The root of the word ideology is Greek idea used by Plato ...



10th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF COGNITIVE EDUCATION AND PSYCHOLOGY (IACEP)

University of Durham, England, July 10-14 2005

Going Beyond Thinking Skills: Reviving an Understanding of Higher Human Faculties

by Jeremy Henzell-Thomas

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the vital need for a revival of an understanding of the nature and extent of higher human cognitive faculties at a time of profound educational crisis when the dominance of a narrow utilitarian concept of schooling for the workplace is bound up with a pervasive failure to awaken and nourish such higher faculties in young people.

This failure will be examined in the wider paradigmatic context of the dispiriting materialism or “reign of quantity” which can be regarded as one of the chief deformities of the contemporary world. Associated with this deformity is the reduction, since the so-called “Enlightenment”, of the original spiritual sense of Intellect as a “seeing” faculty centred in the Heart to its lower rational level as a predominantly thinking, discursive and logical faculty situated in the brain. It will be further argued that so pervasive has been the impact of reductionist scientism in Western thought that the original meaning of the word ‘intellect’ is no longer generally retrievable in Western culture as a means of distinguishing the higher faculty from the lower one.

Related to this need is the pressing need to revive the notion of qualitative education itself, as opposed to the quantitative evaluative approaches derived from target-driven “techno-management” which reduce human beings to conforming and performing cogs in the industrial machine. Truly qualitative education (as opposed to impoverished quantitative approaches masquerading as “quality assurance”) can only be based on a mature understanding of the full range of human faculties - cognitive, affective and spiritual.

The paper will attempt to restore the authentic meaning of human intellect (Greek nous, Arabic ‘aql) with reference to key concepts in various spiritual traditions. Special attention will be given to Islamic spirituality, with its rich and subtle description of the hierarchy of human faculties. It will show how this vision of higher intellectual faculties, encompassing above all the capacity for symbolic understanding and insight, transcends the fixation on rational “thinking” so characteristic of conventional approaches to cognition and cognitive education and offers to young people the possibility of ways of seeing and perceiving which reflect their deepest capacities as human beings.

I would like to say from the outset that it is not a purely academic interest which has motivated this paper. I have been involved in the practical education of young people in one way or another for my whole working life, as a teacher, a director of studies, a teacher trainer, a university lecturer, a research supervisor, and now as the director of an educational foundation, and it seems to me that we are in the grip of a profound educational crisis[i] which requires a total re-assessment of the nature, purpose and methodology of education.

Above all, this re-assessment requires the revival of an understanding of higher human faculties, and in particular the reclamation of the true nature of human Intellection. The historical reduction and degradation of this faculty in Western culture has ensured that the Intellect is now almost invariably associated not with a quality of Intellection or spiritual Intelligence, which is essentially a perceptive, intuitive, contemplative faculty of direct insight, innate and common to all human beings, but with the processes of intellectualising, thinking, conscious deliberation and logical reasoning which have been so good at solving analytic and technological problems and so successful in driving forward what we are conditioned by our own ideology to regard as “progress and development”.

Phrases like “driving forward”, or “ratcheting up”, so common in management-speak and political spin these days, tell us a lot about what this inflation of the lower intellect represents – now, more than ever, not just “driving” and “motivating” us to goal-driven and purposeful activity, but increasingly out of balance and in dangerous “over-drive” as our workforce, oppressed by impatient and urgent demands to produce and “deliver” more and more in less and less time,[ii] and overwhelmed by unmanageably complex “systems”,[iii] is driven to ever-higher levels of stress, exhaustion, and demoralisation.

Brian Thorne[iv] reminds us that it is the “blind slumber” ingrained in the lives of modern Western men and women, which is “fast becoming the collective neurosis of our contemporary culture”.[v] It is ironic that the frenetic hyperactivity of modern life is actually a form of chronic sloth, which really means not laziness but forgetfulness[vi] of the one thing that is needful.

That one thing that is needful can be defined in many ways, and we shouldn’t switch off if the words some people use are different from ours and come from disciplines, perspectives, or traditions of which we are ignorant or which make us feel uneasy. These days, in our predominantly secular society, it tends to be the language of religion which provokes such unease, or even downright hostility. We need to discover and articulate the essential unity behind all those perspectives which honour the innate capacities of the fully human being, whether the words used to describe them and the methods used to nurture them come from psychology, education, the creative arts, linguistics, literature, history, cultural studies, science, mythology, philosophy, spirituality or religion. We need synthetic, interdisciplinary minds which can discern the deep structure of shared concepts and values behind divisive terminology.

In this way we may conceive of the one thing that is needful as the development of higher cognitive and perceptive faculties, such as insight and symbolic understanding; we may see it as an essentially relational and affective mode of awareness increasingly at risk in a culture which gives such eminence to thinking,[vii] and increasingly to that abstract, quasi-autistic, autonomous kind of thinking which, under the false banner of “objectivity”,[viii] engenders inhuman, monolithic systems; we may conceive of it as the education of the soul, or of the heart, or the development of full human potential, or the awareness of the sacred, or a relationship with the divine; or we may choose to describe it as the attainment of self-realisation, or the knowledge of a higher reality or a Supreme Being, or, indeed, the consciousness and love of God, however we may name that ultimate Truth. We should not be bound by words, affiliations and limiting identities to such an extent that we only feel comfortable with a set vocabulary which articulates a single outlook or tradition.

But, forgetting that one thing, however we may describe it, we go implacably about our business, striving, competing, achieving, performing, multi-tasking, outwitting, texting, ‘phoning, e-mailing, upgrading, optimising, ratcheting up standards, modelling best practice, driving forward the agenda, pushing the envelope, managing risks, managing time, planning short-, medium- and long-term goals, strategising, formulating policies and putting them in place, chairing meetings, imposing sound commercial disciplines, meeting targets and deadlines, building cohesive teams, brainstorming, giving power-point presentations, rooting out dead wood, appraising, inspecting, evaluating, assessing, monitoring, testing, improving efficiency, providing quality assurance, specifying performance indicators, checking tick-boxes, defining outcomes, imposing systems of accountability, pressurising, oppressing, bullying, fast-tracking, networking, and of course, dare I say, conferencing, and even video-conferencing, and above all, delivering,[ix] as Thorne says, “the list of frenetic activities and judgmental processes is endless”.[x] Have we forgotten that to “deliver”, in its original meaning, is to “set free”,[xi] not to enslave either ourselves or others?

Many years ago I studied for my Ph.D. research the cognitive processes of my students at the University of Technology in Papua New Guinea, who were trying to learn scientific concepts in what was for them a third language (English) from the standpoint of an indigenous culture which only two generations before them had been described by Australian explorers as “stone age”.

On that note, I wonder if you heard about the recent archaeological research which suggests that Palaeolithic Man (that is, Old Stone Age Man, before the comparative modernity of the Neolithic, or New Stone Age) only had to work three hours a day in order to sustain himself and his family. The rest of his time was spent in family and social life, the arts, leisure, ritual and reflection. We have come a long way since the Old Stone Age! I am reminded of President Eisenhower’s prediction in the 1950’s that within ten years Americans would only be working four days a week because of labour-saving devices. Look at them now! And look at us, too! So strong is the conditioning wrought by the myth of progress, so powerful these illusions, that we fail to see what is before our very eyes.

Earlier this year, I picked up the Guardian[xii] on my way to speak at a conference on Higher Education in Developing Countries in London and noticed an article about our oppressive work culture. Next to the headline “Work is a four letter word for those in their 30s”, there was a striking photograph of a dejected young man sitting on a flight of stone steps, briefcase between his legs, leaning forward onto tightly clasped hands, with the caption: “Stressed, worried and overworked…the price of climbing the career ladder is too high for thirtysomethings”. The article, reporting the findings of a study by the Employers’ Forum on Age, also reports the findings of Brian Thorne, derived from his psycho-therapeutic encounters, that workers in their thirties “gradually tumble to the fact that work has become the totality of their existence and so much of their energy, intellect and emotion goes into making their way up the hierarchical ladder. They are exhausted and they realise they are losing touch with their friends or missing out on aspects of their children’s development that can never recur.”

I thought of a young man I know, for the young man on the steps looked a bit like him. Working in a pressurised job in London in the field of ethical business practice, about to be married, and pursuing a part-time M.A. to enhance his promotion prospects, he fortunately has the wisdom and integrity not to allow himself to be swallowed up, but I know he battles constantly with the challenge to balance his need for success with his need to be a well-rounded human being and to hold on to core values.

I thought too of a young woman, striving so hard to complete her training as a teacher. A born teacher of young children, with a two-year old daughter of her own, longing to impart the joy[xiii] and delight of learning through play, observation and discovery, I see her shackled by the wretched apparatus of policies, planning, objectives, targets, strategies and “assessment opportunities”, and every budding insight and spontaneous inspiration blighted or straitjacketed by the demand always to make explicit how they comply with these “systems” and how they conform to the lifeless terminology in which they are framed.[xiv] I recall an article in the Independent which reported the insanity that children are to be assessed on their physical, emotional, intellectual and social development between the ages of three and six, a task which will necessitate the completion of 3,510 tickboxes for a class of 30 children.[xv]

My heart goes out to all young people today, labouring as they do under the yoke of our impoverished view of human faculties and human potential. When will we begin to understand what our children hunger for, and nourish them? If anyone deserves an ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) is has to be the ideologues, architects and enforcers of government educational policy who repeatedly state that the number-one priority of education in this country is not the acquisition of liberating knowledge, the nourishment of the imagination, the development of character or the realisation of what it means to be fully human, but the driving forward of national economic development goals so that we can all continue perpetually to increase our material standards of living to the detriment of our own happiness and quality of life.[xvi] And I do not even touch on the destruction of the livelihoods of the less “advanced” and the degradation of the environment necessitated by our insatiable greed.

And the government’s answer? The introduction, so I have just heard, of the inspiring subject of money management into the primary school curriculum – the basics of savings, spending and running a budget. Our educational vision and philosophy is now moulded not by those who know how to educate (that is, from Latin educere, to “draw out” our innate potential as human beings[xvii]) but by people who know how to run an efficient economy. Their overuse of the term “delivery” to describe the successful realisation of their policies reflects well their natural affinity with the world of shopping.

A columnist in The Independent newspaper, referring to our education secretary of the time as “Bruiser Clarke the boffin-basher”, believes that “his dead-eyed utilitarian code reduces education to churning out limited, wealth-producing units.”[xviii] Indeed, if you want to produce the modern equivalent of a regimented empire-serving army of ledger clerks and petty officials (that is, an army of unquestioning and conforming cogs in the economic machine) you don’t need creative people with imagination,[xix] apart from those who misuse their imaginative powers to manipulate consumers. Least of all do you need emotionally intelligent people, or reflective and self-aware people, or people of spiritual vision. You don’t even need people who can think much beyond the kind of functional “thinking skills” which reduce the miracle of the human mind to mere rationalisation.[xx] To use a chilling phrase I recently heard uttered by a scientist heralding the future development of the human race, what you ideally need are people with a “digitally re-mastered consciousness.”[xxi]

But to return to the theme of not seeing what is before our very eyes, an American philanthropist recently sent me the details of some recent research in visual perception which was aired on National Public Radio and which suggests that “if you don’t see something often, you often don’t see it”.[xxii] The context of this was a discussion about how to address the problem of ignorance of other cultures, or worse, cultural prejudice, and how to deal with it (and the wider issues raised by the pernicious doctrine of the Clash of Civilisations) through inter-cultural education – not a strong card in the American educational system nor in their corporation-dominated media.

I replied by referring to my research in Papua New Guinea, which found, on the other hand, that “if you see something too often, you may see nothing else”. A degree of top-down or concept-driven processing is of course essential if we are to process material rapidly. In the field of visual perception, it is well known that in the case of ambiguous images, the brain tended to disambiguate them on the basis of familiar or stereotypical views derived from our knowledge of the world.

However, when semantic expectations or global schemata become fixed scripts instead of merely provisional hypotheses they can override new information which we need to process more slowly and accurately from the bottom up through syntactic and lexical analysis if we are to update and refine the state of our existing knowledge.[xxiii] It is of course well known to cognitive scientists that effective learning requires an oscillation or interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes, or, in philosophical language, a process of dialectic or critical engagement by which ideas are cumulatively refined. This is, after all, one of the founding principles of Western civilisation.[xxiv]

And yet, our one-sided, reductionist view of the Intellect has become so entrenched in our culture that it has become very difficult to reclaim its authentic meaning, purpose and scope. People have simply forgotten what it is. “If you don’t see something often, you often don’t see it, but if you see something too often, you may see nothing else”.

As I was writing this paper, it became very clear to me that there is a pressing need to connect up the dots between various approaches to cognition which reflect that disillusionment with the over-emphasis on the lower level of the intellect in our culture and education system - what Guy Claxton calls “d-mode”, or “deliberation mode”[xxv] and defines as the sort of intelligence concerned with “figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems…a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. We often call this intelligence ‘intellect’.”[xxvi] “You are not thinking;” said Neils Bohr to Albert Einstein, “you are merely being logical.”

Claxton himself points out that growing dissatisfaction with the assumption that d-mode is the be-all and end-all of human cognition is reflected in various alternative approaches to the notion of intelligence, such as Howard Gardner’s ‘multiple intelligences’ and Daniel Goleman’s ‘emotional intelligence’. However, as he rightly says, “to understand more broadly how the different facets of intelligence fit together, we have to find an approach that does not presuppose the primacy of the intellect.”[xxvii] (my emphasis).

I would want to add to these alternative approaches the work of scientists such as F. David Peat,[xxviii] who have synthesised anthropology, history, linguistics, metaphysics, cosmology and even quantum theory to describe the way in which the worldviews and indigenous teachings of traditional peoples differ profoundly from the way of seeing the world embedded in us by linear Western science. If there is any clearer example of a fixed script which prevents learning, it is the profoundly limiting assumption that other ‘non-scientific’ modes of enquiry are invalid, and that indigenous science should not be called a science at all. As Peat says, “this is the inevitable conclusion within a worldview whose values are dominated by the need for progress, development, evolution, and the linear unfolding of time”.[xxix]

But most of all, I want to connect these vital correctives and re-orientations with the much more spacious view of human Intellect which is shared by all living spiritual traditions. I would like to give special attention to the insights we can gain from Islamic spirituality, with its rich and subtle description of the hierarchy of human faculties, as a means of reviving this enriched vision of human Intellect, which has such profound educational implications at this time.

In this way, we don’t need, as Claxton suggests, “to find an approach that does not presuppose the primacy of the intellect”, but only need to redefine what the human Intellect is, and give it back its capital ‘I’. This is a work of reclamation, of revival of an original concept, rather than the formulation of a novel concept. This wisdom is already accessible to us, and we only need to connect it up to the findings of modern research in exactly the same way as Peat’s work has shown the remarkable resemblance between the indigenous teachings of native American peoples and the insights that are emerging from modern science.

