Crisis of Knowledge

The Crisis of Knowledge

Introduction and Gratitude

First of all, I want to thank the hosts, all of the distinguished professors that are here, this wonderful center of knowledge, which I was made to understand that this is the largest university in Malaysia. This is also a wonderful auditorium to be speaking and also to see so many young faces out here. It always inspires me to see the young people that are willing to come out to hear a discussion or a lecture or to participate in something of that nature as opposed to spending their evening watching television, which is what a lot of people tend to do these days.

The Nature of Global Crises

The topic, and I think Dr. Delp spoke very eloquently towards the purpose of the evening, we also prepared some thoughts for an academic audience, and I think there's quite a few students here. So, I'm going to modify what I was going to talk about a little bit, but the basic idea of the crisis of knowledge is that there are many problems in the world. We have economic problems, currently we have very serious political problems.

One of the problems that we have right now is in Ukraine, which in some ways is a deeply troubling crisis right now because these are the situations that in the past have very easily led to major conflagrations. People tend to forget that it was the assassination of the heir of the Habsburg Empire that ignited World War I, which led to countless deaths, that it was the German invasion of Poland, which they considered actually to be Lebensraum or German living room. They were reconquering what they felt to be part of the previous German Empire that was dismantled after World War I, and people tend to forget that World War II was actually a direct result of World War I. And the utter humiliation that the Germans suffered at the hands of the conquering powers at the Treaty of Versailles.

So, these events led to over 100 million people being killed during the 20th century. But if you actually look at these problems, they were always a failure of the political class at solving problems that were in essence not just simply political problems but deeper than that. And this is part of the trouble that we have is that we no longer define our terms anymore.

Superficial Solutions to Deep Problems

We no longer look at these human illnesses that we have at a deep level. We look at them at a very superficial level. And so we have economic problems, but they're addressed at a very superficial level.

For instance, the recent massive crisis which Bernanke, Ben Bernanke, who was the head of the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States and did his PhD on the Great Depression, recently came out admitting that the financial crisis of 2008 was greater than the financial crisis of 1929, October 1929 that began the Great

Depression. But instead of addressing the problem at the root, instead what was done was to ignore the deep problems of the financial structures and institutions and to simply bail out the criminals that perpetrated great financial crimes against large numbers of people, not just in the United States but around the globe. And there were people here in Malaysia that were affected by that crisis.

The Irish people were made to bail out banks in mainland Europe that had nothing to do with Ireland, but their political class accepted this. One of the few countries that actually did anything was Iceland where they put the banksters in jail. And they refused to pay the English banks for crimes that were committed against their population by people that were unethical.

Understanding Philosophical Foundations

So instead of addressing the economic problems at a deep philosophical level, which is understanding first and foremost the economic system that you have at its philosophical base, because any institution you have has a philosophical understanding. There's a philosophy behind consumerism. There's a philosophy behind capitalism.

There's a philosophy behind despotism. And unless you understand the philosophies behind those, when the problems of those institutions arise, you can't address them properly because you don't understand the problem. Any physician knows that etiology and diagnoses go together.

You have to understand what caused the disease before you can treat the disease. And you cannot, if somebody comes to you with malaria and you treat them for malaria and then you send them back to the malarial swamp to simply be reinfected again, that is not treating a person. That's not treating the cause.

The Epistemological Crisis

And so looking at a deeper problem is very important. Now one of the major problems in the crises of knowledge is that knowledge has been defined by a materialistic hegemonic civilization that does not acknowledge other forms of knowledge. So for instance, in our tradition, as well as the tradition that Dr. Delp was trained in, which is the Catholic tradition, in our tradition, our epistemology is very different from the epistemological assumptions of the current dominant model around the globe.

But if we don't understand the epistemological assumptions, if we simply go to these universities and we imbibe what's being taught without having the critical skills to understand and analyze these things, then we become victims of worldviews that were engendered by others, that do not share the same first principles that we share. If we don't know our first principles, if we don't know what our methodologies are, if we don't know what the epistemology of Islam is, if we don't know how we view truth and what is truth, if we don't know these things, then that ignorance is easily replaced by another type of ignorance, which is a compounded ignorance. It's learning things that are simply wrong.

Simple Ignorance vs. Compounded Ignorance

Our scholars differentiate it between simple ignorance and between compounded ignorance. (الجهل البسيط والجهل المركب - الجهل البسيط) is the ignorance that somebody who knows they are ignorant has. And this, Dr. Naguib al-Attas calls it innocent ignorance.

