Many of my former colleagues are familiar with my love of fiction and poetry. In my previous workplace, I even prepared and presented a brief talk on why reading fiction was crucial. I’ve used some butchered version of that talk with myriad nieces and nephews who are all coming into college or are at decisive levels in their educational journeys. In bookstores, the fiction sections have shrunk and many a second-hand book seller has lamented the dwindling customer base for their fiction stock, in any language. Even smaller is the stock of local fiction writers and poets, also in any language.
Among my own family, there is a great tradition of reading that we’ve passed on to the next generation. I have been very hopeful, for many years, seeing this generation grow up and display extraordinary creative talents, that some of them may become artists or poets or writers. Alas, I remain disappointed. All of them have chosen fields that are traditionally the middle-class parent’s greatest ask: medicine, engineering, or business.
On a related note, having worked in publishing for over 28 years, I can tell you that the most profitable product in publishing is a school book. Publishers have massive print runs for textbooks, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions. In contrast, fiction or poetry will rarely exceed 1,000 copies because they are unable to sell them (usually because marketing for these books is abysmal and severely underfunded). Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to many Pakistanis who have said that reading fiction is a waste of time, and they only read textbooks or non-fiction books.
Why is this important?
Pakistan has a long legacy of poets and writers and philosophers who shaped our culture and ideologies preceding colonisation and Partition. We also have a legacy of exceptional writers post-Partition. Most people I know (at all levels and classes of society) can quote apt verses at the drop of a hat—something I am deathly jealous of. This is a skill that exemplifies the rich literary vein that travels through Pakistan, despite our low literacy rates (radio and TV once did a great job of disseminating the works of great writers and poets, which seems to be no longer fashionable today). It also reflects the philosophical bent that our peoples have. If the next generation is no longer reading anything but textbooks, that philosophical leaning will wither and die.
This erasure of our literary legacy will lead to a further erosion of our cultural roots, leaving us mere facsimiles of other cultures.
It will also cut us off from a much older legacy, one that has been systematically eroded around the world: the legacy of Sufism and the Islamic traditions of education.
Not, as much of the world would have you believe, madrasahs or Quran schools.
Our Present Educational Systems
Schools worldwide evolved into the form we are familiar with today because the Industrial Revolution demanded skilled factory workers. The moving assembly line, which enabled mass production, needed workers who would follow orders. They needed to limit their knowledge of the process to the section of the assembly line they were in charge of—a specialisation within a field, you might say. Schools mimicked these requirements by breaking down and compartmentalising subjects, enforcing discipline, and setting up their own assembly lines for mass education. The sole purpose of education, once an end goal in itself, became a means by which to earn a living.
This goal has been absorbed into the fabric of nations across the world, particularly in middle-class families hoping each succeeding generation will have more than they did. It’s not entirely their fault, of course. We live in an era engorged on consumerism and capitalism, constantly bombarded with messages that show us how we can live ‘the good life’ if we just spent more. We are constantly shown how ‘the other half’ lives in large mansions with fancy cars and slick gadgets, leading to deep aspirations that require that we work harder and longer. We are gradually moving towards Americanism, which is in itself a destructive move. Middle-class Americans today are corporate slaves, mired in credit card debt, living from pay cheque to pay cheque, and fighting deep depression with opioids.
There is hardly any pushback in Pakistan against this devolution. Our educational institutions, our leaders, our teachers, our publishers, and our writers are fully immersed in the drive to ‘bring Pakistan into the 21st century.’ This means emulating the Global North with every new fad, new ideal, new technology, without considering what it is doing to our social fabric. So when educators in the Global North pursue educational reform that will serve the new economy, making the same mistakes made a century ago, Pakistan is going along for the ride.
The National Curriculum Council and Education Ministry now place inordinate emphasis on STEM and STEAM when basic literacy is still a challenge. Universities opening up in the past thirty years are all focused on technical and business skills.
There are only a handful of spaces for writers, poets, or artists and they seem to be for a tiny percentage of the population. These roles do not provide financial security, or the ability to earn mountains of money, so the majority pushes them aside. And since one major goal for anyone going to college is, other than to get a good job, to leave the country and work abroad, the vast majority of Pakistanis choose fields that have global demand.
Philosophy is not one of those fields.
