Countering epistemicide: Muslims have a lot of work to do

The fact that global universities follow a model set by Western institutions is no accident. Centuries of colonisation at the hands of European nations led to the Global South-wide killing of many scholars, the destruction and dismantling of institutions and systems of learning and the elimination of books and oral histories.

In a word, this is what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “epistemicide” – the intentional and systematic annihilation of non-Western ways of thinking, learning and being.

Before it was colonised, the pre-colonial Muslim world from North Africa to the Asia-Pacific had its own very rich tradition of higher education – ‘university’ models that were distinctly different from those in Western Europe.

For example, there were no ‘degrees’ handed out by madaris (Muslim institutes of higher education). Instead ‘ijazas’ were handed out by individual academics to students when they personally deemed that they had achieved sufficient mastery of a subject. Students were free to choose their teachers on the basis of merit, and could travel across borders between Muslim countries and expect to be given the same political status and access to learning as budding academics.

Changes to the global educational landscape

However, centuries of epistemicide and the forceful imposition of Western-style colonial schooling and governance have fundamentally changed the global educational landscape for not only traditional Muslim regions, but for many other communities as well.

Most Muslim students who attend global ‘modern’ universities across the world – whether for an undergraduate degree or a PhD – are not acquainted with this pre-colonial legacy. They do not know of the incredible accomplishments and contributions made to scientific, philosophical and aesthetic fields of inquiry by so many Muslims, as well as others across the Global South.

Indeed, most Muslim students – regardless of whether they went to school in the Global North or the Global South – receive a Eurocentric and largely secular education.

Most Muslims cannot really visualise and put into practice what it might mean to engage with knowledge from an Islamic perspective. They do not know that for over a thousand years, engaging with knowledge from within an Islamic worldview of the workings and purpose of nature was the norm for much of Eurasia and that religious belief was a strong impetus in scientific study and accomplishment.

All this is a legacy of the mass-schooling systems that were imposed by European colonial powers, that imposed textbooks and syllabi that continue to indoctrinate indigenous students today.

A hidden curriculum

What kind of indoctrination are we talking about? One need only open a science textbook at any grade level – whether at school or university in most parts of the world. The chances are that the pages of those textbooks will predominantly feature the faces of white men: Einstein, Galileo, Newton, Tesla, Hawking. Perhaps the occasional book will also feature an acknowledgement of Marie Curie – a white woman.

It is not that these textbooks explicitly say, “you should believe that Western European men are the source of all scientific knowledge and advanced civilisation”; rather, it is the legacy, accomplishments and scientific traditions of the rest of the world (and of women) that is often simply not mentioned at all.

This deafening silence and omission are among the many ways in which a Eurocentric hidden curriculum continues to be conveyed to students across the globe.

It is not just a matter of race and gender. This indoctrination is also a matter of religion. School and university textbooks, especially in the natural sciences, are likely to make brief or ‘bite-size’ references to the history of science and Western Christianity.

Who doesn’t study and learn in passing about Galileo vs the Church when they first start learning physics? In such texts Galileo is portrayed as the force of rationality and reason, and the Church as that of backward traditionalism.

Science vs religion

This over-simplistic portrayal creates a ‘science vs religion’ narrative. It becomes a hidden curriculum.

It feeds into other such implicitly conveyed ideas to give the moral story that “since Christianity was the religion of the white man – the most superior kind of human being in the world – and the white man had to overcome his religion in order to let the light of science shine through and lead him to scientific wonders that have led and dominated the world, then naturally the religions of all other more inferior people from the rest of the world must also have hindered them from making the same advancements”.

The colonial narratives within ‘modern’ mass schooling and university systems across much of the world are a topic that is well researched. Increasingly, so is the influence of secular and Eurocentric education on pushing students away from their religious beliefs. Take, for example, a report by Ex-Muslims of North America.

According to the report, of a sample size of 550 respondents who were administered surveys, 54% of those who left their faith specialised in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathermatics) subject disciplines. Furthermore, an additional 24% specialised in social science disciplines.

It was also notable that the vast majority of the people surveyed who left Islam were ‘young’ – 46% of them were aged between 17 and 22 years. This is the age at which students have just completed their high school education, at which they are introduced to the sciences and social sciences as separate sub-disciplines for the first time – each sub-discipline with its own characteristic set of history of science stories and methodologies for arriving at ‘truth’.

Then they decide to major further in these subjects at the higher education level and build a strong focus towards specific sub-disciplines, such as biology or chemical engineering. In other words, these are their formative years.

Notably, 28% of the respondents reported conflict between Islam and the scientific view of the natural world as the most important factor in their decision to leave Islam, while 65% labelled it as a contributing factor. Only 7% said it was not a factor.

This is not to say that the insights gleaned from this small sample size are representative of the reasons why some Muslims leave Islam globally, but it certainly hints towards there being a potential connection between leaving one’s faith and exposure to secular ideology.

A vision to build back better

People should be allowed to decide their religious beliefs for themselves. The Quran itself says, “let there be no compulsion in religion”. But there should be a level playing field. Colonial narratives and secular ideology should be critically challenged – where they are taught as matter-of-fact objective and neutral truths.

For Muslims, this means a lot of work needs to be done. It is not a matter of being nostalgic for a lost golden age of Muslim accomplishments and global eminence. Rather, it is about having the vision to build back better, given the on-the-ground realities of modernity that continue to be strongly influenced by Western powers and ways of thinking today.

While the science textbooks that feature the work of non-white male thinkers are missing, students can and should critically question why those gaps are there.

If they are being told to leave their religious beliefs to their private lives and that areas like the natural sciences and social sciences do not need to bring in Quranic perspectives on physical and human nature, they should realise at the very least that this is not a ‘neutral’ curricular decision or system that they are learning in.

The Muslim philosopher-poet, Muhammad Iqbal, who advocated decolonising the mind, said that Muslims must inculcate ‘Khudi’. This means having a sense of self-dignity and being grounded in an understanding of being a creation of Allah and having a significant moral purpose in this world.

‘Khudi’ and critical consciousness

‘Khudi’ also means to be able to take action in one’s capacity to resist those psychological forces that weaken one’s sense of religious self. This resonates with the sentiment of emancipatory thinkers from other cultures around the world, such as Paulo Freire’s idea of ‘critical consciousness’.

For Freire, it is essential for students to make it a habit of mind to recognise when oppressive messages are being conveyed to them as matter-of-fact truths and to be able to take action to resist that influence.

What would that look like in practice?

Mental health is a topic that is often discussed in neutral-seeming scientific language, but as Western psychology usually assumes that there is no soul or link between the mind and a higher reality, there are evident clashes with an Islamic worldview.

To call these clashes out, to ask why the role of ‘spiritual’ healing is often relegated to superstition or ‘alternative medicine’, would be an act of such critical consciousness. To then actually create, for example, a social media awareness campaign for one’s own Muslim community about the discipline and practice of Islamic psychology (ilm-ul-nafs), and how to access such support, would also be an act of critical consciousness.

It is this ‘Khudi’ or Islamic scientific critical consciousness that Muslim students need and that they should start nurturing in their formative years in order to navigate the pushes and pulls of the global secular higher education that exists today.

Usama Javed Mirza studied physics and philosophy at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan, and education as a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University in the United States. He is an experienced educator and social entrepreneur. He is researching science and religious education in Muslim schools in the United Kingdom at the University of Cambridge as a PhD student in education on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.