But before we excavate this unifying concept, let me briefly summarise the characteristics of Claxton’s ‘d-mode’. I hesitate to connect ‘d-mode’ with the stated aims of the IACEP, but they seem rather similar.

The IACEP website states that “perception, thinking, learning and problem solving can be understood and ultimately improved by the development and application of systematic, identifiable, and communicable processes of logical thinking.”

D-mode

~ is a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking which works well when the problem it is facing can be easily conceptualised;

~ is much more interested in finding answers and solutions than in examining the questions;

~ assumes that the way is sees the situation is the way it is… and the idea that the fault may be in the way the situation is perceived or ‘framed’…does not come naturally to d-mode;

~ sees conscious, articulate understanding as the essential basis for action, and thought as the essential problem-solving tool;

~ seeks and prefers clarity, and neither likes nor values confusion;

~ operates with a sense of urgency and impatience;

~ is purposeful and effortful rather than playful;

~ is precise;

~ relies on literal and explicit language ;

~ works with concepts and generalisations;

~ works well when tackling problems which can be treated as an assemblage of nameable parts and are therefore accessible to the function of language in segmenting and analysing.[xxx]

Claxton contrasts d-mode with slower, “unconscious” processes such as “ruminating, mulling things over; being contemplative or meditative” and cites recent scientific evidence which “shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined.”[xxxi] He believes that the overemphasis in recent years on the evolution and function of the conscious mind (as, for instance, in the work of Dennett, Penrose, and Ornstein) has caused us to continue to overvalue those modes of mind that are most associated with consciousness and to ignore those that are less conscious, or require a different image of mind. “Much of this wave of research and speculation on consciousness must be seen as symptomatic of our cultural obsession with the conscious intellect and not a corrective to it.” [xxxii]

He continues: “Our culture has come to ignore or undervalue [slow ways of knowing], to treat them as marginal or merely recreational…The individuals and societies of the West have rather lost touch with the value of contemplation. Only active thinking is regarded as productive”.[xxxiii]

Again, “We find ourselves in a culture which has lost sight (not least in the education system) of some fundamental distinctions, like those between being wise, being clever, having your ‘wits’ about you, and being merely well informed. We have been inadvertently trapped in a single mode of mind that is characterised by information-gathering, intellect and impatience, one that requires you to be explicit, articulate, purposeful and to ‘show your working’. We are thus committed (and restricted) to those ways of knowing that can function in such a high-speed mental climate: predominantly those that use language[xxxiv] (or other symbol systems) as a medium and deliberation as a method…. However, to tap into those other modes of knowing which require patience, intuition and relaxation, we must “dare to wait”, for such knowing “emerges from, and is a response to, not-knowing.” [xxxv]

To rehabilitate the slow ways of knowing, the “crucial step…is not the acquisition of a new psychological technology [Claxton lists brainstorming, visualisation, mnemonics and I would also add accelerated learning, with its revealing connotations of speed and urgency] but a revised understanding of the human mind…Clever mental techniques… miss the point if they leave in place the same questing, restless attitude of mind. In many courses on ‘creative management’…instead of calling a meeting to ‘discuss’ the problem, you call one to ‘brainstorm’ it, or to get people to draw it with crayons. But the pressure for results…is still there.” [xxxvi]

F. David Peat calls the more leisurely process of learning “coming-to-knowing”.[xxxvii] “Each person learns for himself or herself through the processes of growing up in contact with nature and society; by observing, watching, listening, and dreaming.”[xxxviii] This sounds very much like Claxton’s “learning by osmosis”. Peat points out that Polanyi’s notion of “tacit knowledge” also comes close to this vision of coming-to-knowing.[xxxix] This knowledge, according to Polanyi, is not transmitted through books or verbal instruction but is known through the whole of one’s being through direct experience and relationship with the thing to be known.

Peat maintains that the natural tendency in Western culture is to “warn, help, teach, instruct and improve” instead of allowing people to learn from their experience.[xl] Under the heading “A Story about Knowledge and Knowing”[xli] he relates a story told by Joe Couture, a therapist and traditional healer, which explores the implications of these two ways of knowing and the clash between a Western education and his own Blackfoot background. The story shows how traditional people teach by telling stories which come out of their direct experiences rather than from the simple imparting of facts or the application of abstract logical reasoning. In this case a Native Elder, speaking about the experience of his grandson at a local school, “had no need to analyse the philosophy of the local school board or discuss the relative value of different worldviews. He simply told a story… which brought into focus some of the things that people were sensing and feeling about the school’s effect on the community.”

The story the Elder told was about the time when he was a boy and had to make a long trip along the Yukon River to Dawson City. His old pickup truck had broken down and he had faced a journey of over a hundred miles and under adverse conditions. In the end he had made it through. The old man said that his grandson could now read and write, but he was sure that if the boy were to make the same journey alone he would never make it back.

This story reminds me of another one, related by the Harvard educationalist Roland Barth in his book Learning By Heart:[xlii]

“On June 17, 1744, the commissioners from Maryland and Virginia negotiated a treaty with the Indians of the Six nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Indians were invited to send boys to William and Mary College. The next day they declined the offer:

“We know that you highly esteem the type of learning taught in those colleges, and that the maintenance of our young men while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise must know that different nations have different Conceptions of things and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same as yours. We have had some Experience in it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all of your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods – not fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor counsellors, they were totally good for nothing.

“We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Educations, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.”

Barth is relating this story to illustrate the tension between what he calls the top-down teacher-centred Transmission of Information model of learning (or “Sit ‘n Git”) and the Experiential model, and to the value of adventure education programs.

Now, we might easily dismiss the story as largely irrelevant. After all, you might say, what need is there in the modern world for the preservation of a culture so dependent on the manly skills of running, living in the woods, and fighting, even if we might agree that the other skill so prized by the Indians of the Six Nations – that of counselling - is very much in demand.[xliii] And, to return to the story told by the Blackfoot Elder, how often is the need going to arise for the skills which require a boy to travel a hundred miles in rugged country in adverse conditions in order to get home? These days, children don’t even need to walk to school, so perilous is such a journey considered to be by their parents.

However, commenting on the story, Barth[xliv] reports research which has shown that students who participate in adventure programs show significant improvement in their problem-solving abilities, leadership skills, social skills and independence. Furthermore, the gains of such students continued to be realised after the experience in contrast to educational programs where the learning gains fade rapidly after the program ends.

There is a deeper dimension to contact with nature – one which Barth doesn’t really address, partially seduced as he is by the d-mode dimension of proven ”benefits”, “gains” and “improvements” in “problem-solving”. If he didn’t write as well as he did, he might tell us that these are some of the useful gains that are, to use the hideous term, “delivered” by adventure education programs.

As Al-Ghazali[xlv] puts it, “tasting (Arabic dhawq[xlvi]) is the only way to certitude.” Al-Ghazali also points out that tasting (or internalisation through experience) is the only way to go beyond the “conventional learning of the age, treating as it did only the more superficial aspects of man’s condition”. In his day, he was referring to formal religious knowledge without spiritual experience as the limiting “conventional learning of the age”, but these days we might just as well see such conventional limitations in an educational system which increasingly detaches young people from that experience of “tasting” or direct experience.[xlvii]

Rumi,[xlviii] another great Sufi, taught that “The Intellect of intellect is your kernel; the intellect is only the husk.”[xlix]

Unfortunately, in our culture, it is the husk of the intellect (with that small ‘i’) which has been promoted beyond its station to masquerade as the pinnacle of human cognitive development. Piaget is partly to blame, demoting as he does the intuitive, practical intelligence[l] to the infantile level of “sensorimotor intelligence” which is dominant during the first two years of life, to be superseded and transformed in due course by more powerful, abstract, intellectual ways of knowing – notably, the “formal operations” of hypothetico-deductive thinking and theory construction. Claxton points out that there is an implicit assumption in Piaget’s ‘stage theory’ of development that d-mode is the highest from of intelligence, and his influence on several generations of educators has ensured that “schools, even primary schools and kindergartens, saw their job as weaning children off their reliance on their senses and their intuition, and encouraging them to become deliberators and explainers as fast as possible.” [li]

It is surely the case that the development of the rational mind has even undermined those capacities which we all naturally possessed at earlier stages of development, such as the capacity for awe and wonder in the face of mysteries which are inaccessible to the mind.

The original meaning of the word understand in English was ‘to stand in the midst of’ – that is, to understand by direct experience and engagement.[lii]

The word understand is the only instance in modern English of the survival of the prefix under as meaning ‘between’ or ‘among’ (as in Old English undersecan, ‘to investigate, seek amongst’). In all other cases the prefix means ‘below’ or ‘beneath’. Old English understandan meant literally ‘to stand in the midst of’.

Modern German verstehen (from Middle High German verstan) is based on a different prefix (ver-) which means ‘in front, or on top of’, so verstehen literally means ‘to stand in front of, or on top of’. Ionic Greek epí-stasthai, ‘to understand’ also means to ‘stand on top of, stand over’.

Two types of understanding are implicated here: understanding through direct experience and engagement (‘standing amongst’ – understandan) and understanding through observation (‘standing in front of, or on top of - verstehen). Significantly, it was these two forms of learning which Francis Bacon regarded as the basis of his learning by ‘induction’, that is, learning by experience and observation, as opposed to the outmoded methods of medieval scholasticism based on abstract logic and authority. The revival of experience and observation was at the root of the scientific revolution in Europe.

However, in the history of the West, the notion of ‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere ‘experimentation’. ‘Standing in front of, or on top of’ (i.e. objectivity, objectification) has taken precedence over ‘standing in the midst of’ (subjectivity, direct experience, tasting). In other words, Bacon’s notion of ‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere ‘experimentation’, which explains the spectacular success of the scientific method to the detriment of other forms of inquiry and perception involving faculties of direct insight.

To put “d-mode” or “formal operations” in their place, the function of the lower level of the intellect (Latin ratio, Greek dianoia) in all spiritual traditions is to acquire and extend knowledge not for its own sake but for the purpose of verifying the innate Knowledge of higher realities which exists in the innermost Heart of every human being and which is directly accessible to the higher intellectual function (Latin intellectus, Greek nous).

The Arabic word for Intellect, ‘aql,[liii] organically combines reason and the higher intellect in its sense of intelligence-understanding, or mind-heart. In its highest sense it is the “universal principle of all intelligence, a principle which transcends the limiting conditions of the mind”.[liv] Ibn Sina (Avicenna)[lv] refers to this higher faculty of intellection as the Active Intellect,[lvi] the means of approaching the Divine Intellect, of which it is a reflection. It is through the Intellect, if purified, that man can know the inner essence or principles (logoi) of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. The Intellect is the faculty which dwells in the depth of the soul and constitutes the innermost aspect of the Heart,[lvii] the organ of contemplation.[lviii] It is this faculty, again, which confers on us the capacity to penetrate to mythical, archetypal and symbolic meanings. “We know the truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart”, said Blaise Pascal.

It is important to realise that the multi-levelled conception of Intellect denoted by the word ‘aql not only encompasses both reason and insight, or conceptualisation through language and direct spiritual perception, but also includes a moral dimension. The conception of ‘excellence’ expressed in the Arabic word ihsan is in fact inseparable from goodness and virtue, whereas the Western conception of ‘excellence’ is more

often than not limited to personal mastery, achievement and success. The moral and cognitive dimensions are therefore intertwined, and not separated.[lix] In a hierarchically ordered conception of human faculties, cognitive psychology is part of moral philosophy, which is itself derived from, and subordinate to, spiritual revelation.[lx]

In a detailed study of the concept of ‘aql, appropriately titled “Between wisdom and reason: aspects of ‘aql (mind-cognition)”, Crow states that “the mystery of human intelligence or cognition is the subject of current neurological-based studies in the field of ‘cognitive psychology’” He points out that “investigators in different fields are now questioning the definition of intelligence accepted by many scientists (the single unitary entity or g factor, for general intelligence), and are advancing concepts such as emotional intelligence, social intelligence, or moral intelligence, as well as ‘wisdom’… Noteworthy is the re-appearance of the term ‘wisdom’, connoting a combination of social and moral intelligence, or in traditional terms: that blend of knowledge and understanding within one’s being manifested in personal integrity, conscience, and effective behaviour.”[lxi]

He concludes that one of the key components of the concept of ‘intelligence’ expressed by the term ‘aql was “ethical-spiritual: teaching how to rectify one’s integrity and to cause one’s human impulses, faculties and latent powers to flourish, with the purified emotions promoting the operation of a higher intelligence”[lxii]

Peat explains that “knowledge, within a traditional society, is not the stuff of books but the stuff of life. Even in the English language that word knowledge has its origins in a verb or activity.[lxiii] In medieval times it served as a verb somewhat like our modern to acknowledge, and it meant to own the knowledge of something and perceive something as true. In turn, the origins of the verb lay in yet another process – the verb to know – which is a term of extremely ancient Aryan origins that had to do with perception, recognition, and the ability to distinguish.[lxiv] From this Indo-European base, gn-/gon-/gen-, we also of course derive the English words denote and notion, as well as cognition, although Shipley points out that the authentic concept underlying cognition is Greek gnosis, “higher knowledge of spiritual things”. “I know, therefore I can”, proclaims Shipley, presumably parodying the less generative[lxv] (and hence essentially sterile) Descartian axiom “I think, therefore I am”.

Thus, to the earliest peoples of Europe and Asia knowledge and knowing had more to do with a discriminating perception of the mind and the senses than with the accumulation of facts.” [lxvi] (my emphasis).

This discriminating perception is also something quite different from abstract thinking and reasoning. The origin of the English word think also goes back to an ancient Indo-European root, whose connotations were not restricted to conceptual thought processes but encompassed perception, reflection, imagination, knowing, feeling, thankfulness, and goodwill – faculties of mind-heart.[lxvii]

In modern Western culture, however, the original meaning of the word ‘Intellect is no longer generally retrievable as a means of distinguishing the higher faculty from the lower one.[lxviii] Albert Einstein, one of the greatest constructers of scientific theory, warned against the over-valuation of the rational mind: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.” Thomas Moore also writes of the way in which the over-valuation of the rational intellect not only diminishes inidividual potential but also de-souls our institutions : “Without an animated, educated heart,” he writes, “the intellect appears superior, and we give too much attention and value to it. Our institutions and ideas then lack the humanizing breath of the soul.”[lxix]

It is therefore hardly surprising that there is widespread suspicion of ‘intellectuals’ and growing disillusionment with scientism.[lxx] People sense the inhumanity and arrogance of reason detached from the heart. There can be no true intellectuality without human values and spiritual intelligence. Every teacher should follow T.S. Eliot’s wise dictum that “It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us escape - not from our own time, for we are bound by that - but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time.” Scholars, researchers and teachers bound themselves by such limitations are hardly in a position to help others escape from them.