Education in the Past
Joseph Lumbard, a professor at the Hammad bin Khalifa University in Doha, recently published a paper titled Islam and the Challenge of Epistemic Sovereignty. He examines the ongoing destruction of Islamic forms of acquiring knowledge in a post-colonial era, subjugated by the overriding secularism of the ‘civilised’ modern world:
“Awed by the technological achievements of Western civilisation, many have freely surrendered the ground of intellectuality to the secular humanistic and scientistic (as opposed to scientific) world-view that gave rise to them. In doing so, they have relied upon epistemologies that are not simply foreign to classical Muslim epistemologies, but even opposed to them, because they are grounded in a paradigm that denies the very idea of the transcendent, one that relies upon an illusion of metaphysical neutrality to abolish metaphysics…”
The Islamic world sought balance between the world and spirituality. I once believed the core message of Islam was moderation, but balance, or mīzān, is a much clearer translation. It encompasses the need for justice and the recognition that religion and the modern world are NOT distinct entities—they are deeply intertwined. Mathematicians and astronomers and physicists were also philosophers and poets and writers. They learned not only from the Quran, but from the world around them. According to Professor Lumbard, “Karim Lahham underlines the…unity at the heart of this cross-fertilisation: ‘… the Islamic sciences possess a real unity, as shown by the interdependence of logic, metaphysics, and ethics. Central to this cohesion and interdependence lies the Quranic paradigm of knowledge that leads towards God and inner equilibrium, thereby establishing everything in a balance (mīzān)—or what Syed Naquib al-Attas refers to as ‘justice’.”
Our ancestors left us legacies of monumental living spaces that spoke of community and culture. Their libraries were filled with scholarship that we no longer look to because their contributions to humanity have been minimised and labelled ‘less valuable’ by Orientalists. In place of the deep learning and thought espoused by the Sufi men we call saints, we have wishes transferred to scraps of cloth and tied around trees, and pilgrimages to sacred places reduced to drumbeats and rituals.
When the liberal West denounces our epistemologies, our liberal elite bow their heads in shame and believe every word they say. And when they demonise Islam, our conservative right reflexively radicalises the teachings of the Prophet (PBUH) instead of learning from them. Neither of these positions offers any real evolution of our society, while the remaining population pursues ‘progress’ reflected in increased secularity and material gain.
As Professor Lumbard says, “Many aḥādīth underline and perpetuate the Quranic understanding regarding the importance of knowledge: “The superiority of one who has knowledge over the one who [merely] worships is as the superiority of the full moon over all the planets.”
The end goal of an education was not about the person’s earning potential, but the pure pursuit of knowledge.
Why the Humanities?
Eqbal Ahmad, one of Pakistan’s foremost intellectual minds, a former freedom fighter for Algeria, suspected (and tried) for conspiring to assassinate Henry Kissinger, and an advisor to the PLO, returned to Pakistan in the hopes of establishing a university named after Ibn-e-Khaldun. His goal was to build a university to teach humanities—not nuclear physics, information technology, or business management. Sadly, Mr Ahmad passed away before he could realise his dream of Khaldunia, but the sentiment is more valid today than ever before. He recognised the importance of an education that builds self-confident, self-actualised thinkers. Technical skills can always be learned later in life, but the ability to parse the world we live in, examine the deep-rooted insecurities of the country, and confidently make decisions that work for us is the product of lifelong learning, deep self-reflection, and understanding of the natural world. These are the skills on which Muslims reached the Golden Age of Islam.
Thinkers are the writers of fiction who couch unpalatable truths in exciting tales (think Orwell’s 1984 and the current repression on US campuses, or Animal Farm and the rise of fascism in Europe). Thinkers are the poets who wrench our souls with words and make us remember that we are more than our material selves. Thinkers are the artists who stand tall and crush the label of “inferior” or barbarism imposed on us through centuries of repression.
These are the people who become mirrors to society and effect deep change for the better. These are the artists and poets who articulate ideals and build tolerance and openness. These are the writers who reject the imposition of foreign identities and sustain and develop native cultures and identity.
Where are these philosophers in Pakistan today? Where, under the towering legacies of Bulleh Shah, Sachal Sarmast, Allama Iqbal, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, are tomorrow’s dreamers? Where are the writers who devote their lives to the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment? Where are the poets who seek balance in a world that is caught between two extremes? Where are the thinkers who protect us from charlatan leaders and corrupt discourses?
We assume that our problems stem from economic quagmires, but we have it the other way around. Our pursuit of money as individuals and as a nation has left us beholden to Empire, in deep debt, and under crushing inflation. Our love of money has given us leaders who have destroyed our industries, eroded our cultures, and divided us for decades. Our materialism has derided our Sufi roots and denied all of us any semblance of justice or peace. We no longer make anything, rather, we hold out the begging bowl and pray for the money tree we planted to flower.
Without a soul, this nation will never rise beyond mediocrity because we will always follow the foreign leader; we’ll never be the leaders ourselves.
_________
This article was previously published in T-Magazine on 14 July 2024, under the title “Where are the Thinkers?”
Leave a Reply