It's something that can be remedied. But compounded ignorance is an ignorance where somebody is ignorant and they're also ignorant of their ignorance. And this is a much deeper problem.

The Tragedy of Modern Education

And so one of the great tragedies of modern human beings, we have a cult film in the United States which is called The Wizard of Oz, which every American child has to see year after year until they're fully indoctrinated into the worldview of The Wizard of Oz. But one of the things about The Wizard of Oz is there's a scarecrow who's looking for a brain. And he says, if I only had a brain with the thoughts, I'd be thinking I could be another Lincoln if I only had a brain.

So he's looking for a brain. Well, he never finds the brain, but at the end, The Wizard gives him a piece of paper. And he says, in my country back home in Kansas, when somebody doesn't have a brain, we confer upon him a diploma.

And this is very often what happens in our universities. Brainless people are given pieces of paper to convince them that they have a brain. But the reality of it is they're actually more ignorant coming out of the university than they were going in.

Because when they went into the university, they had innocent ignorance. But by the time they come out of the university, they have this compounded ignorance. And this is one of, to me, one of the great crimes of the modern educational institutions.

The True Meaning of Education

That people are deprived of a true education. They're given what they think is an education, edukere, to lead out of. You cannot teach people what they don't already know.

That learning, in our tradition, is remembering. It's a recollection of something that we already know. And this is why the Qur'an says, Remind, make them remember what they already knew.

What is it that we already knew? We knew a covenant that we took in another dimension. It was a sacred covenant. And it began with, Am I not your Lord? And we replied, as spirits, we replied in the affirmative, Indeed, you are our Lord.

And we witness to this. We're brought into this world. And the world is a place of remembrance.

It is to remember a previous existence. It is to recollect, to recall. This is why we call it dhikrullah, dhikrullah.

Because we're remembering what we already knew. You cannot remember something that you did not know previously. And this is the highest form of knowledge in our tradition.

The Removal of God from Knowledge

It is to know your Lord (لا إله إلا الله - فاعلم أنه لا إله إلا الله) (Quran 47:19). This is not being taught in the modern institutions of learning. They have completely removed God from academia.

They have removed God from the social sciences. They have removed God from the physical sciences. And they have certainly removed God from the ethical traditions that are taught today and inevitably lead for anybody that has an intellect to moral relativism based on how they're taught.

Alien Worldviews in the Muslim World

So, in the Muslim world, we have adopted alien worldviews. These are not the worldviews of our own tradition. They have been given to us by people that have come to certain conclusions about the world.

One of them is that the world is purely the material world. It's a quantitative world. And this is why they worship the quantitative sciences over the qualitative sciences.

But in the Islamic tradition, while a human being is meant to be literate in both qualitative and quantitative aspects of life because we are beings of meaning but dimension, we have comprehension and extension. We have quality and we have quantity. And therefore, both of them are important.

To have literate people but also to have numerate people is important. And this is why the numerate sciences, the quantitative sciences are important. But our tradition always gave precedent over the qualitative sciences.

The Primacy of Language

And the single most important of all these sciences was language. Language. This is what makes us human.

What makes us human is that we are articulate beings. We are beings that can communicate. But what is the secret of our communication? When we were told in the Qur'an (إِنِّي جَاعِلٌ فِي الْأَرْضِ خَلِيفَةً) (Quran 2:30) - The angels asked (أَتَجْعَلُ فِيهَا مَن يُفْسِدُ فِيهَا وَيَسْفِكُ الدِّمَاءَ) - Will you put in the earth those who sow corruption and shed blood? The question involved corruption and shedding blood, which look around the globe now how widespread these two phenomena are.

The Problem of Corruption and Bloodshed

Corruption and bloodshed. We have corruption, unfortunately, the Muslim countries, the corruption indices that are done in the Scandinavian countries on a yearly basis, the Muslim countries are some of the most corrupt. They are in fact considered to be the most corrupt countries in the world.

In fact, on average, Nigeria always takes first place and Pakistan generally comes in second. But I have a Pakistani friend who informed me that the Pakistanis bribed the Nigerians to take first place. So, this is a big problem.

This is a major problem that we have. Now, the other is the shedding of blood. And so the angels asked this question, this is istifham, it's not i'tirad. They're asking to understand because they were looking at the beings that were on earth before humans, which were the jinn, and this is what the jinn did. The jinn were here before us and they were corrupt and they shed blood. And so the human being was put here to replace them.