The devastating loss of the authentic meaning of Intelligence and the absurdly disproportionate emphasis given to lower levels of rationality is largely responsible for the debilitating instructional and schooling regime we now see masquerading as education[lxxi]– an oppressive, sclerotic and soulless utilitarian regime sustained by blinkered and robotic materialists, technocrats, IT professionals, managerialists, control freaks, testers, measurers and surveillance agencies; overwhelming and crippling teachers with unworkably complex systems of recording and accountability; negating creativity and imagination through the cumulative imposition of one burdensome initiative after another; confounding the exploration of that potentially expansive inner space through the tyranny of time-pressure devoted almost entirely to arid or trivial objectives; demoralising and dispiriting[lxxii] our young people with an ever-increasing weight of factual content[lxxiii] and obsessive testing, and totally failing to answer their hunger for meaning, inspire their deeper human aspirations or engage soul or spirit.

The rampant decline in the mental health of children and adolescents, revealed by studies which have exposed the growing incidence of stress, depression, compulsive disorders and even suicide, is now a national disgrace, and they carry this malaise into their adult life, where it is further compounded by an oppressive work culture.[lxxiv]

And not content with the oppression of our own young people by this reductionism which confuses genuine qualitative education with mere efficiency and quantity of output, it seems we also wish to export this malaise to other countries in the name of progress and development.[lxxv]

I am not referring here to the imminent colonisation of France and the destruction of the French social model by more efficient and competitive Anglo-Saxon free-market economics (although as an Englishman living and working in France I hope that

the likely spread of this virus can at least be averted for a while so that we can continue to enjoy what remains of a civilised existence based on a knowledge of how to live and how to relate to other people through a real sense of community and a respect for relaxed leisure time spent with family and friends).

No, the malaise is spreading much further afield. At a conference on Higher Education in Developing Countries in London,[lxxvi] at which I spoke about the need to revive an authentic notion of qualitative education based on the education of the higher faculties of mankind, it dismayed me to see an almost total dominance of Western models of so-called “quality assurance”, for such is the reach and influence of this debilitating virus whose global hegemony takes away any confidence which educators in other cultural settings might have in their own approach to ensuring quality based on their own traditions.[lxxvii]

None of these exported models had any concept of a higher education based on the higher faculties of mankind – that is a truly qualitative education of the human being – even though they claimed to assure “quality” in Arab universities, usually by reforming structures and improving management styles. Neither did any of them have any concept of how the reclamation of the finest elements of traditional Islamic civilisation might contribute to quality. It was sad to see a once great civilisation reduced to offering apologetic imitations of the worst of Western education, which is based not on any understanding of higher human faculties, and increasingly not even on an intermediate concept of humane education.

The American social critic Neil Postman coined the word ‘technopoly’ to describe our dominant worldview (now, it seems, increasingly homogenizing the world through globalisation) based on the belief that “the primary, if not the only goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by ‘experts’”.[lxxviii]

I would like to wrap up this appeal for the revival of Intelligence with another point about the use of language. Unlike Arabic, for example, English is relatively limited in its ability to express the kind of concepts we need in order to understand the nature and range of human faculties and the hierarchical relationship between them. This is because of the semantic degradation of key concepts which has occurred as words have passed into English from other languages (especially those ancient languages which retained that perennial wisdom) and also as English words themselves have changed their meanings over time. The tri-literal root system in Arabic enables the connotations of words to be recovered, but original meanings in English can only often be recovered through a scholarly process of etymological research, often going back to Indo-European roots. How many people, apart from medievalists, know the original meaning of the word ‘cunning’, for example?[lxxix] How many people unfamiliar with the Classics can recover the original meaning of ‘intellect’ or ‘idea’?

Related to this is the confusion in terminology which arises from one word in English having to cover different concepts or different nuances of the same concept. “Intelligence” is a prime example. The words ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ also pose awkward ambiguities. Claxton makes the important point that “we need new metaphors and images for the relationship between conscious and unconscious which escape from the polarisation to which both Descartes and Freud, from their different sides, subscribed.”[lxxx] “The confusion of the unconscious with the pathologically repressed Freudian subconscious, “the sump of the mind into which sink experiences, impulses and ideas too awful or dangerous to allow into consciousness” reflects the acceptance of the other extreme, “the basic Cartesian premise that consciousness is intelligent[lxxxi] and controlled”. This polarisation forces us to believe that “consciousness is other than and opposed to, unconsciousness”, which is “emotional, irrational, wild and alien.”[lxxxii]

Because of these potential confusions, Claxton has to use various expressions according

to context to convey what he calls the “dark, inaccessible layers” of the contemplative “tortoise mind”, and to avoid potential confusion with the Freudian subconscious: hence, we have ‘the unconscious’, ‘the intelligent unconscious’, ‘the cognitive unconscious’ or the ‘undermind’.

But the polarisation is hard to escape, and we are still left with a limiting association between the ‘conscious mind’ and the merely conscious reasoning of d-mode. However, this is clearly not what is meant by the use of the term ‘conscious’ and “consciousness” in the language of spiritual traditions. To be ‘conscious’ of the Supreme Reality[lxxxiii] (however we may name it) is hardly something accessible to the ‘hare brain’ of ‘conscious thinking’, in Claxton’s terms. Paradoxically, it has more to do with what Claxton calls the ‘intelligent unconscious’, with its capacity for ‘tasting’, direct perception and contemplation. In this sense, there are aspects of Claxton’s ‘unconscious’ which point to a level of consciousness which is ‘higher’ than what he calls the ‘conscious’. Such problems with terminology can lead to some quite intractable conundrums.

Some resolution is offered by the Arabic word shahid, ‘conscious mind’, which refers in the Qur’an to the “awakening of the deeper layers of man’s consciousness”, in contrast to sa-iq, “the complex of primal and instinctive urges and inordinate, unrestrained appetites”.[lxxxiv] This seems to be contrasting something like Claxton’s “intelligent unconscious” with something like the Freudian subconscious. The key phrase is “the deeper layers of man’s consciousness” which clearly refers to a level of consciousness (whether “under” or “over”), beyond the “conscious thinking” of d-mode.[lxxxv]

To envisage the ultimate and deepest level of consciousness as the Centre is perhaps the best way for us to escape from the awkward linearity of the metaphor provided by the vertical dimension, but the exploration of that metaphor is beyond the scope of this paper.

Educational Implications

What are the educational implications of the revival of the full range of human faculties? How can teachers use such knowledge to educate our young people?

This is a huge question, because the restitution of such a vision in education depends to a very large extent on the revival of the idea of civilisation itself. Bertrand Russell said that “teachers are more than any other class the guardians of civilization”, but what kind of civilisation was Russell talking about? Without an understanding of what a true civilisation is, and without any embodiment of that truth in our own lives, we may be unwitting disseminators of that deformed and impoverished notion of ‘civilisation’ that I have been at pains to expose in this essay.[lxxxvi]

Ananda Coomaraswamy, in his essay “What is civilisation?” contrasts what he calls “true civilisation” derived from an “inspired tradition” based on perennial wisdom with its deformation in the modern industrialised West. “The one considers man’s needs; the other considers his wants, to which no limit can be set, and of which the number is artificially multiplied by advertisement”. Our modern ‘civilisation’, based as it is on notions of social advancement, ambition, competition, free enterprise, individualism,[lxxxvii] growth, expanding consumer ‘choice,’[lxxxviii] and quantitative output for profit creates a perpetually expanding world market for its surplus, produced by those whom Dr. Albert Schweitzer called “over-occupied men”. It is, according to Coomaraswamy, “the incubus of world trade that makes of industrial ‘civilisations’ a ‘curse to humanity’ and from the industrial concept of progress …that modern wars have arisen and will arise; it on the same impoverished soil that empires have grown, and by the same greed that innumerable civilisations have been destroyed.”[lxxxix]

Since educational policy is inextricably linked to this impoverished view of ‘civilisation’ and the equally impoverished and lopsided view of human faculties that such a ‘civilisation’ demands for its survival and expansion, and since such policy now dictates to teachers that the first priority of a ‘quality’ education is to serve the economy,[xc] a huge challenge confronts teachers if they are to rise above this miserable aim, which demeans both themselves and the children they teach, and live up to Russell’s dictum that they are, above all others, the “guardians of civilisation”.

To serve, first and foremost, the economy, and at the same time to follow the requirement to find “opportunities” to weave “moral and spiritual development” through the whole curriculum, can do little more than superimpose empty platitudes upon it. Nothing more enlightening can come out of an inverted system in which the superordinate position is usurped by what is naturally subordinate to it. We might hope to weave a gold thread here or there to illuminate the uniformly grey and lifeless texture of the material we are given to work with, to give our young people some glimpses of their true potential and of the vast range of their human faculties. We might hope to animate their souls for a moment in the midst of all that urgent and purposeful thinking, talking, instructing and telling.[xci] We might aspire to show them the way to what it means to be a better human being in a better world, and to give them hope for the future.[xcii]

There are always exceptional and inspiring teachers who can do this, who can plant imperishable seeds in the hearts and minds of their students. But the wholesale revival of a qualitative education of the soul and the rediscovery of an authentic intellectual life is an enterprise which now works against the drift of our ‘system’[xciii] - for that is the parody that a civilisation becomes when it is stripped of true intellectuality, moral valuation and spiritual substance. Worse, devoid of any transcendent principles, such systems inevitably crystallise further into regimes, both conceptual and political, which imprison and stifle the human spirit.

In the end, like the regime depicted in Orwell’s 1984, they actively deny and invert the truth. I heard only this morning on BBC Radio 4[xciv] one of the most absurd illustrations of the tyranny exerted by IT systems. A man went into W.H.Smith, picked up a TV aerial from a shelf, and took it to the cash desk. The cashier, however, refused to sell it to him because the computer said it was out of stock. Apparently, members of our workforce are now not only deficient in independent thinking, but unable even to accept the existence of an object placed before their very eyes. Is this the outcome of our educational system?

The task is indeed huge, but I don’t want to depress you. We have to accept that we live in an increasingly secular society[xcv] in which few people subscribe to a view of human faculties which places consciousness of a Supreme Reality at the top of the tree, even if they might accept some version of this knowledge phrased in a different kind of language, often watered down to avoid any reference to the Divine[xcvi] and avoiding any association with formal religion - such as wisdom, self-realisation, spiritual perception, contemplative insight, analogical and metaphorical thinking, mythic and symbolic understanding, Claxton’s “intelligent unconscious”, Polanyi’s “tacit knowledge”, Peat’s “coming-to-knowing”, or the cognitive faculty which is at home with paradox and ambiguity. We can describe it in countless ways using the language of many disciplines.

And the level of education which activates these faculties, or at least gives some credence to some version of them, is obviously not something which need be restricted to Religious Education (RE), even if it is most interesting to note that, according to a recent survey, the popularity of RE amongst secondary school students can be attributed partly to the fact that it is one of the few school subjects which allows students to develop the skills of philosophical enquiry and reflection.[xcvii]

Even if we cannot embrace an explicit concept of spiritual education, we can still honour an intermediate concept of humane education typical of the best liberal[xcviii] arts programs, which are in themselves a preparation for the development of spiritual intelligence and integrate higher-order cognitive activity into a holistic context: engagement in the creative arts as a means to engage the soul, kindle the imagination,[xcix] develop aesthetic awareness and stimulate the connectivity of the brain;[c] courses which develop communication skills,[ci] including discussion[cii] and dialectic;[ciii] courses which develop understanding of the human condition,[civ] a pluralistic and compassionate outlook which values and respects diversity and actively fosters inter-cultural dialogue;[cv] courses which give opportunities for direct experiential learning, especially in the beauty and majesty of natural settings;[cvi] and, not least, courses which develop character and transmit ethical values, whether applied to personal conduct, relationships, citizenship, business practice, or the care of the environment which is now such a pressing concern for all of us.

We need to be aware how the education system is continuing to compound the process of dehumanisation by devaluing not only the creative arts and the qualitative dimensions of science and mathematics,[cvii] but also those subjects which seek to understand the human condition in all its diversity and complexity.[cviii] The marginalisation of the humanities, of history,[cix] archaeology, geography, and modern languages, will only ensure that an ignorance of the richness of human heritage and diversity is compounded by an incompetence in cross-cultural communication, and this will remove our young people even further from that rich educational experience which is a prerequisite for truly human development.

All these arenas of education are intimately connected with higher-order cognitive development even if they may not set out and systematise links to an explicit taxonomy of “thinking skills”.

If we are to revive a concept of holistic education, even at an intermediate level, which values perception, insight, contemplation, observation and experience, and puts thinking in its place,[cx] we need to put into practice those research findings which tell us that visual and kinaesthetic learners far outnumber auditory learners.[cxi] If the learning of so many students is enhanced by visual input[cxii] and by the immediate sensory stimulation of hands-on experience and action, it makes little sense for schools to rely on predominantly verbal instruction. A system based on such studied resistance to the well-researched ways in which people actually learn can only be a system embedded in ideological fixity.[cxiii] We must balance the seduction of hi-tech by providing highly stimulating visual and tactile environments and by using a range of multi-sensory teaching techniques.

But I also want to make a case for the revival of some lost verbal skills, particularly the revival of memorisation of complex verbal material as a vital tool in developing higher-order cognitive faculties.[cxiv] We live in an age where unsubstantiated opinions are increasingly shouting down the meaningful thoughts of people who actually know something and have something of substance to say. People have electronic access to oceans of data which they rarely know how to turn even into useful information through selection of what is relevant, let alone turn into knowledge or wisdom by connecting it up to a wider context. History A-Level has recently been described by a History specialist as “history for the MTV generation – know a little but keep on repeating it”.[cxv]

Memorisation makes complex material accessible to the brain for subsequent processing and lifelong reflection and therefore provides a potent database for establishing patterns and enhancing connections in the brain, as well as providing a store of knowledge on which new knowledge can be built, and with which substance and credibility can be given to arguments.

Our educational process needs to reclaim memorisation in those areas where it enhances deep learning. I have seen shy pupils and pupils with learning difficulties transformed by reciting poetry by heart or singing songs learnt by heart in chorus in musical productions – activities which not only foster expressive skills but also enhance the self-esteem and self-confidence which comes from a tangible achievement attained through effort and practice. In fact, all children, from those with learning difficulties to the bright and gifted, benefit from learning songs and I believe research shows there is a transferable benefit to better mathematics and language learning.

