to be: that special creation of the creator God. Modern life is often neglectful, if not outright contemptuous, of the virtues of restraint, self-denial and contentment (ridha) mentioned above. Modernity, which entails modern lifestyles, is often about the elevation and celebration of all forms of the lower passions of the human soul. Most of what makes up its ethos border on the extreme: extreme forms of materialism, extreme consumerism, even hedonism and real and virtual narcissism, often in the name of individuality, expressiveness and originality. All this heedlessness is very disorienting and which sully the psyche, or the inner life of the individual, and through extension affects society of which the individual is always a part. In such contexts, fasting becomes an orienting and a deeply cleansing practice. We nourish and replenish our inner life by temporarily denying material nourishment to our outer life. By being intentionally blind to our lower self, we begin to see our true, higher self. By “starving” the animal or the animal-like in us, we feed and nourish the truly human in us, to use a strong and explicit imagery. And that is perhaps what the above proverb means when it says what it says about asceticism and true culture. 

In addition to the spiritual, there is also an equally important social aspect to fasting. Religious rituals like fasting remind the Muslim believer of the plight of the needy and the destitute in society and sensitize him and her to the importance of charity and alms giving, all of which are the duties of a Muslim believer but which have been forgotten. Ramadan is, therefore, a month of solidarity with the less fortunate in this world and an attempt to re-awaken compassion, re-establish social harmony and equilibrium in communities. Muslims, forgetful as everybody else in their daily lives, begin to see anew the utter importance of life’s essentialities like food, drink and other material things of this world, things that we take for granted most of the time; with their renewed awareness they begin to see them as blessings, as gifts of God. It is for these reasons that Muslims welcome this holy month of fasting that provides them with a special opportunity for spiritual renewal and social rejuvenation. 

Just as Ramadan starts with the sighting of the new moon, it comes to an end with the sighting of the new moon of the next month in the Islamic lunar calendar. This sighting, much awaited by all but especially by children heralds the start of the great feast of Eid al-Fitr celebrated for three continuous days and which is one of the two great festivities in the Islamic world. The Muslim faithful, after one full month of self-denial and abstention from food and drink, re-experiences all the blessings of life with a reinvigorated mindfulness. In this way, both the faithful and his and her faith are revivified every year in this holy month of fasting.
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Note: In this blogpost and elsewhere I use the word “man” (and all the subsequent gendered pronouns) in its old, conventional sense, meaning man as the generic/gender-less/gender-inclusive homo, or as insan, which is inclusive of both the sexes of the species. No “sexism” or gender bias is intended.

The TAO: The step out of your self

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Short, Short: Bandagi

“No time cometh on you but is followed by a worse.”    Hadith

"We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men."           George Orwell

Note: Bandagi (Arabic, Persian and Urdu) derives from banda, a created being implying a Creator, here specifically meaning being Allah’s banda. To be Allah’s banda, is to be both His servant (abd) and vicegerent (khalifa) in this imperfect, created world.

In the believers’ universe, God was once the presiding idea, the quintessential orienting Idea---the Compass, the celestial and terrestrial GPS---that mattered most in his or her life. All reality, all thoughts and actions, referred, or referred back, to this concrete Reality, to this Source, for their meaning and efficacy, for their very existence. The world of the believers was theocentric (God-centric), through and through: they saw God everywhere and in everything.

Now, we live in an age of content-less forms, of deceptive images that make us believe that our fantasies and fancies are more real than reality itself. It is an age of bumper-sticker “philosophies” that emanate from the depths of our unexamined and corrupted self, our inner hells. The Idea, the Sacred, is not even anthropocentric (human centered) anymore; it is outright machine-centric, or thing-centric. We make and invent things and then the same things become our measure, the measure of the human as such. This ontic degradation and epistemic bankruptcy is clearly visible in the non-symbolic, reductionist language that many people use nowadays with such novelties as “input”, “output”, “feedback’, “brainstorming”, “interface”, “networking” and so on. The young, in particular, are constantly instructed that the brain is nothing but a “computer”, the very thing that was created by that brain in the first place! In the popular American documentary series called The American Family the character Ashley asks the doctor, "Why doesn't God get a computer so he can figure all this out?"