The Secret of Human Distinction

Now, what's interesting about this replacement, the angels said (وَنَحْنُ نُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِكَ وَنُقَدِّسُ لَكَ) (Quran 2:30) - We praise you and we deem you holy and transcendent beyond any description, that this is what we do. Allah says, (قَالَ إِنِّي أَعْلَمُ مَا لَا تَعْلَمُونَ) (Quran 2:30) - know what you do not know. And this is important, that the word that is used is, I know what you do not know.

And then the very next thing is (وَعَلَّمَ آدَمَ الْأَسْمَاءَ) (Quran 2:31) - And God taught man, Adam, all of the names. This is the secret of the human being, that we have the ability to abstract. We have the ability to see the one in the many.

The Power of Abstraction

The only way that we can communicate is by seeing the one in the many. When we talk about a lecture, see, you knew that there was a lecture tonight. How do you know what a lecture is? How do you know what a lecture is? If I say, there's a lecture on the crises of knowledge, how do you know what a crisis is? How do you know what knowledge is? Because you have abstracted the one out of the many.

There are many types of crises, but they share common qualities. And that enables us to speak intelligently about the oneness, the unified nature of crises. It enables us to speak about the unified nature of knowledge.

We are unifiers by nature. This is what we do as human beings. We are موحدون - We are constantly making one.

And how do we make one? We make one through language. We can only communicate because of the oneness of language. And this is why the ultimate abstraction is to recognize that this diverse creation also has a source.

Recognizing the Creator

Just as every crises, we can abstract the essence of a crises. We can abstract the essence of a crises. Out of all these diverse crises, we can also abstract the essence of existence.

Out of all this diversity. And the essence of existence is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is our Lord.

He is not creation. He is the creator of creation. But it's through His creation that we know Him.

This is the crises of knowledge. We have failed to see our Lord in His creation. We have failed to see our Lord in this extraordinary theater of manifestation that He has given us to come to know Him in the short time that we tarry here.

From Theocentrism to Narcissism

Muslims are a theocentric civilization. Our lives are meant to revolve around God. We are becoming like other previous civilizations.

A narcissistic civilization. A civilization that revolves around me. This is the child civilization.

This is the age of the child. We're living in the age of the infant. But this is a tyrannical infant.

It's not... Because we look at children. We have... In English we talk about... I don't know if you have this distinction in the Malay language. But in English we talk about childlike and childish.

Childlike is a very positive quality. But childish is a very negative quality. Because a child has an innocence that we all recognize because it has yet to be tainted by the world.

It's a sinless being. But the childish nature is the tyrannical nature of the self. This is the ego that does not share.

This is the ego that sees that it is the only thing in existence and everything is peripheral to its own existence. This is what the child needs to be educated out of. This is the essence of education.

The Islamic Concept of Education

Is to draw the true nature, the true innocence of the child, the براءة الأصلية of the child into existence. And this is done... In our tradition we have no word that corresponds to the word education. There is no word in the history of Islam that corresponds to the English word education.

We have two concepts that are always kept together. تربية والتعليم - The idea of nurturing and the idea of educating. In other words, you cannot separate the nurturing process from the process of education.

And this is why they went together. The مربي, the مؤدب, the معلم went together. The teacher was a spiritual mentor as well as being an intellectual mentor.

The Spiritual Nature of Intellect

You cannot separate the spirit from the intellect. Because the intellect in and of itself is a spiritual phenomenon. It is not a material phenomenon.

Consciousness is spiritual. The very center of the human being, this core that Allah calls the أولي الألباب, لب is an immaterial reality. It is a spiritual reality.

And so the مربي was the one who took you by degrees, who brought you out of yourself. And this is why مدرسة in Arabic means the place of effacement. It's the place where the negative qualities are effaced and the positive qualities are inculcated.

They called the first stage of education تخلية - the emptying out of the self. And the second stage was تحلية - the adorning of the self with those beautiful qualities.

Truth, Goodness, and Beauty

What the ancients called truth, goodness and beauty.

What we call إسلام, إيمان and إحسان is our truth. There is no god but Allah.

Islam is the way that we behave with goodness in the world. And إحسان is the profound need for the human being to make things beautiful and also to recognize beauty. And this is the human condition.

The Reign of Two Powers

But if you look at the current world today, everywhere you look, there are two powers ruling. There is the irascible power and the concupiscent power.

There is the dog soul. This is what Imam al-Ghazali called the dog soul and the pig soul. These are the two powers that are reigning. The people that are consuming and not recognizing that their consumption is killing them.

And then the people that are effecting their rage on the world. Literally going out with rage in the world. The war mongers.

The war mongers, whether they're spreading the weapons of war. And we know in our tradition that it's prohibited to sell weapons during times of civil strife. In fiqh, the vast majority of ulama said it's prohibited to sell weapons when people are fighting.