Learning poetry, like learning music for performance, has transferable benefits, because this kind of verbatim memorisation is developing potent cognitive strategies for using a variety of patterns and cues – not just word order, but also prosodic, metrical and rhyming patterns, as well as various poetic devices, such as alliteration and assonance, which build memorable connections between words, and which are a common feature of epic poetry and sacred text.[cxvi] Such skills were well developed in societies rich in oral tradition, and of course encompassed not only skill in memorising but also the expressive skills required for inspiring recitation.[cxvii]

We should not forget that the genius of Shakespeare was grounded in the memorisation culture of Elizabethan England. Without that store of memorised knowledge, we simply cannot recognise the wealth of allusions contained in great literature.[cxviii] Imitation, too, was another formative practice in that era. “One studies a great piece of writing by one of the acknowledged giants of the past, enters into a process of internalisation – an alchemising through one’s own life and experience – and then creates a poem of other work that is unique to the writer yet has similarities to the original. This practice enriches one’s ways of thinking, depends one’s ability to allude to other forms, thickens the soup of one’s mind.”[cxix] The best schools will use imitation of great models in this way, and not only in literature, but also in art and music. It is important to realise that this is not unthinking imitation, mere reproduction or mechanical copying. It is using a model to catalyse a creative process which draws on a variety of sources, both external and internal.

As a counterbalance to the linearity and one-dimensional explicitness of rational thought processes, we need to encourage a mentality which can escape form the literal, which is comfortable with analogical thinking, metaphor, and symbolism, with fable, parable and allegory, with the heightened language of poetry, with ellipsis, with paradox and ambiguity, and with the constructive confrontations and asynchronies which emerge from the process of dialectic. Dialectical thinking, regarded by Riegel as the highest stage of cognitive development,[cxx] is a powerful means of transcending the limitations of dichotomization.[cxxi]

This advanced style of thought places the human being in an inter-world, an isthmus or meeting-place (Arabic barzakh), a point of intersection. It strives to unify opposites, to attain balance, to resolve conflict, affirming and incorporating logical polarities rather than seeking to avoid contradiction and paradox through one-sided adherence to a single perspective or paradigm. In these times of cultural and ideological confrontation, it would be hard to think of a more pressing educational imperative.

Dialectical thinking (and the intellectual connectedness which its promotes) should be one of the major planks of a holistic education, together with deep reflection[cxxii] (which enables learners to connect with their innermost selves[cxxiii] and thereby promote spiritual connectedness) and conversation and dialogue (which enable individuals to connect with others and the society in which they live). All of them need to be given time and space.

What distinguishes all these advanced processes and activities is the common thread of establishing relationship and connectivity, either between ideas, between faculties and levels of being within oneself, or between human souls. This is very far from the isolationism, one-sidedness and solipsism (and their pathological expression as a kind of cultural or societal autism) which are the consequence of a type of mental activity that can only dissect and atomise reality into autonomous components[cxxiv] or distance us from reality by manipulating or inventing language which turns flesh-and-blood experiences into manageable abstractions. C.S. Lewis, commenting on the use of the word liquidate to replace kill, describes this process as the use of “pseudo-scientific” words to “disinfect”, and George Orwell, referred to the same process as the use of “euphemisms” to name things “without calling up mental pictures of them.”[cxxv] (my emphasis). It will be readily apparent how this reduction of concrete experience to abstraction mirrors the reduction of perception to conceptual thinking which is such an essential part of an impoverished view of human faculties.[cxxvi]

Within a hierarchical concept of human faculties, the key principles of relationship and connectivity are never detached from another central principle – that of orientation, which is semantically related to the concept of origin.[cxxvii] Advanced dialectic should not be confused with that type of disorientated academic disputation which is little more than clever intellectual gymnastics. True dialectic is concerned not with peripheral intellectualisation couched in barely comprehensible abstractions, which is little more than playing with long words, but with a process of convergence on a central and unifying point of Truth through the application of objective truth criteria. Authentic dialectic is always orientated to the Centre, the origin of all things, the dimensionless point beyond duality where the opposites meet.

It goes without saying that the dialectical process is not one either of compromise or loose relativism, but one of creative tension which ultimately transforms contradictions into complementarities, releasing the open-minded thinker from ingrained habits and conditioned patterns of thought, established affiliations, fear of change and instability, and reluctance to approach any new ideas which are threatening to a rigid sense of ‘self’.[cxxviii]

Associated with this openness to change, uncertainty and instability is the willingness always to seek new evidence and the ability to resist premature closure and fixed conclusions. Albert Einstein said: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”

Let me appeal too for a revival of play. Carl Jung said that “the creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.” The creative mind plays with objects it loves.” With all that planning, managing, telling and expounding, not to mention marking, assessing, and the systematising wherever possible of cross-curricular links, IT opportunities, special needs provision and risk assessment, what time do teachers have left for play? And if they cannot play, how can they create a culture of play amongst their students?

Play relates to talk too, because playful talk is creative activity in itself. Play can express itself through talk in a variety of ways: in joke-telling, riddling, parody, satire, repartee, dramatic enactment, mimicry, having fun with language – in all kinds of ways which have little or nothing to do with the kind of functional, expository language skills so indispensable for purposeful rational thinking.

Above all, we must cultivate the capacity for awe[cxxix] and wonder in the face of mysteries which are inaccessible to the rational intellect - an innate, childlike capacity, which, as I have already said, has been undermined by a stage model of cognitive development (or ‘genetic epistemology’, as Piaget called it) that regards abstract reasoning or ‘formal operations’ as the pinnacle of human cognition. Direct observation of the night sky ought to be on every science curriculum, not simply to satisfy curiosity about the workings of the universe (as if the universe can be reduced to self-sufficient laws and mechanisms or striking phenomena) but as a means to evoke that sense of unfathomable mystery which Albert Einstein regarded as the source not only of all true art, but also the source of science[cxxx] itself: “The most beautiful thing we can experience”, he said, is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”

As well as the vastness of the night sky, that sense of awe and wonder in the face of beauty and majesty can equally well be cultivated in everyday encounters with nature, in that sense of limitless multiplicity which anyone who looks at nature with an open eye can perceive in every shifting scene; but whatever it is, it is a point of reference with something infinite and unfathomable, far beyond the practical dimension of human affairs.

This is not ‘observation’ in the sense of a trained eye, whether of artist or scientist, noticing and recording observable and measurable physical characteristics, such as shape, dimension, texture, and other details, but a deep supersensory faculty of “imagination”, one of the “mirrors of the Intellect”.[cxxxi]

If we fail to awaken and nourish this innate ability to “see” and “taste”, as well as all those other perceptive and insightful ways of knowing which are germane to an authentic vision of higher human faculties, we leave our young people with a bitter legacy based on our own impoverished view of human potential: we leave them with an impoverished view of themselves, other people, the world and the universe, and one that gives them little hope for the future beyond the increasingly frenetic activity which they will need to sustain in order to ensure their success in the world and to serve an ideology of perpetual material ‘growth’ and ‘development’. All educators would surely wish for them a better future than one which is ultimately both immoral and unsustainable.

Jeremy Henzell-Thomas

June 2005

Correspondence to jht@

ENDNOTES

Dictionaries of Etymology

In explaining the etymology of English words, I have made significant use of four sources:

Ayto, John, Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990.

Barnhart, Robert K. (ed.), Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, edited by Edinburgh: Chambers, 1988.

Shipley, Joseph. T., The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Watkins, Calvert (ed.), The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots,

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

I refer to these sources as Ayto, Barnhart, Shipley, and Watkins, respectively.

Translations of the Qur’an

I have made use of four translations of the Qur’an:

‘Ali, ‘Abdullah Yusuf, The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an. Beltsville, Maryland: Amana Publications, 1989.

Arberry, Arthur J., The Koran Interpreted. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Asad, Muhammad, The Message of the Qur’an . Bath: The Book Foundation, new edition, 2003.

Pickthall, Muhammad M., The Glorious Qur’an. New York: Muslim World League, 1977.

I refer to these versions as Yusuf ‘Ali, Arberry, Asad, and Pickthall respectively.

-----------------------

[i] I have explored the way in which modern education systems demoralise and dispirit young people through their dominant regime of utilitarian schooling and managerialism in a series of recent papers: Henzell-Thomas, J., ‘Passing Between the Clashing Rocks: The Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive Identity’, The Journal of Pastoral Care in Education, Spring, 2004; ‘Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of Intellect’, paper presented at the Reasons of the Heart Conference, University of Edinburgh, September 2004; and ‘Quantity Masquerading as Quality: Reviving an Authentic Notion of Qualitative Education’, paper presented at a conference on Higher Education in Developing Countries, Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London, February 2005.

[ii] See Gleick, James. Faster. London: Abacus, 2000, for a dissection of our “unceasing struggle to squeeze as much as we can into the 1,440 minutes of each day”.

[iii] On 21 June 2005, BBC radio 4 reported another catastrophic failure of a government IT system – this time, the one responsible for working out tax credits. A few days later the same channel reported that one of the many hard-up people who had received an overpayment as a result of this “computer failure” was having £200 per month deducted form her bank account in ‘repayments’ (1 July 2005) even though the amount recovered should have only been £3 per month. An offocial questioned on the programme explained that it was “impossible to stop the computer”!

[iv] Professor Emeritus of Counselling Studies at the University of East Anglia.

[v] Thorne, Brian, Infinitely Beloved: The Challenge of Divine Intimacy. Sarum Theological Lectures. London: Dartford, Longman and Todd, 2003, p.50. Chapter 3 of this book, “The Surveillance Culture and Economic Imperialism”, was delivered as the Keynote lecture at the 10th International Conference on Education, Spirituality and the Whole Child (Faith Feeling and Identity), University of Surrey Roehampton, 26-28 June, 2003.

[vi] The Arabic word for forgetfulness, nisyan, is related to the word for Man (insan), pointing to the forgetful tendency which is ingrained in human beings.

[vii] The bias towards thinking over feeling in Western culture, especially in corporate and business environments, is well-known by practitioners of the MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Inventory) who are trained to make corrections for it in scoring questionnaires.

[viii] Tarnas believes that the resolution of the crisis is already emerging in various movements which reflect an epochal shift in the contemporary psyche, a fulfilment of the longing for a reunion with the feminine, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites. This can be seen in the “tremendous emergence of the feminine in our culture...the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women...in the increasing sense of unity with the planet and all forms of nature on it, in the increasing awareness of the ecological and the growing reaction against political and corporate policies supporting the domination and exploitation of the environment, in the growing embrace of the human community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing and ideological barriers separating the world’s peoples, in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives.”

I would add the important caveat that we are now at a point of maximum intensification of those negative aspects of masculine consciousness, as they attempt to forestall the impending paradigm shift described by Tarnas. This rearguard action, a typical occurrence as old paradigms redouble their efforts to prevent change, includes the co-opting into the masculine camp of a new legion of women who have embraced an unbalanced masculine modus operandi and have themselves abandoned the emerging feminine values which Tarnas sees as the main hope for the “epochal shift in the contemporary psyche”. Similarly, alongside the “increasing awareness of the ecological” is a potentially catastrophic acceleration in the assault on bio-diversity and in climate change; alongside the growing dissolution of “ideological barriers separating the world’s peoples” we have the pernicious doctrine of the Clash of Civilisations which threatens to engulf the world in catastrophic conflict; alongside the “deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives”, we have the resurgence of dangerously divisive forms of unilateralism, isolationism, nationalism, patriotism, machismo, supremacist ideology, and other forms of narrow identity politics. In all of this we can see the common thread of an autonomous solipsism which destroys relationship, and which has reached the stage where it has assumed a pathological character, a kind of societal and cultural autism. Never has the need been greater for a concerted effort to challenge those “corporate and political policies” which sustain the old paradigm.

I would also add that the much vaunted “objectivity” of Western civilisation is in fact a pseudo-objectivity, for it is based not in any truly objective principles, which can be derived only from spiritual tradition, but in the illusion of an objectivity derived from rational thinking. It has been said that Western civilisation, despite its pretensions, is the least objective of all civilisations because it has not truly objective criteria with which to critique itself.

Nancy Kline compares what she calls a ‘Thinking Environment’ with ‘Male Conditioning’, as follows:

Thinking Environment Male Conditioning

Listen Take over and Talk

Ask Incisive Questions Know everything

Establish equality Assume superiority

Appreciate Criticize

Be at ease Control

Encourage Compete

Feel Toughen

Supply accurate information Lie

Humanize the place Conquer the place

Create diversity Deride difference

From Kline, Nancy, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. London: Ward Lock, 2001, p. 91.

Of course, there is also a negative female conditioning which undermines a Thinking Environment. Both male and female ‘conditioning’ (to use Kline’s terminology) represent, in Aristotle’s terms, vices which arise from defect or excess of virtues. Thus, criticism (which Kline attributed to “male conditioning”) is an excess of discernment, but its opposite - the “appreciation” she associates with a Thinking Environment - if in excess, could be regarded, to extend her own terminology, as Female Conditioning, which appreciates every idea equally without any discrimination. Similarly, there is also obviously a golden mean when it comes to “being at ease” (instead of “controlling”), “feeling” (instead of “toughening”) and the other activities in the left-hand column. A negative caricature of these qualities could equally well be fashioned to represent a set of polar opposites to the extremes of male conditioning.

As I indicate later, the faculty of discernment always carries a moral valuation in spiritual traditions, as does the idea of the golden mean itself. Aristotle finds moral lessons in geometry, to the extent that he likens a “good man” to a “perfect cube”.

Our mathematics curriculum has lost any conception of this convergence of mathematical proportion and human virtue. Some years ago, as Director of Studies at a school in England, I asked all Heads of Department to consider how they could incorporate “moral and spiritual development” into their subject areas, since this was ideally required of the school by the National Curriculum. The Head of Mathematics (together with many other Heads of Department) resolutely refused to acknowledge that there was any way in which his subject could reflect such aims.

[ix] Even teachers these days no longer teach; they “deliver” a curriculum, or a policy. “We should resist not only the kind of language which reduces education to a kind of soulless managerialism, but also the kind of language which equates education with the postal service. Are teachers only there to “deliver” programmes of study, as if they were pre-packaged one-way parcels, mere items of content to be transmitted into letter-box brains? In authentic spiritual traditions, the teacher is not only responsible for the instruction and training of the mind and the transmission of knowledge, but also with the education of the whole being. Such traditions never divorced the training of the mind from that of the soul. In the Islamic tradition, for example, the teacher is both a muallim (a transmitter of knowledge) and a murabbi (a nurturer of souls)” (From Henzell-Thomas, J., “Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of ‘Intellect’”. Paper presented at the Reasons of the Heart Conference, University of Edinburgh, September, 2004).

[x] My own list of “frenetic activities and judgmental processes” given here is an expansion of an original list provided in Brian Thorne, op. cit. (See note 5).

[xi] Latin de- ‘away’ + liberare, ‘to free’, as in the phrase “deliver us from evil”. The oppressive imperative to ‘deliver’ has now become a form of bondage which could not be further from its original meaning.

[xii] 24 February 2005.

[xiii] “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” ~ Albert Einstein. Motto for the astronomy building of Junior College, Pasadena, California.

[xiv] The neglect of the education of the soul is characterised by a lack of intimacy, by an over-emphasis on “competencies” and “tools” – the distancing language of technology, military strategy, surveillance, corporate efficiency, quantification, target-setting and managerialism.

