and then our exile

Knowledge has been stripped of meaning.

This is a bold claim to make.

~

Autumn winds bring not only the slow ripening of leaves but also, for many of us, the beginning of a new year at an educational institution. Whether high school, college, or university, we are told their main purpose is to educate, producing graduates with the skills and knowledge they will need to operate both as members of society and citizens of the world. This is the aim of most, if not all, educatory bodies the world over; those of modern civilization, however, regard this knowledge in a radical light, subverting its purpose.

Learning has always been an exercise of primal importance. All knowledge, though, is directional, a vector quality; this direction is determined by the framework of the particular civilization. The same fact would have different meaning (be interpreted differently) in each framework. In Plato's idealism, for example, all material being is but a shadow of ideal being; facts are not just facts but indicators of ideal facts (an apple is not just an apple but the shadow of an eternal, perfect apple). Plato's facts were suffused with meaning – as were those of nearly all other knowledge-systems. Medieval Europe was especially heavy on this, assigning meaning to the slightest actions, or the interplay of colours and numbers. In Islamic civilization, all that exists does so as an ayah, a sign, of God's existence, omnipotence, and glory. All matter, in Islamic civilization, is pregnant with His praise. Mountains, seas, birds, animals – the Qur'an draws at the meaning of natural phenomena as witnesses to its truth.

Every knowledge-system must describe facts so that they become useful. Modern naturalistic frameworks, however, do a curious and perhaps unprecedented thing to these facts: the meaning they apply is reductive; the fact is bound up only with itself. In other words, instead of reaching at a higher, transcendent meaning, the apple is defined as only the sum of its parts. We are told it is made of various chemical compounds, and that if ingested it will provide a specific amount of energy: it exists – but that is all. The framework's interest is only with what is immediately perceptible of the apple, and does not lie with what the apple means. The question itself is foreign: if I were to ask what an apple meant, or represented, or implied, most teachers or professors in these educational institutions would think I was either trying to impress them with frivolous esoterica or was simply superstitious.

Once something can be explained away it loses much of its wonder. When an apple is regarded as the physical reflection of a perfect and eternal essence, or as matter which has been brought into being through a special divine act of command – when it has any meaning beyond itself whatsoever – it has been touched by the transcendent, and thus has a certain spiritual beauty. It is still, of course, made of the same compounds and will provide the same energy when digested, but a more comprehensive profile of the apple is presented: not only the 'how' but also the 'why' is answered, and so it has both existence and purpose.

The reductive approach has also become dominant in the social sciences. The institutions of society exist to perform functions; social and political explanations are found for religious beliefs; all complex interactions can be reduced to class or gender conflict. These different explanations all hold some truth, I believe, but do not provide a holistic, comprehensive, picture: things are not only the sum of their parts, they have independent identity. These explanations do not deny the existence of meaning, but simply ignore it. As this has grown deeply rooted in modern approaches to knowledge, the two have been separated: discovering the meaning of facts is no longer an integral part of the learning process, it now is a fringe pursuit attempted only by weird cults and fundamentalist, primitive peoples.

Educational institutions in the past tried to produce graduates who had a grasp of both the 'how' (the facts) and the 'why' (their meaning), thus making the crucial step from information to understanding, and from learning to wisdom. Today, however, most high schools, colleges, and universities consider the 'why' irrelevant, focusing only on the 'how'. These explanations of the apple, I believe, will always be limited, and are inadequate – especially for Muslims attending these institutions.