Because Islam does not encourage fighting. It encourages ending fighting.

- Every time they raise the flames of fire, God put those flames out.

Muslims as Peacemakers

Muslims are supposed to want to put the flames of war out, not to ignite the flames of war. This verse that was recited at the beginning, and it was an interesting choice from surat al-Tawbah. But this verse that was recited at the beginning is a good example.

You see, the Qur'an says

- The disbelievers will find harshness in these people. This is only during actual fighting. But there are now Muslims that believe that this is simply the way we're supposed to behave with non-Muslims.

Whereas the Qur'an tells us

- That God doesn't prohibit you from showing those who don't oppose you and persecute you religiously, that you show righteousness towards them. And that you actually give them a portion of your wealth.

This is what Qadi Abu Bakr in his Ahkam al-Qur'an says أَن تُقْسِطُوا إِلَيْهِمْ means to be just. But he also says اجعلوا قسطاً من أموالكم - That you can actually help them when they're in need.

Historical Examples of Muslim Mercy

We just recently, I've been mentioning this for years, but just recently, I was glad to see it, there's a Turkish filmmaker that wants to make a film highlighting the fact that in the 1840s, in 1847, the great Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Majid sent shiploads of aid to the Irish during the Irish famine and sent pounds, money to help them.

This was before the idea of global charity. This was before the idea of actually helping other people. And I would challenge anybody to show me many examples of this in human history where people are suffering in one place and people in another place find out about it and want to help them out.

This is a very modern phenomenon, the idea of aid. But Sultan Abd al-Majid, he had an Irish doctor who told him about the suffering of the Irish people during the potato famine and the Anglo-Saxon people in England were not only not helping them, but in fact, they were actually happy about it because it was removing a problem that they had, which is the Irish problem. If you don't believe me, just read A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift to see, although it's a sarcastic piece, it identifies the sentiment of many English about the Irish.

So this ship was sent to Ireland and the English were so bothered by it, they actually prohibited from being allowed to dock in their shores in Ireland. So the English who were controlling Ireland at the time did not want the aid from Turkey to come to the Irish and so the Ottomans went down and they snuck it into a southern harbor and that city today has a plaque reminding people of that fact. This is mercy and this is based on a Quranic injunction that human beings, wherever they are, should be helped.

Algeria, during the great famine of France at the beginning of the 19th century, the Bay of Algeria sent massive amounts of wheat from Algeria to France to help them because they were suffering, even though they were their enemies at the time. But there's something that transcends the animosity of politics and that is the necessity for us to reveal our humanity, to be muhsinun, to be people that do beautiful acts of goodness, of kindness. This is the essence of human beings.

The Prophet as Mercy to All Worlds

The Prophet ﷺ was called a mercy to all the world.

- We only sent you as a mercy to all the world. This is our Prophet, he was a mercy.

In fact, you have a brilliant Afghani scholar here and you're fortunate to have him, Dr. Kamali, who writes extensively on maqasid al-shari'ah. I had the good fortune of having lunch with him today. But one of the things

that he says is the two fundamental maqasid of Islam are rahmah and hudah, mercy and guidance.

And I would argue that really they can be collapsed into one because guidance in itself is a mercy, that the reason God has given us guidance is because He's merciful. And the Qur'an begins بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ - It doesn't begin بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الهادي - It begins بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ to emphasize using two attributes of mercy. The essence of our Lord is mercy, and the essence of His Prophet is mercy. And so Muslims, this is the tarbiyah.

The Essence of Islamic Education

Tarbiyah is inculcating mercy. It's taking the child out of its cruelty. It's taking it out of its selfishness into a sharing creature, a creature that wants to serve others instead of be served by others.

And then the ta'lim is the hudah. So tarbiyah and ta'lim is rahmah and hudah. It's mercy and guidance.

This is the essence of our tradition. And guidance is something that we cannot live without. And because we're imitative creatures, we imitate what we see.

The Influence of Media on Our Children

Now we have demons teaching our children. We have demons. If anybody came to your house and knocked on the door, and you opened it up, and they looked like Madonna, or Britney Spears, or any of these people, Russell Brand.

You know these people because we're in a global civilization. But if any of them knocked on your door and said, Excuse me. Do you mind if I come inside and just entertain your children for a few hours? Which mad person would say, Oh, of course, tafadhul.

Even with the wonderful Malay hospitality, you wouldn't do that. You'd say, get the hell out of here. And you would slam the door on them.