[xv] “Do we need to tick the tots?” by Caroline Haydon, in The Independent, 8 May, 2003.

[xvi] The DfEE White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success (London: HMSO, 2001) gives the game away in the first paragraph of the Introduction: “The success of our children at school is crucial to the economic health and social cohesion of the country, as well as to their own life chances and personal fulfilment” (my italics). Notice the priorities which are placed first in this sentence. In an exclusive interview reported in the Times Educational Supplement of 5 July 2002, Blair himself has confirmed this agenda: “Education”, he says “is and remains the absolute number one priority for the country because without a quality education system and an educated workforce, we cannot succeed economically” (my italics). The real priority is clear, and it is the same one (economic power) as that which governs educational policy in the White Paper.

Widespread over-emphasis of the applied sciences over the social sciences and humanities in higher education is increasingly prevalent worldwide. An example is the call for a 60:40 ratio for natural and applied sciences to social science and humanities in Malaysian universities, as well as the establishment of specialized technology universities. Such imbalance puts national economic development goals over individual human development, and regards the educational process as a factory for producing human “products” and “resources” to drive up the pace of economic growth and national “success”.

[xvii] This concept of drawing out latent potential is also present in the common description of Islamic education as tarbiyah - ‘nurturing’, ‘rearing’, ‘nourishing’ or ‘fostering’. Note also that the English word develop has the etymological sense of “unwrap” (Old French des- + voloper). In other words, educational development is a process of remembering, activating, awakening, revealing or bringing to light innate capacities.

[xviii] Terence Blacker, The Independent, 12 May 2003.

[xix] The sociologist Harry Gracey links the elimination of creativity to increasing conformity: “While children's perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity and creativity are being systematically eliminated from the kindergarten, unquestioned obedience to authority and rote learning of meaningless material are being encouraged.” (Gracey, Harry L., "Learning the Student Role: Kindergarten as Academic Boot Camp", in H. Stub (ed.) The Sociology of Education: A Sourcebook, 1975).

In his publisher’s note to New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto’s challenging book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (New Society Publishers, 1992) David H. Albert refers to the words of the social philosopher Hannah Arendt that “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instil convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any”. (Arendt, Hanna, Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, p.168). Gatto’s indictment of the assumptions and structures which underlie modern state schooling in the USA exposes the same deadening utilitarian agenda which informs British educational policy, an agenda geared to turning children into cogs in an economic machine, children who are dependent, conforming, materialistic, and lacking in curiosity, imagination, self-knowledge and powers of reflection.

“It is very nearly impossible,” said James Baldwin, to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.” And William Harris, US Commissioner of Education, proudly said in 1889 that “our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening...The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role."

In 2003, The Times Educational Supplement (TES) launched a campaign called Target Creativity to “liberate creativity in primary schools.” An article in the issue of 2 May 2003 (“Say ‘no’ targets”) cites a poll as evidence that “targets are…stifling opportunities for both children and teachers to be creative”. Earlier in the same year a group of famous musicians, including Sir James Galway and Julian Lloyd Webber, wrote to Tony Blair to raise “their grave concern about the increasing marginalisation of music” in schools caused by the overwhelming pressure of tests and targets (reported in TES 9 May 2003). They believe that if the subject is not rescued from the margins of school life, Britain will develop a generation of musically illiterate students. The problem here goes beyond the issue of musical illiteracy, because the benefits of musical education are transferable to other subjects. Well-attested research has found that learning to play a musical instrument can dramatically enhance human intelligence, probably because of the patterning activity stimulated in the brain. The mental mechanisms which process music are deeply entwined with brain functions such as spatial relations, memory and language. Spatial intelligence is crucial for engineering, computational abilities and technical design. Other creative people, including novelists Doris Lessing and Philip Pullman, have joined with the musicians to support the new TES campaign.

This is all very well, but, please, let us not restrict the notion of creativity to an exclusively Western concept of creative arts. A recent BBC radio 4 series on the Sikh community included a program in which a young Sikh woman talked about the prejudice she had experienced in secondary school from teachers and examiners who had devalued and even openly scorned her artwork because it was too “traditional” and did not conform to their Eurocentric modernist assumptions about what constituted “creative” work. In this example, the diversity strand of the Citizenship program of the National Curriculum is actively flouted, although it may well be that this strand will more typically be simply given lip service in a curriculum overloaded with examinable content and taught by teachers deficient in inter-cultural knowledge and skills.

[xx] I do not include in this arid category the enriched “thinking skills” approach which promotes “philosophical enquiry” amongst children in the classroom. See Fisher, R., Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom. London: Continuum, 1998. This is a promising extension of thinking skills which goes beyond the “critical thinking” approaches which focus so exclusively on the logical analysis of “arguments”. One such book, for example, covers: Identifying arguments; persuading and arguing; recognising the importance of arguments; arguing, explaining and summarising; analysing arguments: showing argument structure as a diagram; finding more detail in arguments; exploring weakness in arguments, etc.

[xxi] BBC Radio 4, 26 August 2004.

[xxii] "NPR : Researchers Take a Closer Look at Vision". See

[xxiii] I remember from my research days an experimental artificial intelligence program developed, I believe by Roger Schank at MIT, to “read” and summarise texts rapidly for US Congress. In order to read rapidly you need to activate global schemata which can make predictions about content, because a bottom-up parser analysing every grammatical and syntactic cue, though more accurate, would be very slow. I believe the AI challenge was to discover how you could combine top-down with bottom-up data-driven processing, and when the slower data-driven processing should kick in so as to check on the accuracy of the comprehension state. Schank developed an essentially top-down parser so as to enhance speed of processing. It summarised an article entitled “Pope’s Death Shakes the Western Hemisphere” as “Pope killed in an Earthquake”. This is a classic example of script-driven top-down processing – the program merely sampled lexical items in the text, taking no notice of syntactic structure, and generated an “Earthquake” script on the basis of those items. It then fitted the Pope into the Earthquake script.

[xxiv] This founding principle is partly based on Plato’s affirmation that the process of philosophical dialectic (that is the testing process of critical enquiry through discourse, dialogue and discussion) is utterly distinct from and immeasurably superior to rhetoric, which, if not firmly subordinated to knowledge and reason, is roundly condemned as emotional manipulation. It is this legacy which has ultimately ensured that “in the contemporary usage of all modern European languages, outside the specialized vocabulary of certain antiquarian and literary critical coteries, the word rhetorical is unfailingly pejorative. Rhetoric now roughly connotes the dissembling, manipulative abuse of linguistic resources for self-serving ends, usually in a political context.” (Wardy, R. ‘Rhetoric’, in J. Brunschwig and G. Lloyd (eds.), Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 465).

[xxv] Claxton, Guy, Hare Brain Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When you Think Less. London: Fourth Estate, 1997.

[xxvi] Ibid., p. 2.

[xxvii] Ibid., p.16.

[xxviii] Peat, F. David, Blackfoot Physics. London: Fourth Estate, 1994.

[xxix] Ibid., p. xiii.

[xxx] Summarised from Claxton, op. cit., pp. 2-10.

[xxxi] Claxton (Ibid., p. 3) makes the important point that “poets have always known the limitations of conscious, deliberate thinking” and that “the sages and mystics of all religious traditions attest to the spontaneous transformation of experience that occurs when one embraces the ‘impersonal mystery’ at the core of mental life, whether this mystery is the ‘godhead’ of Meister Eckhart or the ‘Unborn’ of Zen master Bankei.”

[xxxii] Ibid., pp. 227-228.

[xxxiii] Ibid., p. 4.

[xxxiv] “In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.” ~ William Duane, Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1822.

[xxxv] Op. cit., p. 6.

[xxxvi] Ibid. p.13.

[xxxvii] F. David Peat, Blackfoot Physics, op. cit., p. 57.

Cf. Rainer Maria Rilke: “Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life. Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide.”

I would add that although Rilke associates this mode of knowing with “living the artist’s life”, it should not be regarded as some special way of knowing accessible only to creative artist, geniuses, mystics and the like. This misappropriation of common and innate human faculties by “artists”, as if they have special gifts of perception and sensibility denied to the ordinary run of men and women, is another aberration of contemporary Western culture. In the same way, traditional societies do not have a heavily demarcated concept of “musical” and “unmusical” people. All members of the community participate in music, which is a communal activity essential to collective psychic health.

The gradual degradation of the meaning of the word genius attests to this misappropriation of innate human faculties (accessible to all). Latin genius originally meant “deity of generation and birth” and comes ultimately from the Indo-European base gn-/gon-/gen-, ‘know’ and ‘produce’ (source of English gene, generate, genitive etc. See note 64). It broadened out considerably in meaning, initially to ‘attendant spirit’, the sense in which English originally acquired it. By the 17th century, the sense of ‘person of outstanding intellectual ability’, which is derived from a comparatively rare Latin sense of ‘intellectual capacity’ had largely displaced the more universal sense. (See Ayto, p. 252). Many cases of semantic degeneration of this kind emanate from the inception of the Age of Reason, and many reflect a reduction of higher human faculties.

The word originality is another example. Its original Greek sense was “in accordance with our original nature” – that is, in Arabic terms, in accordance with our fitra, our innate disposition or essential nature. Originality was an ordinary, innate capacity common to all human beings, such that, for the ancient Greeks, even a ‘simple’ illiterate person had an innate understanding of the universal principles represented, say, by geometry. Indeed, it was that very simplicity which could be seen as a qualification for access to such archetypal understanding. Etymologically, the word simple denotes ‘same-fold’ - that is, not multifarious, exactly what is denoted by the original meaning of ‘identity’. It goes back ultimately to a compound formed from prehistoric Indo-European sm-, sem-, som-‘same’ (source also of English same, similar, single, etc) and pl- ‘fold’. This passed into Latin as simplus, ‘single’. The ‘simple’ person is a ‘single’ undivided person, a person who is always ‘the same’, true to himself or herself. Simplicity is like a mirror which reflects the divine unity at the core of every human being, but which is more often than not concealed by the complex and multifarious stratagems of the false self, including those engineered and orchestrated by the faculty of discursive reasoning. This lower aspect of the human intellect seeks always to ensure its own survival at the expense of the whole mind.

As with so many words in the English language, there was a shift in the meaning of the word originality in the eighteenth century with the consolidation of the Age of Reason, the so-called Enlightenment. This began with a shift from the sense of a universal human capacity to the sense of an ‘extraordinary ability’, rather like the notion of ‘genius’ which arose in the 17th century. Later, the sense shifted further to that of ‘inventiveness’, ‘innovation’ and ‘individualism’, to the extent that the modern-day connotation can even encompass the bizarre and the abnormal. The historical trajectory of this term is itself a fascinating commentary on how, as a result of the erosion of traditional wisdom, the outermost sheath of the human psyche (the conditioned individual “personality”) has gradually take precedence over its innermost core or heart where the divine qualities are reflected.

Originality is largely no longer regarded as an expression of our original nature, something emanating from our divine origin, but is often reduced to the level of inventive conjectures, self-obsessed pretensions, flights of subjective imagination and fantasy, and ephemeral shifts in fashion coloured by the preferences and aversions associated with our own personal conditioning. The archetypal qualities inherent in the original disposition of the human being, those qualities emerging from the centre and reflecting the divine attributes of perfection (the Beautiful Names of God in the Islamic tradition), have been reduced merely to the accidental qualities of individual egos facing no longer towards a unifying centre, a single point, but scattered on the periphery in a state of fragmentation, disconnection and disorientation. (For further discussion of historical semantic shifts of words denoting key concepts of universal human identity, see Henzell-Thomas, J., “Passing Between the Clashing Rocks: The Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive Identity”, Journal of Pastoral Care in Education, Spring, 2004.

Claxton (op. cit., p. 14) reminds us that “Another step in the recovery of the slower ways of knowing is to recognise that these forms of cognition are not the exclusive province of special groups of people – poets, mystics or sages – nor do they appear only on special occasions. They have sometimes been talked about in rather mystifying ways, as the work of ‘the muse’, or as signifying great gifts, or special states of grace. Such talk makes slow knowing look rather awesome and arcane. One feels intimidated, as if such mental modes were beyond the reach of ordinary mortals…This is a false and unhelpful impression…A ‘poetic way of knowing’…is accessible, and of value, to anyone. And though it cannot be trained, taught or engineered, it can be cultivated by anyone”.

[xxxviii] Peat, op. cit., p. 59.

[xxxix] Ibid., p. 66.

[xl] The importance of learning through the senses may be recognised as appropriate at very early stages of the mainstream Western curriculum, in accordance with Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development, which demotes the intuitive, practical intelligence to the infantile level of “sensorimotor intelligence”. This mode is dominant during the first two years of life, but is superseded by more powerful, abstract, intellectual ways of knowing. Thirty years ago, the sociologist Harry Gracey had lamented the fact that “children's perceptions of the world and opportunities for genuine spontaneity and creativity are being systematically eliminated from the kindergarten.” (Gracey, op. cit.)

The restitution of learning through the senses was part of the reform of educational practice in the 17th century in England, based as it was on the realization that medieval scholasticism had given rise to an arid educational process based on abstract reasoning and verbatim memorisation. This was the time of the scientific revolution - the realization that truth could be found out through actual observation and experience rather than recourse to authority.

What went wrong was that the notion of “experience” as the ground of truth was narrowly applied only as “experimentation”, which gave rise to the fallacy that the only reality was the observable world accessible to the senses, and the only truth was that which could be verified by measurement. Hence, the suspicion of introspection even today. By limiting science to experimentation, the balance between inward experience (the source of spiritual insight) and external observation (the basis of scientific method) was destroyed. Such balance between religious and scientific outlooks was germane to the philosophy of Roger Bacon, one of the founding fathers of empiricism, himself strongly influenced by Islamic thinkers, especially Ibn Sina.

As a result of the narrowing of the notion of ‘experience’, the mind of Western man became externalised, focused only on observable and quantifiable realities. Inward experience, the source of a deeper science or wisdom, was no longer to be trusted; the capacity for contemplation, the source of spiritual insight, was neglected, and the very idea of a hidden Reality, beyond the reach of human perception, was denied (See note 52 for a discussion of the etymology of the English word understand which shows how this word originally meant ‘stand in the midst of’).

The Qur’an tells us that it is a “book for those who believe in the existence of that which is beyond the reach of human perception” (2:3). Asad comments that the Arabic word al-ghayb, commonly and erroneously, translated as “the Unseen”, is used in the Qur’an to denote all those sectors or phases of reality which lie beyond the reach of human perception and cannot, therefore, be proved or disproved by scientific observation or even adequately comprised within the accepted categories of speculative thought: as, for instance, the existence of God and of a definite purpose underlying the universe, life after death, the real nature of time, the existence of spiritual forces and their inter-action, and so forth. Only a person who is convinced that the ultimate reality comprises far more than our observable environment can attain to belief in God and, thus, to a belief that life has meaning and purpose.”

