Life Journey 1: Beginnings
My education at the finest universities created a secular mindset leading to a meaningless lifestyle. The search from meaning led me to Tableegh, and a renewed faith in Islam. This created a deep conflict: Does the Quran contain complete and perfect guidance for us today, or — as my Western education taught me — our modern problems can only be solved by Western knowledge, while the Quran is mostly irrelevant? This first section merely sets up the problem, while the path to the solutions will be discussed in later sections.
This is the first of 5 sections describing my life experiences which led to my current radical views. In particular, these ideas lie at the heart of my new online course on “Real Statistics: A Radical Approach”, which aims to rebuild Statistics on sound epistemological foundations, replacing positivist epistemology. We hope that this new approach will replace and supplant an entire century of developments which build on the approach developed by Sir Ronald Fisher in the early 20th Century. For more details, see Three Foundational Flaws in Statistics.
Early Experiences: 0–15
My childhood was shaped by the unique training given to all of us by my father, Mohammad Masihuzzaman (For details see: http://bit.ly/AZfather ). Three crucial takeaways from this training, relevant to our topic are the following.
- My father made clear that he had infinite faith in my abilities to achieve the highest goals. Also, his infinite love for me gave me courage and inspiration for high visions.
- My father emphasized non-conformity. He taught us to think for ourselves, and not be influenced by thoughts of the crowd.
- My father thought of formal education as a paper-chase; the credentials were necessary, but only life-experience provides us with real education. As a result, he put us all into school early, and encouraged us to get our degrees early, so that we could get into the business of life at an early age.
Formal Education (16–22):
Due to his encouragement, I got admission into MIT at 16, and finished my Bachelors in Math at 19. Then, in three years, I completed my MS in Statistics and Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.
Then, as now, this educational career would be regarded as the finest available. However, life experiences over the decades revealed severe deficiencies in the education. Some of these deficiencies are discussed in “Lessons MIT did not teach me”. What I needed to learn, as an immature teenager, was how to live my life. However, MIT taught me math, physics, chemistry, and biology — but nothing about how to become a better human being, and nothing about the meaning of life.
In fact, as I realized much later, the informal education I was receiving from fellow students and the cultural environment, was far more important in shaping my life and thoughts than I realized at that time. In “Social Revolutions”, I describe my experiences as a teenager in the USA. This informal and experiential education contained lessons toxic to personal happiness and to society. We were trained to disregard society, and pursue pleasure, profits, and power, without any concern for others.
The Search For Truth
Because my formal education did not answer the central questions posed by life, I adopted the hedonistic and materialistic life-goals of my peers. However, selfish pursuit of pleasure eventually led to extreme dissatisfaction and despair due the spiritually empty and meaningless life I was leading. I began searching for philosophies of life which would given greater depth and meaning to my life. After searching through many different religions and life-styles, I was guided to faith in Islam after spending time with the global movement of Tableegh and Da’wah. For more details, see my autobiographical interview for INSIGHTS magazine: http://bit.ly/AZinsight.
The next phase of my learning from life-experiences (instead of university education) was driven by some key insights I had learnt from Tableegh. The first one was that faith is a condition of the heart, and not of the mind — that is why it cannot be developed by arguments or counter-arguments. Belief and Trust in God means feeling serenity in your heart that God will take care of you, regardless of how adverse circumstances appear to be. For example, facing the Nile in front of him, and the army of Fir’aun behind him, with no apparent chances of escape, Moosa AS is not worried, unlike his followers. He says that God is with me, and he will guide us out of this difficulty.
Over a century of persecutions and religious wars between Christian factions led to the rejection of Christianity as a basis for organizing societies. The trauma of loss of faith led to the idea that science is the only valid source of knowledge. This is a fundamentally mistaken idea at the heart of modern Western education. It is easy to see that essential questions about life cannot be answered by the “science”. In particular, the idea that our hearts are a source of knowledge, spiritual progress leads to advances in understanding the human condition, and that life experiences are the most important form of education, are not part of Western epistemology.
Deep Conflict Created by Faith
Personal experiences with how God shapes our lives, and responds to our prayers, created a much deeper faith within me than I had ever experienced before. With this increased faith, a strong conflict emerged between the education of the heart by Tableegh, and the education of the mind by the West. We believe that the Quran provides complete and perfect guidance for all times. The historical record shows that Islamic teachings took mankind from depths of ignorance to pinnacles of wisdom, 14 centuries ago. But my western education taught me that:
- Knowledge created in the West over the past few centuries is the ONLY type of valid and worthwhile knowledge. All else (including the Quran) is ignorance and superstition.
- For guidance today, we can do without the Quran, but we cannot do without Western intellectual tradition.
It was the training I received in Tableegh which led me to ignore the evidence of my eyes and mind, which point to overwhelming Western superiority. Instead, I learned to focus on the testimony of the heart, which points to the power of the message of the Quran.
Methodological Revolution
Faith, developed through life-experiences, tells me that the final message of God to humanity is complete and perfect, sufficient for our guidance until the day of Judgment. The historical record testifies to the power the message which transformed ignorant and backwards Bedouin into world leaders, and created a civilization which enlightened with world for a thousand years. But the evidence of our eyes bears witness to the supremacy of the West, and the central place of Western knowledge in our modern lives. How can we reconcile this conflict between the head and the heart?
The Western education we receive trains us to ignore our hearts and follow our minds. This is called “rational” behavior. As many intelligent people have understood, this type of “rationality” is actually the height of folly; Amartya Sen has an essay entitle “Rational Fools” on this theme. This kind of thinking arose in the West due to peculiar historical circumstances. Over a century of hugely destructive warfare between Christian factions led Europeans to reject Christianity as a basis for public life. The trauma of loss of faith led them to reject the heart, and intuition, as a basis for knowledge — after all, everyone had believed in Christianity, and all had been mistaken.
Descartes, the father of modern (Western) philosophy, said “I think therefore I am”. Why would anyone doubt their own existence? Such a stance comes from the deep shock of loss of faith, where all past certainties have been rejected. In rebuilding knowledge starting from ZERO, this would be a natural place to start. However, someone in doubt about his own existence would perceive his bodily sensations — the beating heart, the tingling skin, the blood rushing in our veins, the sights, sounds, and smells immediately present. All this experiential and intuitive knowledge is rejected by Descartes in favor of a fallacious rational argument. When the word “I” is used, this already presumes the existence of the subject, and so the deduction is trivial.
In contrast, the Quran (22:46) states that “For indeed, it is not eyes that are blinded, but blinded are the hearts which are within the breasts.” Islamic teachings place great emphasis on the heart as our guide to the truth. My heart testifies to God, and to the power of the message. My observations and thoughts, created by my education, show me the power of the West, and the apparent lack of relevance of the Quran to our modern lives. My training in Tableegh led me to believe in the heart, and to distrust my thoughts. Allah T’aala has promised to guide believers from darkness to light. For many years, I made dua to Allah T’aala to help me solve this conflict of head and heart. Gradually, it became clear to me that what I had learned to regard as knowledge concealed huge amounts of ignorance. The central questions posed by life are not addressed at all by Western knowledge, while the Quran provides complete and perfect guidance about them.
POSTSCRIPT: This is the first in a sequence of talks introducing my new online course on statistics. Modern statistics is built on basis of false philosophies of knowledge, and my course “Real Statistics: A Radical Approach” aims to rebuild the discipline on Islamic epistemological foundations. To register for the course, sign up on the Google Form http://bit.ly/RSRA000