Drowning in the tsunami of our own creations---the technologies, machines and gadgets that so entice and encapsulate us---we seem to be glorying in our incapacity to resist them, as many contemporary sages have argued. Warns Marty Glass: "the Internet stands as the final perversion, inversion, of God, of the Sacred....Heaven is Cyberspace, the Creator is the Scientist, the Altar is the Screen, the theology is computer technology, the monks are the nerds and hackers, Holy Writ is the Program, the Priests are the Consultants, Salvation is Being On-Line, and Paradise is the Information Age...Money, machinery, and people: One at last." 

“And now we’re blind. We lost our sight.
There’s darkness where there once was light.
It’s still the Garden, we’re still there,
It lies about us everywhere,
But all we see now, all we find,
Are the facts and figures in our mind.

The given world was not enough:
We looked for more, discovered stuff
Behind, beyond what eyes could see,
And called that stuff reality.

The world that instruments reveal,
A world we cannot see or hear,
Wonder, love, respect, revere,
That’s where we live now: our reward.
The angel with the flaming sword,
The exiles in their maze of lies
Who feverishly specialize
In finding ways to numb their pain---
Both are us. We toil in vain.

What’s human suffering but the price
Of discontent in paradise? ”
                                              

                                         (Brief by Mary Glass)

TGB: The Two Perspectives

Source: I_Found_BACON @www.Reddit.com

“One could say that the traditional worlds were essentially good and accidentally evil, and the modern world essentially evil and accidentally good.”              Seyyed Hossein Nasr

 “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."      Charles Beard

‘Broadly speaking, there are two perspectives, which may be called the secular and the traditional. They are irreconcilable, and they appear, in innumerable guises, whenever a serious dialogue about humanity and its fate is pursued to ultimate implications, and whenever we think deeply about the meaning, direction and purpose of our lives.

In the secular perspective, reality is History, knowledge is given to us by Science and happiness by technology, everything is relative, and the criterion of rectitude is practicality. In the traditional perspective, there’s an eternal Norm (Haqq/Haqiqa) or Law (Sharia) or Way (Tariqa)---a dharma---from which we have departed, a Truth, or Wisdom or Simplicity which we have forgotten, and an Absolute, which may or may not be a personal God, which is alone real, whose existence we now deny. What is seen from the former as Progress and the multiplication of human potentials is seen from the latter as dehumanization and impoverishment. These opposing perspectives, occasionally explicit but most often implicit, confront each other with growing frequency as the sense of crisis deepens. Their manners of expression are ramified indefinitely, and into bewildering complexity.

The first perspective, however, is also the world. It is enthroned Power. When we talk about History, Science and Progress, we are talking about this world, our common experience and the forces that shape it. The second perspective is a dedication and a Witness; on its own terms, a Witness of Error, Ignorance and Death. It is powerless, and does not seek power. The first, as active, as history and the force behind it, is predominantly “outer” (zahiri), and proudly visible. It is also the modern mind; it informs secular philosophies and nearly everyone’s fundamental, but increasingly threatened, assumptions about the past and the future. The second perspective, as contemplative, is predominantly “inner” (batini) and intangible. It views outer things, the ever-changing world and the over-flowing river of events, as insubstantial because ephemeral; the divine archetypes alone are real. In its full realization, however, in meditative or ecstatic insight, it perceives a perfect identity of inner and outer, of Self and world, in an eternal present.
Each perspective regards the other, with respect to these last grand alternatives and wherever their encounter takes place, as mistaken about the nature of reality. Our decision about how we shall live our lives will depend upon what we regard or experience as real.’


