The Pursuit of Knowledge in Islam
A Path to Salvation, Not Spectacle
﷽
In a previous article I wrote about what I called the Idiocosm, an assertion that Islam makes that, “indeed [there] are worlds, not solely [a] macrocosm and microcosm”. The Idiocosm adds a third dimension, a personal dimension, of how we ought to see the world(s) around us. In a similar vein, Islam also architects for us a reality in which there is the personal, communal, and civilizational. For the sake of this essay I will be speaking on how this relates to the pursuit of knowledge.
In my opinion, the pursuit of knowledge today suffers from a number of maladies. There have been plenty of books and pundits bemoaning our lack of focus; that we are driven to distraction, as Edward M. Hallowell stated. But I want to speak on other challenges to how we as modern Muslims pursue knowledge such as:
the commodification of knowledge;
the contestation of knowledge;
the pageantization of knowledge.
These three observations are not intended to be all-encompassing but, in shā Allāh, will give us some scaffolding to construct a response to these challenges.
The Commodification of Knowledge
It will be helpful in our diagnosis of this malady to understand that we Muslims are neither separate from nor immune to the conditions and trends of the world in which we live. Modern educational pursuits have become tethered to (a) monetary gain and (b) power/prestige. Though some may consider this to be the inevitable outgrowth of a Millsian utilitarianism, the truth is that Mill’s own theory has been appropriated, distorted, and usurped by capitalism. It is the latter which can be argued to have had the most profound impact on shaping the pursuit of knowledge, reducing it to being the mere play-things of market-driven principles, like so many other things in our modern life. The result is not simply that Muslims today are influenced to pursue fields of knowledge that only promise the highest return on investment but that any field of knowledge which cannot be measured in monetary value is deemed to be worthless.
The second part to consider about the commodification of knowledge is its relation to power and prestige. It is a bit of a running testimony and joke that many of today’s “students of knowledge” preemptively seek ijāzahs (licenses to teach which are given to students from teachers) from teachers. When these ijāzahs are not offered many students will seek a teacher who will offer one even if there was no testing involved in the learning process. This too smacks of a hyper-Millsian utilitarianism that mostly is equally tied to market forces as such ijāzahs can translate into remuneration and social media currency, authority, and authenticity.
The Contestation of Knowledge
Another sign that our pursuits of knowledge are not in alignment with the morals and ethics of Islam is that much of what passes for knowledge today has led to argumentation and disunity amongst Muslims. Imam Ibn Mājah relates to us a statement of the Prophet ﷺ that should give us pause in relation to our topic here:
“‘Indeed, there are years to come in which a person will become very confused…, when a liar is believed and the truthful person is proclaimed a liar, the deceitful person is entrusted and honest person is accused of being untrustworthy, and the Ruwaybiḍah will speak.’ It was asked: ‘And who are the Ruwaybiḍah?” So he replied: The insignificant person who speaks on the public affairs’.”
This has resulted in a different type of commodification: knowledge as power, a power to be wielded over others, most specifically over fellow Muslims.
The Pageantization of Knowledge
The third category here will be a play on two words: pageantry, meaning a spectacle or pomp, and paganism, also known as shirk in Islamic nomenclature. As to the first, so much of the pursuit of knowledge today has become nothing short of theater. Huge conferences are held in which “speakers”, not scholars (even when they are legitimate scholars), are sat upon stages to entertain, not teach. Shakespeare would have been proud of our much ado about nothing. And as to the latter, much of what passes for pursuing knowledge is encroaching upon associating partners with Allāh, the cardinal sin in Islam. The Prophet ﷺ warned us about riyā’, a kind of showing off that is described as a “lesser shirk”, in which he said ﷺ:
“If anyone puts his or herself in a position for the purpose of being seen and heard, Allāh will disgrace that one with a place of being seen and heard on the Day of Resurrection.” – from the Sunan of Abī Dāwūd
This pageanism, if I may coin a phrase, is what we see plastered all over Muslim social media and other places where knowledge is allegedly being transacted and pursued.
And so the result of how knowledge and its pursuit has largely been presented to Muslims today where the focus is seldom on the knowledge itself, for the sake of Allāh, or for salvation, but instead on superficial catchphrases like “empowering”. And so this is where I make my first recommendation to combat this issue. Islam, on the scale of the macro, micro, and idio, ought to provide an environment, not where everyone is magically transformed into a scholar or even worse, given the false notion that this is even possible!, but rather we Muslims create tiered environments in which every Muslim can maximize their potential for learning. Our endeavor should not be to “level the playing field” but instead to make the biggest possible field to which everyone can actualize their potential, with the variations in achievement falling where they may. The field should, by design, accommodate those of lesser and greater potentials alike. When we attempt to “level the playing field”, this most often results in a kind of Malthusian social engineering where participants are left with either fraudulent claims to knowledge or worse, have been socially engineered to see knowledge as entertainment. In contrast, when we build a field in which the pursuit of knowledge is as essential to our community as is halal meat, then we will see a structural transformation, an actualization of the civilizational aspect of Islam. Muslims will be able to seek knowledge on any level, the macro, micro, and idio. This can help to alleviate and mitigate, in shā’ Allāh, many of those maladies I mentioned here. Perhaps even more so than the actual knowledge itself that any single one of us can acquire, the pursuit of knowledge must live amongst us.
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