The Ummah of Iqra’ the Document is Now the Ummah of Watch the Documentary
On January 26th of this year, Nassim Nicholas Taleb published a short paper with Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam titled “Systemic Risk of Pandemic via Novel Pathogens — Coronavirus: A Note”.
In this paper, the authors applied a statistical analysis that took into account real-world factors that were known at the time where they argued that conventional responses are doomed to fail in the short term, will lead to our extinction in the long term, and they broke down where the problems lie in convention so they can be mitigated. The specific issues addressed in the paper included a discussion of the virus’ rates of spread, reproduction, and mortality, as well as the increasingly fatal and rapidly spreading emergent pathogens, asymmetric uncertainty as it applies to this coronavirus, and the problem with fatalism and inaction.
All that in one page! I told you it was a short paper.
Their conclusion and recommendation (remember, this was on January 26th):
“Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogens.
It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail to do so will eventually cost everything — if not from this event then on in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large.”
What’s worth noting about this paper is that it’s not unique in its predictive power. The more you delve into the data related to the current pandemic, outbreak monitoring centers’ reports, infectious disease literature, and historical trends, the less mysterious this whole thing becomes, and the more inevitable you realize it was.
In fact, the more you look into who else predicted this pandemic and how it will play out, the more you recognize that the world doesn’t revolve around Bill Gates. Also, the more you look into what other heads of public health departments and ministries say around the world, the more you realize that Fauci is just one guy. And while we’re at the more you do stuff, the more you understand the role of the World Health Organization and its scope of power in terms of what it can, or more accurately canNOT enforce, the less impressed you become.
In a nutshell, the more you ask relevant questions about how the world works and prohibit yourself in the process from speculating answers without hard evidence that you then justify to yourself by calling it a “deep dive” or an “investigation” to uncover what lurks in the “dark”, the more you’ll find yourself successfully predicting future events because you’ll realize that the free will humans have is not Divine Free Will and that human behaviour also has discernable patterns. That’s what the whole psychology of marketing and advertising is all about. When you combine knowledge of the natural world with that of human behaviour as they both are, fantastical explanations and cleverly produced documentaries “exposing” a grand conspiracy involving thousands of people from different parts of this globe (or flat surface) we call earth will be seen for what they are: a waste of what little precious time we have here that will not lead to any beneficial action.
Back to Nassim Taleb to close this circle. In a recent interview he did with The New Yorker, a point was made in the article that goes straight to the point I’ve been trying to make to my conspiracy theory-loving Muslim brothers and sisters:
“In a way, focussing on his January warning distracts us from his main aim, which is building political structures so that societies will be better able to cope with mounting, random events.”
Allow me to emphasize this point: that one-page paper published on the 26th of January, small in size, but so significant in its scope, is the way to make structural changes at the political and social levels. In other words, while Muslims waste their time watching hours upon hours of Alex Jones’ InfoWars-type documentaries, people who are on the ground doing work in the real world are busy coming up with new ways to change how we live based on tangible evidence.
The saddest part of this is the transformation of Muslims from being witnesses upon the people and leaders in civilizational activity to disbelief-suspending viewers and viral spreaders of documentaries about alien shape-shifting lizards.
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.
Visit Al-Andalus Academy to learn more about available programs and short courses.
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