Marty Glass, Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate,  NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001: IV

"The traditional vision of things is above all 'static' and 'vertical'. It is static because it refers to constant and universal qualities, and it is vertical in the sense that it attaches the lower to the higher, the ephemeral to the imperishable. The modern vision, on the contrary, is fundamentally 'dynamic' and 'horizontal'; it is not the symbolism of things that interests it, but their material and historical connections. "

Titus Burckhardt: Mirror of the Intellect, Cambridge, U.K: Quinta Essentia, 1987, p.25. 


Truth.     Goodness.      Beauty.

Short, Short: "Like"

Source: Hospitality Hedonist, South Africa

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us…we become what we behold.”                                                 Marshall McLuhan

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”  

                                                                Pogo, the cartoon character

Some definitions

A fatwā is a religious edict, “a non-binding legal opinion on a point of Islamic law given by a qualified jurist in response to a question posed by a private individual, judge or government. A jurist issuing fatwas is called a mufti and the act of issuing fatwas is called iftāʾ: (Wikipedia) . In the Shia world, fatwas are often issued by a mujtahid, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, among other Islamic sciences. 

 A fatwa baaz, as used here, is a pumped-up fanatic, either of the religious or the non-religious variety (like one belonging to some forms of atheism and vulgar Marxism) who issues a fatwa-like condemnation of all those who don’t submit to, or agree with, his or her uninformed, narrow and often bigoted worldview. Irrational, violently sentimental victims of hypocritical, power-hungry, worldly ideologies, these are people who are always unqualified about the subject matter on which they opine and give their fatwas. Theirs is an extremely prejudicial and violence promoting mindset that has caused a lot of suffering for both Muslims and non-Muslims around the world. In a country like Pakistan, this cancer of the mind, this malady of the heart, started showing its symptoms in the late 1970s with the rise of the brutal dictator Zia ul Haq and has now spread wide and deep throughout the country. It's ugliest manifestations can be easily observed on the "walls" and web-pages of many of the digital hells that are euphemistically referred to as "social media". 


The fatwa baaz mindset: #1

A:  Why didn’t you “like” my post?
B:  Eh…I am sorry, but…

A:  But what? It was the sayings of an Islamic sage, a glorious compilation of his aqwaal e zareen. How could you not “like” it?

B:  Yes, I know that. It’s not that I did not “like” it, but I thought it was improper, decorated with objectionable emojis and other trivia, was wittingly or unwittingly taken out of context and was being used instrumentally, for the wrong purpose, or, being quoted irrelevantly and irreverently. I have serious reservations against such abuse of the sacred, especially in these digital spaces where the perverted and the pornographic often sit next to the inspired or the sacred...

A:  How dare you! You are not a Muslim! You are an infidel! You are not one of us! I “unfriend” you!

----------------------------------------
The fatwa baaz mindset: #2

A:  You didn’t “like” my post? No ?

B:   Sorry, but I have no comments to make.

A:  What do you mean? Why are you so mean? It’s a good thing, isn’t it?

B:  Yes, of course it is a good thing. Listening to Sura e Yaseen Sharif six times a day is a good, pious thing. I do it myself although not as frequently as you do.

A:  Then why didn’t you say something appreciative, something positive? You could have at least clicked on the “like” button!

B:  Well…You see, I am old school and I have a rather different attitude towards such things…

A:  What do you mean? Are you not a Muslim?
B:  Of course I am, Alhamdu’Lillah, but I’d rather not make such confessions in public all the time. You know, the better---the more subtle and humble---thing to do is that, just like we try hard to hide our weaknesses and faults, we should also have a similar attitude towards our strengths, I mean hide the good we do. This is what I was taught. I have also written about it, you know that very well, don’t you?  
A:  OH! You are such a mean-spirited person, a petty and jealous man.  
B:  I think that’s not fair, it’s too extreme a reaction...  