The rejection of inward experience as a ground of knowledge also ensured that the Book of Nature, too, was desacralised and divested of its significance, in the sense that its beautiful and majestic signs (ayat), symbols (rumuz), and similitudes (amthal) - whether in the “far horizons” or within ourselves - were no longer seen as pointing beyond themselves to the existence of a Creator who had invested everything with “due measure and proportion,” but only as phenomena referring to nothing outside their own self-sufficient laws and mechanisms.

[xli] Peat, op. cit., p. 57.

[xlii] Barth, Roland S., Learning by Heart. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001, pp. 49-50.

[xliii] See note 72.

[xliv] Op. cit.

[xlv] Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) was one of the greatest figures in Islamic philosophy and Sufism.

[xlvi] T.J. Winter, Introduction to Al-Ghazali, Kitab dhikr al-mawt wa-ma ba’dahu (The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife), Book 40 of Ihya ªulum al-din (The Revival of Religious Sciences). Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, p. xvii.

Arabic dhawq can be defined as: “Physical taste; but in mysticism the term means direct experience of truth. In this context, dhawq is similar to the words ‘sapience’, or wisdom, derived from the Latin sapere, which means primarily to taste and by extension, to ‘discriminate’, ‘to know’”. (Glassé, Cyril, The Concise Encyclopaedia of Islam. London: Stacey International, revised edition 2001, p. 116). As the Sufi dictum goes: “He who tastes, knows.” “Ultimately, real knowledge of [the food and life of the soul] is the ‘tasting of its flavour’, the ‘spiritual savouring’ (dhawq) that men of discernment speak of, which almost simultaneously unveils the reality and truth of the matter to the spiritual vision (kashf).” (Al-Attas, Syed Muhammad Naguib,The Concept of Education in Islam: A Framework for an Islamic Philosophy of Education. Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC), 1980, pp. 24-25).

[xlvii] Claxton (op. cit., p. 19) states that “the original design specification of learning does not include the production of conscious rationales. Knowing, at root, is implicit, practical, intuitive.” In relation to the removal of children from direct experience, I once observed, as an inspector, a very good hands-on lesson for Year 5 pupils, in which the teacher had brought into the class specimens of clay, loam and sandy soils for the children to handle. At the end of the lesson, the teacher anxiously came up to me and apologised because, in her words, “the children should have been wearing plastic gloves” in accordance with health and safety policy! In June 2005, it was announced on BBC radio 4 that a primary school has banned children from bringing egg boxes into school (for model making) because they might contain “dangerous bacteria”.

[xlviii] Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273), poet and universal spiritual guide.

[xlix] Rumi, Mathnawi III, 2527-2528, from Jewels of Remembrance, A Daybook of Spiritual Guidance from the Wisdom of Rumi, selected and translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski. Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1996.

A further extract from this selection elaborates on the difference between the two kinds of intelligence”:

There are two kinds of intelligence.

One is like that acquired by a child at school

from books and teachers, new ideas and memorization.

Your intelligence may become superior to others,

but retaining all that knowledge is a burden.

You who are so busy searching for knowledge

must be a preserving tablet, but the preserved tablet

is the one who has gone beyond all this.

For the other kind of intelligence is the gift of God:

its fountain is deep within the soul.

When the water of God-given knowledge surges from the breast,

it never stagnates or becomes impure.

And if its way to the outside is blocked, what harm is there?

For it flows continually from the house of the heart.

The acquired intelligence is like the conduits

which run into the house from the streets:

if those pipes become blocked, the house is bereft of water.

Seek the fountain within yourself.

[Rumi, Mathnawi, IV, 1960-1968]

[l] Claxton (op. cit. p. 20) reports that “people’s ability to pick up the skills that their everyday lives require – their ‘practical intelligence’, as Harvard psychologist Robert Sternberg puts it – is independent of their intellectual or linguistic facility.” This is demonstrated by Brazilian street children, who can do quite complex mental arithmetical operations by school standards in order to run their businesses, despite the fact that they are supposed to have low mathematical ability according to tests. Claxton also reports the case of people who work as handicappers at American racecourses who “are able to make calculations, based on a highly intricate model involving as many as seven different variables, yet their ability to do so is completely unrelated to their IQ scores.” (See Carraher, T.N., Carreher, D. and Schliemann, A.D., ‘Mathematics in the street and in schools’, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol 3 (1985), pp. 21-9. Ceci, S.J. and Liker, J., ‘A day at the races: a study of IQ, expertise and cognitive complexity’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Vol. 115 (1986), pp. 255-66.

[li] Claxton, op. cit., p.21.

[lii] The word understand is the only instance in modern English of the survival of the prefix under as meaning ‘between’ or ‘among’ (as in Old English undersecan, ‘to investigate, seek amongst’). In all other cases the prefix means ‘below’ or ‘beneath’. Old English understandan meant literally ‘to stand in the midst of’.

Modern German verstehen (from Middle High German verstan) is based on a different prefix (ver-) which means ‘in front, or on top of’, so verstehen literally means ‘to stand in front of, or on top of’. Ionic Greek epí-stasthai, ‘to understand’ also meats to ‘stand on top of, stand over’.

Two types of understanding are implicated here: understanding through direct experience and engagement (‘standing amongst’ – understandan) and understanding through observation (‘standing in front of, or on top of - verstehen). Significantly, it was these two forms of learning which Francis Bacon regarded as the basis of his learning by ‘induction’, that is, learning by experience and observation, as opposed to the outmoded methods of medieval scholasticism based on abstract logic and authority. The revival of experience and observation was at the root of the scientific revolution in Europe.

However, in the history of the West, the notion of ‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere ‘experimentation’. ‘Standing in front of, or on top of’ (i.e. pseudo-objectivity, objectification) has taken precedence over ‘standing in the midst of’ (direct experience, tasting). In other words, Bacon’s notion of ‘experience’ was gradually reduced to that of mere ‘experimentation’, which explains the spectacular success of the scientific method to the detriment of other forms of inquiry and perception involving faculties of direct insight. (See previous note 40)

[liii] The Arabic root ‘QL has the sense of ‘binding’ and ‘withholding’, i.e. the faculty of judgment, discrimination and clarification and the intellectual power of speech (nutq) which enables man, the “language animal”, to articulate words in meaningful patterns. To Adam was imparted the Names (Qur’an 2:31), and in one sense this knowledge confers on man the faculty of logical definition and the making of distinctions which underlies abstract, conceptual thought. However, as I explain above, the faculty encompasses more than logical reasoning and verbal conceptualisation.

Glassé points out that al-‘Aql (lit. “intellect”) is “sometimes used to mean “reason” or “thinking”, but its highest and metaphysical sense, as used in Islamic philosophy, corresponds to the intellect or nous, as understood in Platonism and Neoplatonism. It is the faculty which, in the microcosm or in man, is the embodiment of Being or Spirit….

“It is also what the Koran calls ar-Ruh (lit. “spirit”). The “Unity of the Intellect”, or the essential identity of the Intellect in the metacosm (what is beyond the created world), the microcosm (man), and the macrocosm (the world, which is the manifestation of the possibilities of the metacosm), was expressed as a theory by Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d.595/1198), the philosopher and chief interpreter of Aristotle. But it is also implicit in most Islamic metaphysics when the question of ‘aql arises, even where there is little or no apparent connection with philosophy or mysticism.

“This “Intellect”….is veiled behind discursive thought or reason; nevertheless, it is essentially the same – or not other – than its celestial prototype. Through this transcendent Intellect man is capable of the “recognition” of Reality and of knowing the world, because the world is in fact contained within him, as the world is contained in being. The intellect makes possible direct knowledge, or intellection, which amounts to “revelation” on the plane of the microcosm, where the subject – because of his capacity for perfect objectivity, comprehends the object, seizes or “assimilates” it, and realizes an identity between the subject (his own mind) and the object. It is thus that Plato, and later St. Augustine, described knowing as remembering.

“It is the presence of the Intellect within man which sets him apart from animals who participate in the cosmic Intellect peripherally, but do not contain it, since they do not occupy the “center” as does man. It is thus also that Adam knew the names of the objects of creation, whereas the angels did not, being also peripheral, that is, not containing the projection of the Divine Intellect within them. The Angels, it is true, were superior to Adam in that they were less limited in their form; yet they bowed to him because he was truly vicegerent of God on earth, khalifatu ‘Llahi fi-l ard….”

(Glassé, op. cit., p. 55).

[liv] Burckhardt, Titus, An Introduction to Sufism, translated by D.M. Matheson. London: Thorsons, 1995, p.94. “Here it must be made quite plain that the term ‘intellect’ (al-‘aql) is in practice applied at more than one level: it may designate the universal principle of all intelligence, a principle which transcends the limiting conditions of the mind; but the direct reflection of Universal Intellect in thought may also be called ‘intellect’ and in this case it corresponds to what the ancients called reason.”

[lv] Ibn Sina, (c.980-1037), known as Avicenna in the West, champion of Islamic Neo-Platonism, was the most influential of all Arabic philosopher-scientists.

[lvi] Ibn Sina agreed with the Greek philosophers that the development of intellect (illumination of the mind) is the true aim of man (where intellect is the instrument of acquiring knowledge in order to understand what is real, universal and necessary). The process of human cognition is a gradual progression or ascent from the lowest condition of potentiality to the highest condition of actuality, where what is stored in the Active Intellect is apprehended. The intellect of man is attuned to the divine intellect and through proper education will eventually be absorbed in it. Ibn Sina calls this progression ittisal, i.e. ‘connection with the Active Intellect’.

[lvii] Al-Attas, op. cit., p. 14, states that “ ‘Aql is synonymous with qalb…the spiritual organ of cognition in the heart.”

In the Bible, too, both in the Old and New Testaments, it is the heart (Hebrew leb/lebab, cognate with Arabic lubb/albab) not the brain, which is regarded as the centre of consciousness, thought and will. The emotions are usually connected with the lower organs. Modern usage typically gives precedence to mental processes by regarding the ‘mind’ as the seat of consciousness and demotes the heart by making it the seat of emotions. That the heart is regarded as the seat of the intellect and the will, as well as feeling, is shown by The First Commandment, which, according to C. Ryder Smith (The Bible Doctrine of Man, 1951) probably means “You shall love (agapan) the Lord your God with all your heart – that is with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength”. See the entry on HEART in The Illustrated Bible Dictionary. Leicester: Inter-Varsity Press, 1980, Vol. 2, p. 625, for detailed references to the function of the heart throughout the Bible.

Martin Lings describes the “centre of the macrocosm” as the “Heart” of the human being – “not the bodily organ of that name but the soul’s central faculty which…must be considered as being above and beyond the psychic domain…The capital letter is used to denote this distinction. Moreover since this centre reflects a whole hierarchy of centres which transcend it, the term Heart is also sometimes used of Spirit, and ultimately of the Supreme Centre, the Divine Self.” Lings, Martin, Symbol and Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence. Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1991, pp. 2-3.

[lviii] This is described in very Islamic terms as the “Eye of the Heart ” in the Makarian Homilies (the Orthodox Christian Tradition of Hesychasm).

[lix] Unlike so many “critical thinking” approaches which focus almost exclusively on techniques of reasoning, Robert Fisher tries to include some aspects of the moral dimension as a key element of teaching thinking. “Ideal critical thinkers”, he says, “display a number of intellectual virtues: seeking truth (they care that their beliefs are true; they therefore seek alternatives, and support views only to the extent that they are justified by available information), being honest (with yourself and other people), and respecting the dignity and the worth of others (listening attentively to the views of others, avoiding scorn and intimidation of others, and showing concern about the welfare of others).”

See Fisher, R., Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom. London: Continuum, 1998, p. 9.

“Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it . . . or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings - that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.” (my emphasis) ~ Gautama Buddha.

[lx] The sense of moral valuation is also present in various Arabic words in the Qur’an (other than ‘aql) which denote the faculties of discernment and insight. Asad explains that the word furqan, for example, means a standard or criterion to discern the true from the false and what is right form what is wrong. The word al-a’raf, ‘the faculty of discernment’, carries the same connotation of ‘perceiving what is right’, as does the word rushd, ‘consciousness of what is right’. The word shahid, ‘conscious mind’, refers to the “awakening of the deeper layers of man’s consciousness”, in contrast to

sa-iq, “the complex of …instinctive urges and inordinate, unrestrained appetites”. The word basirah, denoting the “faculty of conscious understanding based on insight, and verifiable by the intellect (i.e. accessible to reason)” also includes that moral sense or criterion (furqan) which provides the essential orientation for perceiving the truth. The same applies to albab, ‘insight’. Al-Attas (op. cit. p. 14) defines the “real nature of ‘aql” as “a spiritual substance by which the rational soul (al-nafs al-natiqah) recognises and distinguishes truth from falsehood”.

[lxi] See Crow, Karim Douglas, “Between wisdom and reason: Aspects of ‘aql (Mind-Cognition) in Early Islam”, Islamica, Vol. 3. Number 1, Summer 1999, pp 49-64.

[lxii] Crow (ibid.) describes this “higher intelligence” as “a form of ‘cognitive prehension’ (‘aql, ma’rifa). It was this knowledge of virtue and vice, of good and evil, forming an objective moral law based on an ethic of natural reason and conscience, wherein ‘aql was understood to enshrine the innate apprehension of truth opening onto reception of guidance leading through an infinite gradation of spiritual cognition to the divine reality.”

[lxiii] Peat (op. cit. p. 57) notes how our own indigenous view of knowledge has over time been transformed into a noun, “something that could be categorised, conceptualised, collected, and sorted within the filing cabinets of the mind.” Associated with this static, noun-based form of knowledge is the desire to “manipulate, control and exploit.” Descartes proclaimed that “Knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars…men can become masters and possessors of nature” and Francis Bacon, one of the heralds of modern scientism, suggested that in order to gain such knowledge “nature should be placed upon the rack and tortured to reveal her secrets”.

The distinction between verb-based and noun-based languages is of prime importance in understanding different worldviews. Peat explores the difference in an essay on his website (), thus: “the verb-based language system of the Montegnais (a people living in the Labrador region of north eastern Canada who have still managed to preserve much of their traditional hunting life) reflects a worldview common to all the Algonkin families of languages. This is a worldview (shared also by the Blackfoot) of process, transformation, renewal and animation (i.e. verb-based) - a dance of nature, as opposed to the dominant Western paradigm derived from an ‘objective’ mathematics which remains rooted in (and is a refinement of) noun-based language and noun-based categories.”

Peat exhorts us to be aware of “the enormous power of European languages to reinforce a particular world view” and to realise that our mathematics is “a refinement of noun-based languages” and “remains rooted in the idea of noun-categories.” It has “specifically developed to avoid ambiguity, confusion and multiplicity of meaning. Indeed, these are both its strengths and weaknesses, for while our mathematics is well adapted to make calculations and express abstract relationships it cannot deal with quality, value, ambiguity and feeling.”