You know, who does he think he is? Or who does she think she is? And yet, so many of us simply turn on the television and plop these little children in front of this mindless box. And literally allow strangers from a whole other civilization with a whole other set of agendas to raise our children. I was once studying the Disney Channel because Disney Channel is everywhere.

And it really struck me as odd that this obsession with spreading your message all over the world so that Mickey Mouse, which I believe is going to be burned in hell with the other idols, that Mickey Mouse is part of global civilization. You know, a mouse is not exactly something that traditionally we've looked up to. You know, it's not Mickey the Lion.

You know, people name their children after lions and falcons and eagles. Right? A mouse isn't even an orangutan. You know, which is quite a stunning specimen as far as animals go.

I mean, I could look at an orangutan all day. It's just so amazing looking. So, but I was doing... And so, I looked at some of the cartoon, the artists that they have, and I went to their Facebooks because I wanted to see what type of people these were.

One of them had as his profession Defiler of Children. And it just struck me as so strange that somebody who was doing cartoons for children would describe themselves as a defiler of children. A defiler is a corruptor.

It's somebody that makes something dirty, that makes them unclean. So, this is a major problem that we have is that we're not thinking about what our young people are growing up with. So, on the one hand we have the القوة الغضبية and on the other hand, we have the القوة الشهوانية

The Two Destructive Forces

We have the dog soul, which is the anger. So, half of our ummah is filled with rage and a desire for vengeance.

And then the other half is filled with شهوات with appetites, concupiscent appetites, spending too much money, going and wasting your money on empty things.

In certain Muslim countries, they spend 15 times more on luxury items than the average Westerner. 15 times more a year on luxury items than the average Westerner. What is that? That's a sickness.

And that's because they're trapped in their lower self. We haven't risen above these two souls because we have, according to Imam al-Ghazali, we have four faculties in our being. Four faculties.

We have the irascible soul, which is the dog soul the شهوانية soul, which is the pig soul, and then we have the faculty of justice, which is the balancing faculty, and then the sage soul, or the rational soul. One of the American poets, he said, some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice. He's talking about these two forces in the world of appetite and anger. That the world, we're going to destroy ourselves out of our rage, like these revolutionaries that want to tear everything down, or out of our appetites, where we're consuming until there's nothing left to be consumed.

The Crisis of the Rational Soul

And this is a crisis because the sage soul, the rational soul, and I'm talking about rational, I'm using this not in a sense of formal logic. I'm talking about the true rational soul that sees essences, that sees first principles, that acknowledges reality, that recognizes beauty and harmony, that sees that behind this is something vast that we cannot comprehend. We can only comprehend it in our incomprehensibility of it.

And this is our Lord. This is real rationality. It's irrational to believe that this popped into existence out of nothing.

The atheists are the irrational ones, not the believers. They are the truly irrational ones. And their crisis of knowledge should not be our crisis of knowledge because they no longer believe in anything.

Their meaning is determined by each individual. This is their meaning. And this is why they can have wealth and fame and yet they take their lives.

The Redemptive Nature of Suffering

Even in our suffering, we don't take our lives because we believe in our suffering that there is something spiritual about suffering. We believe that suffering is redemptive. This is our belief.

It's (تَكْفِيرُ الذُّنُوبِ - It is to remove our sins). And there will be people that have great suffering before they die.

And our Prophet had سَكَرَاتُ المَوْتِ - He experienced the pangs of death. And actually said on his deathbed the pangs of death are intense.

So even the best of creation was not spared the pangs of death. Because this is the transition from this world to the next world. So this is important for us to keep in mind.

Conclusion: Addressing the Spiritual Crisis

In conclusion, I would say that if we don't seriously address the crises in our ummah, the current crises of knowledge in our ummah, and recognize that metaphysics has been lost in our ummah, seeing the deeper causes of things, that we will be trapped in the economic causes, the political causes, and fail to recognize the deep spiritual causes that are at the root of the human condition. If we don't address the spiritual crises, which is, it's an intellectual crisis because the intellect, as I said, is a spiritual organ. It's not a material organ.

It's not a physical organ. When it looks at intelligibles, it's called aql. When it looks at spiritual realities, it's called ruh or sirr.

But these are all synonyms for the same reality, which is a spiritual reality. If we don't address this deep-seated problem, and recognize that the faculty of balance has been lost, that we need to restore this balance of our triune souls, that we have intellect, and we have emotions, and we have appetites.

If these aren't working harmoniously in the proper order, then we either perish in fire or we perish in ice.

Jazakumullahu khairan wa salam alaikum.