A:  You are not a Muslim! You are an infidel! You are not one of us! I “unfriend” you!
--------------------------------------------

A friend of mine, Sardar Kharkaftar of Helsinki, once jokingly said that if social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter replaced the “like” button/icon with an “understand” button, people would leave in droves, the platforms would go bankrupt  and the owners’ billions would evaporate within few days if not few hours! Chris Hedges, the former Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist, has identified a serious problem in this age of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  etc.---an age where we have moved from a print based culture to an image based one: many people confuse “I like” with “I understand”. They are not the same:  “We confuse how we feel with knowledge…It feels good not to think…” says Chris.  But there is logic to this shift from a print-based (books) to an image based (photos, emojis) culture in the age of late capitalism or of post-modernity, as Susan Sontag once observed: “Needing to have reality confined and experiences enhanced by photographers is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.” (from On Photography)

People whose only claim to meaningful existence is that they are present 24/7 on the social media, have thousands of “friends” and followers, and for whom the most important things in life are clicking the “like”, “forward” and “share” buttons on their i-gadgets---those addictive tricknologies of mass deception---have this automatic, by-default, expectation that no matter what they send, share or forward, the other side must “like” it even if they don't share or forward it. Blackmailing, in other words. Anything other than a “like” is considered unacceptable, “impolite”, “disrespectful” and even “insulting” and would result in censorious responses like the ones above, admittedly two extreme examples where the faith of the reacting persons is nothing but an extension of their inflated, crude and undisciplined egos. What people say, do, see, buy, sell, eat and excrete are all photographed these days, instantaneously uploaded on these platforms, which are then promptly “shared” and “forwarded” followed by the instinctual no-thinking-required ritual of “likes”.  Here's Zygmunt Bauman's view: “The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you…people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice.”

TGB: Counsels of a Sufi Master

Source: World Wisdom Books www.worldwisdom.con

“Your wishing to be isolated (from the world) when God has placed you in its midst betrays selfish desire; to wish for the world when God has isolated you from it is evidence of a decline in your aspiration.”

“No act springing from the heart of one who has abandoned the world can be of small account, just as no act deriving from the heart of a covetous man can be of any real consequence.”

“A sin which leaves behind it a sense of humility and helplessness is better than an act of obedience which leads to self-importance and pride.”

“That you should not feel remorse for the missed opportunities of conforming to His will and that you should cease to regret the lapses you have permitted yourself are signs that the heart is dead.”

“When you encounter someone who offers answers to every question, expound on everything he has experienced and reveals all that he knows, you may reasonably conclude that he is ignorant."

 “On waking from sleep the heedless man considers what he will do during the day; the intelligent man considers rather what God will do with him.”

“Whoever considers himself worthy of more than he has is not humble; the humble man sees himself as unworthy even of what is accorded to him.”

“What a terrible setback it is when, having finished your work, you do not turn towards Him, and that, even when obstacles are few, you do not the more eagerly pursue your journey towards Him.”

“Often in giving you something He is (in reality) denying you (something), just as He may, in denying you something, be really bestowing a gift upon you.”

                                            Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari al-Shadili

“He who knows God is disinterested in the gifts of God; he who is negligent of God is insatiable for the gifts of God.”  

                                          Shaykh Ahmed Al-Alawi

Truth.    Goodness.     Beauty.

On simplicity and simple people

A portrait of an old woman by Sofia Minson

"...he who seeks to gain all things by cleverness ends by losing all in blindness and ineffectuality...it is better to go to heaven artlessly than to go intelligently to hell..."      
                                                        Shaykh Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad

"We live in an age of plenty, but what use is plenty of rubbish?"  
                                                       Lord Northbourne

“Yogurt! It’s yogurt”, she said to me once. “The secret to my long years is yogurt. A healthy person always has a natural desire to have yogurt”, she used to say. She lived to be 96 or 97. Originally from the Sistan region of Iran, she was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with engaging, sunken eyes and an aquiline nose set on a time-worn corrugated face that often reminded me of the graceful Red Indians or the First Nations of North America. The resemblance was not just physical but also, and more importantly, metaphysical. She was our paternal great grandmother. She was our, and everybody else’s who knew her, Aaja, the Faarsi word for a grandmother or a grandmotherly woman. In this blogpost I want to recall and reflect upon the “philosophy” of this wise woman who belonged to a generation of people, who are now all but extinct, like the human version of the unfortunate Dodo, both species being the victims of the vicissitudes of what we often mindlessly celebrate as “our time”---as if it were an objectively real and eternal phenomenon and not just a blip in the current cycle of time---or just “the times” that always seem to be “a changin…”

