Don’t Confuse Rigour for Thinking
I was recently listening to an episode of The Philosopher’s Zone podcast in which Bryan Mukandi, one of our medical ethics lecturers in the medical program at the University of Queensland was being interviewed to discuss the politics and ethics of COVID-19. On a side note, and I am quite biased because I really like Bryan, this was a great episode. But there was something he said that particularly stood out for me:
“One of the legitimating moments of contemporary Western philosophy is the enlightenment. You know, this idea that God is dead, we ourselves must now become our own gods… We can’t just defer to tradition. We can’t just defer to religion… We need to do the work of reasoning, of grappling with things ourselves. And yet, what more often than not happens is that a lot of effort goes into a kind of literary analysis of how does Heidegger make sense of the world? How does Arendt make sense of the world?…and once I’ve understood that then I take a particular phenomenon and I try and fit it into that framework… What that does is it gives us a kind of rigour and a set of standards but what I think we end up doing is we end up confusing rigour for thought.”
In the course I’m currently teaching on the writings of Malek Bennabi at Al-Andalus Academy, the idea that Mukandi touches on here permeates Bennabi’s deep analysis of the factors leading to the decline of Muslim civilization and the futile attempts young Muslims engage in in their quest for liberation from the physical and intellectual subjugation of the European colonizer.
Considering this, I found myself thinking of a quote by James Baldwin I see Muslims sharing from time to time:
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
This quote comes from a speech Baldwin delivered in 1963. While in isolation it comes across as insightful, I think it misses a bigger problem and serves to create an illusion of being “woke” when it can be more accurately described as a progression into Stage 3 of the sleep cycle. Let’s take this Baldwin quote all the way to the depth it should go:
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated…” using the framework one has been educated in to examine with. Hence, it’s necessary to consider the metaphysical principles of the education one receives. If it’s atheistic, it will be a superficial materialistic examination of the society, even if it provides some answers.
The popularity of some figures in struggles against discrimination and colonialism is not sufficient for a Muslim to pick their work up and use them as absolute sources of inspiration and authority if their work is not filtered through our own beliefs about the nature of the world based on what God and the Beloved ﷺ told us. This can be appreciated by looking at the statement Baldwin made following the one being commonly shared in isolation:
“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.”
That is not to say that we cannot benefit from the works of the likes of Baldwin. There’s much insight that can and should be gained from them. But a Muslim should not be elevating them to a point where they no longer are filtered through a Quranic lens that can define what can be accepted and what can be discarded without hesitation as they remember what God tells us in the Quran:
وَإِذَا ذُكِرَ اللَّهُ وَحْدَهُ اشْمَأَزَّتْ قُلُوبُ الَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِالْآخِرَةِ ۖ وَإِذَا ذُكِرَ الَّذِينَ مِن دُونِهِ إِذَا هُمْ يَسْتَبْشِرُونَ
Whenever God is mentioned on His own, the hearts of those who do not believe in the Hereafter shrink with aversion, but they rejoice when gods other than Him are mentioned. [39:45]
Mohamed Ghilan earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 2015 and is currently a 4th-year medical student. He is the founder of Al-Andalus Academy, an online learning platform delivering traditional Islamic teachings and an online book club where non-fiction books are explored and discussed through an Islamic lens during live webinars.
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