It is important to add here that literacy (written language) itself reinforces noun-based categories, since written language is derived from the need to store complex material (originally lists or inventories of things) which cannot easily be remembered, and, in so doing, to release more cognitive capacity for processing. Modern mathematics is inconceivable without written language because it is beyond human short-term memory capacity (7 plus or minus two disconnected items) to hold enough material to enable processing capacity to work on it. This has to be done on paper. As Vygotsky explains, written language is a "technological amplifier" of a certain kind of cognitive capacity - the kind which has given us our scientific and technological worldview. It can therefore be argued that societies based on oral tradition, far from being "primitive" societies which use a pre-literate and therefore "inferior" mode of communication, actually preserve a primordial form of communication which has not succumbed to the abstraction and pseudo-objectivity which is typical of noun-based consciousness.

[lxiv] The underlying sense of an ‘idea’ as that which is ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ (rather than that which is ‘thought’) comes from the Indo-European root ueid-, meaning ‘look at, see’. This root gives us Sanskrit Veda, knowledge, as in the sacred books of Hinduism (vidya is ‘knowledge’ - i.e. ‘seeing’ in Sanskrit, and a-vidya is ‘ignorance’, or at best ‘imperfect knowledge’, literally ‘not seeing’ or ‘blind’). The same root ueid- gives us Greek eidos and idea, as we have seen, and Latin videre (‘to see’) from which our own English derivatives are legion. The word “white” is a derivative of the same root from Celtic, and literally means “easily seen”.

It is worth noting also that the original sense of the Greek word idea, used by Plato in the specialised sense ‘archetypal form’ or ‘ideal prototype’, is the ‘look’ ‘appearance’ or ‘image’ of something. The word ‘idol’ comes from the Greek eidos (‘form, shape’) which itself comes form the same root as idea. The early English sense before 1398 was the Platonic ‘general or ideal form, type or model’. The more general and abstract sense of ‘notion, mental conception’ is not found in English, as far as I know, before 1645.

So, the underlying concept is that of ‘seeing’ not of ‘thinking’. As with so many words which had kept a measure of their original meaning in the medieval period, the sense of ‘idea’ as something ‘seen’ was reduced in the post-Renaissance world to something ‘thought’. A concrete experience, a ‘tasting’ (dhawq), was reduced to an abstraction. “I see, therefore I know” becomes the wretched Descartian axiom “I think, therefore I am”. (See note 97 for further discussion of the difference between ‘imaginal’ and conceptual modes of knowing).

The revisioning of what it means to know can also be observed in the semantic degradation in post-medieval English of certain words which connect ‘knowing’ with ‘skill’ or ‘ability’. Thus, the word ‘cunning’, which now has the sense of ‘skilfully deceitful’ (from the 16th century), originally had the sense of ‘learned’, but its relationship to the word ‘can’ (preserved in Scots ‘ken’) shows how this ‘learning’ was conceived not essentially as abstract knowledge but as knowledge gained through innate ability, perception and experience. This is a striking example of how the ideology of post-medieval scientism perverted the original meaning of a word so as to banish original ways of knowing. The word ‘craft’ still preserves both meanings: the sense of ‘skill’ or a ‘trade’/‘profession’ and the degraded sense which reduces it to mere ‘craftiness’ or ‘cunning’. The original Germanic sense of ‘craft’ was ‘strength’, which is still preserved in other Germanic languages apart from English.

[lxv] The second major sense of the root gn-/gon-/gen-, apart form know, is generate, although the two meanings are very much entwined. Shipley points out that the 1611 King James Bible tells us that “Adam knew his wife, Eve, and she conceived” (Genesis 4:1), so the idea of knowledge and familiarity (carnal and mental) is closely connected here with the act of ‘begetting’. This sense remains in German Kind (child) and English kindle. In Sanskrit, the root becomes yoni, the intercrural cleft,the base for the erect lingam. Latin or Greek not only give us generate, but also generous, germ, germinate, native, natal, nation, innate, nature, progeny, pregnant, genitive (the case of origin), generic, gender, engender, gonad, genesis (with its multitude of compounds), gene, eugenics, genius (friendly spirit assigned to us at birth – see note 37) and gentle, which originally meant ‘of gentle birth’ (and hence a gentleman). The connection between birth and the virtue of gentleness is also preserved in the Germanic word kind. The head of the kin/kindred is the king, whose virtues should include kindness. Macbeth’s murder of his cousin, King Duncan is all the more ‘unkind’ (i.e. unnatural) because it involved the murder of his own ‘kin’.

[lxvi] Peat, op. cit., p.56.

[lxvii] The ‘seeing’ dimension of this composite notion of ‘thinking’ is reminiscent of the underlying sense of the English word idea as that which is ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ (rather than that which is ‘thought’) which, as I have explained in note 63, comes from the Indo-European root ueid- meaning ‘look at, see’.

It is also striking how the original meaning of the English word think includes the spiritual-ethical sense of ‘gratitude’. This primordial sense is expressed in Shipley’s distillation: “Methinks mankind has daily cause for thanksgiving “ (Shipley, p. 414). In Arabic the root KFR, meaning ‘to deny the truth’, has the associated sense of ‘ungratefulness’ or ‘thanklessness’, even though its derivative kafir is commonly mistranslated as ‘unbeliever’.

The English word think goes back to two senses in Old English, but only the later meaning has survived into modern English. Old English thencan meant ‘to conceive in the mind, think’ but this is a variant of thyncan which preserves the original meaning, “to seem”, ‘to cause to appear to oneself’, or, in Ayto’s entry, ‘to cause images, reflections to appear to oneself’ (Ayto p. 528). Old Icelandic thekkja, cognate with Old English thencan, meant ‘to perceive, know’, and another cognate Gothic thankjan carries the reflective sense of ‘to consider, meditate’.

The noun thought is derived from thohte, the past tense of thenkan. According to Barnhart (p.1134), “Because of the close semantic relationship and a sharing of forms (thought and think), these two different words, now both spelled think, became thoroughly confused in early modern English, which has led to the complete submersion of the form think to seem, to appear.” This obsolete latter sense has survived only in the archaic form ‘methinks’ (literally ‘it seems to me’).

Other cognates outside Germanic may include Old Latin tongere, ‘to know’, and

Tocharian tankw, ‘to love’. The Indo-European root is tong-, which carries the sense

of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’. The word thank is also derived from it through Germanic

*thankaz, ‘thought, gratitude’ and Old English thanc, which carried the multiple sense

of ‘thought, thoughtfulness, goodwill, thankfulness and thanks’. See also Watkins,

p. 93.

In the Qur’an, words derived from the Arabic root FKR are variously translated as

‘consider’ (Yusuf ‘Ali), ‘reflect’ (Arberry), ‘think’ (‘Asad), and ‘take thought’

(Pickthall). The root appears in only two forms, once in the form fakkara and

seventeen times in the word tafakkara, and if the contexts for the occurrence of these

are examined, it will be found that they almost invariably refer to the manifest ‘signs’

(Arabic ayat) or ‘similitudes’ (Arabic amthal) which God sets forth for man to reflect

upon. Many of these signs are the wonders of creation, thus:

“And it is He who has spread the earth wide and placed on it firm mountains and

running waters, and created thereon two sexes of every kind of plant; and it is He who

causes the night to cover the day. Surely, in all this there are signs for people who

reflect.” (Qur’an, 13:3)

[Note: I prefer the more concrete sense of Arberry’s phrase “signs for a people who

reflect” to Asad’s rather more abstract translation, “messages for people

who think”.]

“It is He who sends down water from the skies; you drink thereof, and so drink the

plants upon which you pasture your beasts; and by virtue thereof He causes crops to

grow for you, and olive trees, and date-palms, and grapes, and all other kinds of fruit:

in this, behold, there is a sign indeed for people who reflect. (Qur’an 16: 10-11).

“And among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates out of your own

Kind, so that you might incline towards them, and He engenders love and tenderness

between you: in this, behold, there are signs indeed for a people who reflect.” (Qur’an

30:21)

In the Qur’an, the act of ‘thinking’ or ‘reflecting’ is therefore a deep meditative or

contemplative act in response to the visible signs of God’s bounty. It therefore also

includes the moral dimension of thankfulness, which comes from the realisation that

the wonders of creation, including everything upon the earth, are the bounty given to

us by God.

The Arabic sense of “think” in the root FKR therefore connects closely with the sense of the Indo-European root tong-, which is the origin of both the English words think and thank. Malik Badri, defines tafakkar as a “cognitive-spiritual activity in which the rational mind, emotion and spirit are combined”. (See Badri, M. Contemplation: An Islamic Psychospiritual Study. Herndon: IIIT, 2000).

Deep thinking or reflecting is therefore, in its primordial sense, a concrete act of “seeing”, and the activation of the moral sense of gratitude which comes from understanding the spiritual “significance” of what is seen. It is not an abstract conceptual process occurring in the brain, but a composite activity of cognition, perception, feeling and valuation.

The convergence of this vision of “thinking” across two apparently unrelated groups of languages (Semitic and Indo-European) gives credence to the idea of universal primordial concepts (the Names imparted to Adam) embedded in the human mind- heart.

Of added interest is the fact that the Qur’an explicitly connects the faculty of tafakkar with that of ‘aql. Following verse 3 of Surah 13, which tells us some of the wonders which are “signs for people who reflect (yatafakkarun)”, verse 4 expounds further “signs” for those who “understand” (ya’qiluun):

“And there are on earth many tracts of land close by one another and yet widely differing from one another; and there are on it vineyards, and fields of grain, and date-palms growing in clusters from one root or standing alone, all watered with the same water: and yet, some of them have We favoured above others by way of the food which they provide for man and beast. Verily, in all this there are signs indeed for people who understand!” (Qur’an 13:4).

Asad prefers the phrase ‘use their reason’, but I prefer ‘understand’ - the translation of ya’qiluun favoured by both Yusuf ‘Ali and Arberry. The sense of ‘aql might equally well be translated here as ‘insight’ (i.e. “people of insight”). Asad himself also on occasion translates ‘aql as ‘insight’ (e.g.39:17-18), although more usually as ‘reason’. He also uses the word ‘insight’ to translate Arabic albab, another faculty of the Heart activated in the contemplation of the wonders of creation:

“Verily, in the creation of the heavens and the earth, and in the succession of night and day, there are indeed signs for all those who are endowed with insight, and who remember God when they stand, and when they sit, and then they lie down to sleep, and thus reflect on the creation of the heavens and the earth: O our Sustainer! Thou has created aught of this without meaning and purpose….(Qur’an 3: 190-191).

[lxviii] In the Islamic philosophy of Mulla Sadra, the perfection of man resides in the perfection of his soul. The Arabic word natiqah, although usually translated as ‘rational’, must not be reduced to the modern understanding of this term, in the same way as the term ‘aql must not be reduced to the lower level of the intellect alone. The word natiqah in Arabic still contains all the depth of meaning which such terms as nous, intellectus and even ratio possessed before Cartesianism and empiricism deprived reason of its connection with the intellect and reduced it for the most part to its rapport merely with the outer senses. (For a masterly discussion of this desacralisation of the intellect, see chapter 1 ,”Knowledge and its desacralisation”, in Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Knowledge and the Sacred. New York: State University of New York Press, 1980.

[lxix] Moore, Thomas (ed.), The Education of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins, 1996, p. 5.

[lxx] On 28 June 2005, a report aired on BBC radio highlighted the steep decline in applications from students to study Mathematics at higher level. The retreat from Mathematics is another symptom of the disillusionment with quantitative scientism, discussed in note 69, in relation to the report published by the joint Royal Society and Joint Mathematical Council working group in July 2000 which criticised the reduction in the teaching of mathematics to nothing but numbers.

[lxxi] I have criticized in some detail elsewhere the profound malaise in our education system caused by the dominance of a narrow, quantitative, utilitarian concept of schooling derived from target-driven regimes of techno-managerialism which reduce human beings to conforming and performing cogs in industrial machines so as to drive forward national economic development goals. (See Henzell-Thomas, J. “Mythical Meaning, Religion and Soulful Education: Reviving the Original Sense of Intellect”, Reasons of the Heart Conference, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, 9-12 September 2004). See also my Excellence in Islamic Education, on the website of the Book Foundation ).

The most obvious sign of the “Reign of Quantity” in our educational system is the debilitating testing regime tied into league tables of “performance” – a relentless and unremitting treadmill of assessment of uninspiring objectives and dangerously narrow prescriptive content. Research by Cambridge University for the National Union of Teachers refers to a testing “insanity” which is gripping primary schools in the UK (The Independent, 5 July, 2002). Almost half the weekly timetable is now taken up by mathematics and English lessons and thousands of children as young as seven are being tested every week on their reading. The disproportionate emphasis on the teaching and perpetual testing of a narrow band of literacy and numeracy skills, which are deemed to be essential for economic survival, is taking the heart and soul out of education. A survey has shown that over half of seven-year olds suffered from stress before taking standard Assessment Tests (SATs) (“A generation of the hunched and slumped”, by Michael McMahon, in The Independent, 27 April, 2003). A poll carried out in September 2002 found that testing had replaced bullying as the biggest fear for schoolchildren during their schooldays (“The obsession with exams and targets is destroying childhood”, by Richard Garner, The Independent, 21 September, 2002). This regime coerces pupils in English schools to take more than 100 exams and tests in their school years.

The same national obsession with standardised testing can be seen in the USA, where its failure is leading many to call for a repudiation of all educational centralized planning. According to Jeffrey Tucker, Vice-President of the Mises Institute, preparation for tests on a narrow band of prescriptive content in core subjects has become the sum total of all public-school education in the USA. “Advanced students”, he says, “are bored out of their minds, while weak students are relentlessly frustrated.” (“Another Central Plan Fails”, by Jeffrey Tucker, posted 3 January 2003 on ).

A study from Arizona State University, the first to examine the issue nationally, has confirmed what we might have expected – that there is an inverse relationship between the ability to pass the tests and the scores on independent tools like the SAT and ACT. The latter comes up with a measure of the student’s mastery of the ability to think and solve problems, whereas the school exams only measure whether students have mastered the material on the tests. Again, it is hardly surprising that despite all this testing, more than half of America’s best students make it to university without picking up more than an elementary grasp of how to write. This is the finding of a recent report by the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, which also tells us that three-quarters of American students at high-school grades equivalent to our sixth-form level are never given written assignments in humanities classes (“Best students ‘barely literate’”, by Stephen Phillips, Times Educational Supplement, 9 May, 2003.) According to the writer of the report, “there is a total devaluation of teaching of good writing and, along with that, intelligent reading.”

It is this unsustainable system which is driving the revival of homeschooling across America, with its “attention to individual needs, the flexibility that allows students to develop in unique ways”, and its “employment of localized knowledge and resources.”