Aaja used to say that goodness travels the furthest in life, so try to do good as often as you can. The good will live and will be remembered the longest than all the other acts done and words spoken: both the goodness of the tongue and of the deed. On food and eating, her one most valuable advice that I will never forget and which I often pass on to others was, “ When you sit to eat, never leave the dastarkhwan (or the meal table) with a full stomach; always stop eating just before you start feeling full. Don’t eat that last bite if you know that it will make you feel full!” The tone in which she would utter that last part of her advice and the facial expression that underlined its gravity were most suitable for saying something like, “Stop killing yourself!” or “Stop digging your grave with your teeth!”  Years later, I discovered similar insights on food and eating in the works of the great Islamic theologian and Sufi Al- Ghazzali. Another of her gems was, “Observe more and talk less. Listen and listen attentively, because the art of listening is the most difficult to master and the one least taught these days. Therein lies man’s true tarbiat (education)”

I have called her utterings as “philosophy”. She was a philosopher, in other words. By that I mean philosophy not in the usual, modern sense which often amounts to not much but mental gymnastics, one or the other kind of cerebral monkey play. I use the expression in its ancient sense, which is also its original form: as a way of life, manière de vivre or as bios in the French classicist Pierre Hadot’s words. Philosophy, according to this view is not just a truncated and compartmentalized discipline of knowledge that provides information or informs but what transforms the student, or forms its practitioner. It was, therefore, always called taleem au tarbiat, and not just education or taleem. In that kind of world, knowledge was essentially transformative in nature.

Old woman, a portrait

These “philosophers” were straight talking, simple and down to earth people. The simplicity, the unpretentiousness in both their thinking and lifestyles was more than anything else a reflection of the fact that they never confused the few things that are essential in life with what is accidental---the ever-multiplying flotsam and jetsam that first compete for our attention and then distract, disorient and eventually destroy us. They were people who were closer to the origin of things and hence were the "true"  originals than their amnesiac modern and postmodern counterparts. Many people nowadays think of original, or of originality, as novelty, as something new. But the word “original” has its roots in the word origin which makes something original to be closer to its source, and not just being novel.

Comfortable living with many ways of seeing and understanding the past for example, through myths, shared memories, stories, parables, sacred poetry, songs and so on, and not just consumers of hyper-rationalized, scientized history written by professional historians, they knew very well that history does not take man towards a clearer and more sophisticated understanding of his world and reality, but that history is always a house of paradoxes and ironies. In other words, they held that progress in one domain is undermined by regression and decadence in others. Or that every story of a chest-thumping civilization is also a tale of soul shattering barbarism, a sobering lesson that many modern Westerners not so much learned but re-learned the hard way in the latter half of the twentieth century mainly through the critical work of the Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin and what they called “negative dialectics”. We may have progressed technologically and materially but not morally and ethically. Morally, we are pygmies in front of our “naïve” and “simple” ancestors, while technologically we stand tall as giants. But the modern techno-monstrosities that we have produced reflect those same paradoxes and ironies of history:  they may well become the source and cause of our annihilation, of the annihilation of life as such on this planet.

We congratulate ourselves that we are sophisticated and complicated people and those who came before us were naïve, simple. Simple, yes, but simpletons they were not. In our self-congratulatory mood, we often forget that stupidity can also come wrapped in sophisticated worldliness speaking the urbane language of the metropolis. Just a quick look around us will confirm the truth of that claim. As a sage has reminded us, “…complication does not make error less false, nor stupidity less stupid.” In fact, the pathologies of modern forms of rationality are now more destructive, deadlier than those of the irrationality that we quickly and unthinkingly associate with most things, if not everything, past and with which we reproach everybody who lived in that past.

Nobody I think has provided a better formulation, in verse, of our Aaja’s philosophy than the great contemporary poet and thinker Iftikhar Arif when he says:

Buss ek hee rasta hay duniya ko zer karnay ka, jeetnay ka

Yeh jittni pur pech hoti jaaye ussi qadar sehl au saada ho jaa 

(There is only one way to win over and conquer this world,

The more it becomes complicated, the simpler you must become)

My great grandmother was semi-literate like most people of her generation in that part of the world. Judged according to the criterion of literacy-as-we-understand-it now, that is. But I do not know many people who are as literate, to use this word in its best sense, as Iftikhar Arif. He is the very model, the very definition, of authentic literacy and integral education. As the well-known poet, writer and literary critic, Saleem Ahmed, once said: “The poetry of Arif is the poetry of a man who is clearly in his own class when it comes to thought, feeling and expression.  Most of his contemporaries fail in one of these departments: those who know how to think cannot express or articulate, and the ones who can articulate, cannot think clearly. And when they are good articulators and thinkers, they are emotionally infertile.” The erudite Indian literary theorist and critic Gopi Chandar Narang has called Arif  “The empathetic poet of new (modern) alienation” by which he means that as an artist, Arif is someone who “first and foremost, has a profound love for humanity, enjoys life and living” ( what the French so charmingly call joie de vivre) and who is keen on understanding and feeling the suffering that is the human condition, by being both inside and outside of social structures because only by having a cold and objective stance on, or distance from, these structures and social norms, can one have the epiphany of that suffering, of that dukkha.  Such is the art of this man, the aesthetically sublime and philosophically profound quality of which is matched by his character as a decent, caring and humble human being, as witnessed by all those who have had the privilege of meeting him.

So, what Iftikhar Arif is saying in his verse is what our Aaja and people of her generation---at least the philosophers among them---were the embodiment of. They were people in possession of the sharp sword of simplicity that could cut through the complicated and accumulated layers of dross that engulf the contemporary man. Those “naïve” old-timers, who lived philosophy rather than propound and preach it, had eyes and vision that could penetrate through the fog of compound ignorance parading as authentic insight. They were people who were acutely attuned to quality rather than craving quantity, as I have also argued elsewhere in one of my blogposts; they knew that to be truly rich and contented one had to possess less. For them what was not absolutely necessary to sustain life, was just corrupting burden. That is how the sehl au saada in the above verse should be understood.  Life always meant being first and then something else, and definitely not just having or possessing.

I am not an expert interpreter of Iftikhar Arif's work but let me try to open up what he says in the above verse lines a bit more. Saadgi, or simplicity, affords us the power of discernment with which we can make the crucial distinction between what is real and what is illusory, between error and falsity, necessity and contingency, or between light and darkness. This ability is actually a kind of critical thinking whereby the simple person has courageously protected his or her ability to discriminate between what is right and what is wrong, between truth and falsity; in them, this critical ability is intact and whole because they have refused to let the clutter of this world inundate their minds, harden their hearts, and corrupt their entire beings. Unlike in the past, in our times the real problem is not the lack of information but its excess; we are submerged in it 24/7 and 365 days a year, bombarded with it from all directions and in all forms and formats. We are floating, nay, drowning in information. So, the critical skill that is urgently needed is not just to have access to information and knowledge but to filter out, to sift and sort, to separate and dig out the deeply buried wisdom and truths from under the mountains of falsities. The late historian and philosopher of art Ananda Coomaraswamy expressed it beautifully when he said, “It is far better not to know how to read than (not to know) what to read.”  What can be more insightful in this post-truth age of information glut, of alternative facts and fake news? That, the critical filtering and sifting, can only be done if one has made a conscious choice to live the simple, the saada life, just like Aaja and the other old philosophers would have liked us to live.

Ay Dost Bataa Tu Kaisa Hai?

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