Other signs of the Reign of Quantity are evident in the reduction of Mathematics and Science to mere numbers and facts. A joint Royal Society and Joint Mathematical Council working group reported in July 2000 that the teaching of mathematics was increasingly being reduced to nothing but numbers, and that the death of geometry, the study of shape and space, in mathematics education could only be to the detriment of visual and spatial intelligence (Times Educational Supplement, 18 January, 2001 – Curriculum Special: Mathematics). It is known that spatial intelligence is crucial for engineering, computational abilities and technical design.

A report on science teaching at GCSE level drawn up by Dr. Ian Gibson, Chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, found much of science teaching “boring, pointless and stultifying” with far too much weight given to facts and content. Few opportunities were given for experimentation, little connection was made with topical modern developments and controversial issues, let alone with that sense of wonder and mystery which authentic science evokes. The scientific method itself was rarely taught, and the limitations of science hardly ever addressed. (Today programme, Radio 4, 11 July, 2002 and Times Educational Supplement, 12 July, 2002).

The Times Educational Supplement of 2 January 2004 (“Attack on science ‘by numbers’” by Warwick Mansell) reports Jonathan Osborne, professor of science education at King’s College London, as saying that the shepherding of pupils through GCSE practicals was like a set of “recipe-like steps” which had very little to do with the process of scientific exploration. He points out that at GCSE, assessment of investigation is dominated by just three experiments: measuring the resistance of a wire, the rates of chemical reaction and the rate of osmosis in a potato, which is “a bit like reducing the teaching of performance in music to three standard scales on a recorder. Any teacher with even half an understanding of science knows that this approach …bears as much relation to science as painting by numbers does to art.”

Such recent critiques of modern science education recapitulate Walt Whitman’s distaste for the mechanistic and materialistic reduction of Science to mere calculation:

“When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”

~ Walt Whitman (American poet, 1819-1892)

[lxxii] I deliberately refer to this kind of schooling as “dispiriting” and “demoralising” because these debilitating effects are the outcome of an educational process which often gives no real place to spiritual and moral development apart from the generalised lip-service paid to them in the common platitudes found in school mission statements.

[lxxiii] “What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.” ~ R. Buckminster Fuller, US inventor.

[lxxiv] Brian Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Counselling Studies at the University of Norwich, describes how in his psycho-therapeutic work, he ministers in his consulting room to an ever-growing stream of angry, burnt-out, deeply unfulfilled people who sacrificed their souls in the frantic pursuit of personal achievement and material success. Bound by the imperative to “deliver” so much of what is useless and ephemeral they had failed to see to their own “deliverance”, which in its original meaning is simply their liberation from all such oppression and illusion.

Brian Thorne’s experience is confirmed by recent studies which have exposed the scandalous increase in depression, self-harm and even suicide amongst young people, including schoolchildren, with a growing number of websites offering advice to young people who want to take their own lives about the best methods of killing themselves. The Independent on Sunday (12 September 2004) reports that the suicide rate in Britain today is now three times higher among schoolchildren than it was 20 years ago, with children as young as five being treated for self-harming. The main causes of self-harm amongst children and teenagers in the UK – believed to be the highest in Europe – are bullying at school and exam stress as well as an abusive parent or bereavement. A poll carried out in September 2002 found that testing had replaced bullying as the biggest fear for schoolchildren during their schooldays (“The obsession with exams and targets is destroying childhood”, by Richard Garner, The Independent, 21 September, 2002).

In an article in The Guardian (“Doubt and depression burden teenage girls”, 24 February 2005), Lucy Ward reports the findings of a poll commissioned by the magazine Bliss that “the vast majority of teenage girls in Britain suffer depression and self-doubt, blaming excessive pressure to look good and succeed in school. Nine out of ten say they feel depressed, 42% feel low regularly, and 6% think life is not worth living…84% felt burdened with too much homework and coursework at school, and almost two-thirds thought there was too much pressure to succeed academically. Most admitted crying over their homework…Bullying also featured high, 66% admitting that they had been bullied, mainly by other girls.” The article also referred to last Autumn’s Time Trends study on adolescent mental health by the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and the University of Manchester, which reveals a sharp overall decline in the mental health of teenagers in the past 25 years. Amongst its findings was the startling revelation that 37% of teenage girls believed they suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder.

And this stressful existence is not confined to schoolchildren. In the same edition of The Guardian (24 February 2005) next to the headline “Work is a four letter word for those in their 30s”, there is a striking photograph of a dejected young man sitting on a flight of stone steps, briefcase between his legs, leaning forward onto tightly clasped hands, with the caption: “Stressed, worried and overworked…the price of climbing the career ladder is too high for thirtysomethings”. The article, reporting the findings of a study by the Employers’ Forum on Age, also reports the findings of Brian Thorne, derived from his psycho-therapeutic encounters, that workers in their thirties “gradually tumble to the fact that work has become the totality of their existence and so much of their energy, intellect and emotion goes into making their way up the hierarchical ladder. They are exhausted and they realise they are losing touch with their friends or missing out on aspects of their children development that can never recur.”

Professor Louis Appleby, the British Government’s mental health ‘tsar’, said earlier this year that the way to deal with the problem of declining mental health in children and adolescents was to bring in an “army of therapists”, as if it were the children who are “sick” instead of the culture and school system in which they growing up. A wiser approach would surely be to attempt to rectify an educational system which not only demoralises and dispirits, but also causes widespread disaffection, depression and even suicide. These debilitating effects are the outcome of an educational process which often gives no real place to spiritual and moral development apart from the generalised lip-service paid to them in school mission statements. Dispirited and demoralised school pupils are also increasingly disaffected, as is clearly shown by truancy statistics which show that truancy is continuing to rise despite government measures designed to tackle this problem. The BBC Radio 4 News of 15 September 2004 reported that an average of 49,000 pupils were absent from school every day in the year up to April 2004.

“One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child” said Maria Montessori.

[lxxv] The reduction of the notion of ‘quality’ to that of mere quantity, is a necessary consequence of the blatant secularism which “admits of nothing divine, has categorised all aspects of our life by negating the human spirit (ruh) and the heart (qalb), which are the essence of our inner being, and in so doing “has created a society in which life is considered to be simply an interplay of physical and chemical forces, morality a human construct, and spirituality …a mere psychologization of human experiences.” See Shaikh Abdul Mabud, “Beyond the curriculum: the secular crusade”, editorial, Muslim Education Quarterly, Vo. 21, No. 1 & 2 (Autumn and Winter issues combined), 2004.

[lxxvi] Henzell-Thomas, J. “Quantity Masquerading as Quality: Reviving an Authentic Notion of Qualitative Education”, paper presented at a Conference on Higher Education in Developing Countries With a Focus on Muslim Contexts at The Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations, 24-25 February 2005.

[lxxvii] It is not only indigenous cultural traditions which can provide models of management appropriate to their settings, but religious and spiritual traditions can do the same, since the principles and values upheld by both indigenous and global spiritual traditions often converge, even if the language in which they are articulated is markedly different. In both the Christianity and Islam, for examples, there need be no necessary conflict between the pursuit of efficiency and the pursuit of higher values. In a paper on the application of religious models to educational administration, Aref Atari has shown how the implementation of both the Christian model of Service-Stewardship” and the Islamic “Khalifah” model “entails a radical transformation in management, thought and practice” away from a hierarchically organised bureaucratic Western model to a what he calls a “caring and sharing spirit”. In this climate, trust, love, sympathy, mercy, cooperation, tolerance and altruism are at least as important as efficiency, effectiveness, competition, professional ambition and achievement. The outcome is an organisation which is both “virtue-based and excellence-oriented”. Shurah-based management, empowering and working with others, replaces a top-down approach which manipulates, controls and works through others. (Atari, Aref T. M., “Christian ‘Service-Stewardship’ and Islamic ‘Khalifah’: Emerging models in educational administration”, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, Vol. 17, Summer 2000, No. 2, p. 29 ff.).

I would, however, avoid the misleading dichotomy set up by Atari between “excellence” and “virtue”, since the Islamic conception of “excellence” (ihsan) is in fact inseparable from virtue, whereas, as I pointed out earlier in this paper, the Western conception of “excellence” is more often than not limited to personal achievement and the attainment of “success”. We have to remember that the first priority of the government is the economy. The DfEE White Paper, Schools: Achieving Success (London: HMSO, 2001) gives the game away in the first paragraph of the Introduction: “The success of our children at school is crucial to the economic health and social cohesion of the country, as well as to their own life chances and personal fulfilment” (my italics). Notice the priorities which are placed first in this sentence. In an exclusive interview reported in the Times Educational Supplement of 5 July 2002, Blair himself has confirmed this agenda: “Education”, he says “is and remains the absolute number one priority for the country because without a quality education system and an educated workforce, we cannot succeed economically” (my emphasis). The real priority is clear, and it is the same one (economic power) as that which governs educational policy in the White Paper.

Widespread over-emphasis of the applied sciences over the social sciences and humanities in higher education is increasingly prevalent worldwide. An example is the call for a 60:40 ratio for natural and applied sciences to social science and humanities in Malaysian universities, as well as the establishment of specialized technology universities. Such imbalance puts national economic development goals over individual human development, and regards the educational process as a factory for producing human “products” and “resources” to drive up the pace of economic growth and national “success”.

[lxxviii] Neil Postman, Technopoly. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Claxton (op. cit., p.5) relates that “until ten years ago, a Ladakhi wedding lasted a fortnight. But their lifestyle rapidly altered following the introduction of some simple ‘labour-saving’ changes: tools, such as the Rotovator, to make ploughing quicker and easier; and some new crops and livestock, such as dairy cows. Compared to the traditional yak, cows yield more milk than a family needs, creating a surplus which can be turned into cheese and sold to bring in some extra cash…unfortunately this apparently benign ‘aid package’ also gave the Ladakhis a new view of time – as something in short supply. Instead of the Rotovators and the cows generating more leisure, they have in fact reduced it. People are now busier than they were: busy creating wealth – and ‘saving time’. Today a Ladakhi wedding lasts less than a day…Within the Western mindset, time becomes a commodity, and one inevitable consequence is the urge to ‘think faster’: to solve problems and make the decisions quickly.”

[lxxix] See note 63.

[lxxx] Claxton, op. cit., p. 13.

[lxxxi] I would obviously much prefer the word ‘rational’ here, rather than Claxton’s ‘intelligent’.

[lxxxii] Ibid., pp. 223-224.

[lxxxiii] The Qur’an, for example, describes itself as a Book which is meant to be “a guidance for all the God-conscious”. The Arabic word translated here by Asad as “God-conscious” is muttaqi, a derivative of taqwa, which expresses a range of meanings. These encompass the sense of awareness, awe, and guarding oneself against things which are harmful to one’s spiritual life. As we see so often in Arabic terms referring to human faculties, they encompass both cognitive and moral dimensions (see note 60 for further examples).

[lxxxiv] The translation and definition here is by Asad. In note 60, I discussed the meaning of shahid in relation to other Arabic words which denote the faculty of insight or discernment.

[lxxxv] This is clear from the fact that the verb shahida (from which shahid is derived) means ‘to observe’ and ‘perceive’ as well as ‘to witness’ and ‘give testimony’. As Glassé points out, “the word shahida has double significance typical of the genius of the Arabic language. It embraces the acts of seeing perceiving and then of declaring that one has seen or perceived [and living it out]. The key to this is the link between act and speech, which in the Arabic soul, is so swift and spontaneous that many words bear a double significance reflecting it. For example, dhikr (“memory”) is also “mention”, that is, the verbalisation of memory.” (Glassé, op. cit, p. 417).

[lxxxvi] “What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand.” ~ Dorothy L. Sayers.

[lxxxvii] Lancelot Law Whyte is right on the mark when he refers to the “moral mistake” and “intellectual error” in “the European and Western ideal of the self-aware individual confronting destiny with his own indomitable will and sceptical reason as the only factors on which he can rely…for it has exaggerated the ethical, philosophical and scientific importance of the awareness of the individual.” He goes on to say that “one of the main factors exposing this inadequate ideal is the [re-]discovery of the unconscious mind . That is why the idea of the unconscious is the supreme revolutionary conception of the modern age.” From Whyte, Lancelot Law, The Unconscious before Freud. London: Julian Friedmann, 1978, quoted in Claxton, op. cit., p. 223.

[lxxxviii] The supposed demand by “consumers” for more and more “choice” has now become a mantra used by supermarkets and other commercial interests to justify the continual expansion of their outlets. On the BBC radio 4 programme You and Yours of 28 June 2005, we were informed in a discussion about voluntary euthanasia that people now want the same “control” and “choice” over the manner of their death as they do over their “life-style”.

[lxxxix] In Coomaraswamy, Anaanda K., What is Civilisation? And Other Essays. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1989, p. 7. Coomaraswamy cites as examples of these destroyers of civilisations the “Spaniards in South America” and the “Japanese in Korea”. Many more could be added, including the settlers in Native America, and, closer to our time, the Chinese in Tibet.

[xc] See note 16, which refers to Blair’s statement that “Education is and remains the absolute number one priority for the country because without a quality education system and an educated workforce, we cannot succeed economically.” (my emphasis).

[xci] “I think my deepest criticism of the educational system at that period [junior high and high school], and that also applies to other periods, is that it's all based upon a distrust of the student. Don't trust him to follow his own leads; guide him; tell him what to do; tell him what he should think; tell him what he should learn. Consequently at the very age when he should be developing adult characteristics of choice and decision making, when he should be trusted on some of those things, trusted to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes, he is, instead, regimented and shoved into a curriculum, whether it fits him or not.” ~ Carl Rogers, U.S. psychologist, in Evans, R. Carl Rogers: The Man and His Ideas, 1975, p. 39.

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.” ~ William Arthur Ward.

[xcii] “Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save it from that ruin, which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.” ~ Hannah Arendt, Teaching as Leading.

[xciii] “An intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.” ~ Albert Einstein.

[xciv] You and Yours, 24 June 2005.

[xcv] The most recent survey of religious belief in Britain found that, of the 74 per cent of the population who described themselves as Christians, their religion was rated the least important to their identity out of ten factors in their lives. This Home Office Survey, based on 15,500 interviews, and reported in the The Independent of 18 August, 2004 (“Faith plays a minor role in lives of most white Christians” by Nigel Morris) found that although the highest number (74 per cent) called themselves Christians, “religious affiliation made little difference to the lives of white adherents. When asked what they considered important to their identity, religion was cited by only 17 per cent of white Christians, behind family, work, age, interests, education, nationality, gender, income and social class. For Black people, 70 per cent of whom say they are Christian, religion is third, and Asians placed it second, only behind family. The category “Asian” here encompasses the majority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

[xcvi] I am only too aware of how, in referring to the Divine, I myself avoid any direct reference to God, and I trust that this will not be regarded as a kind of capitulation to the mentality which prefers to banish and consign God to an apologetic footnote. Such are the demands upon us to find a language, suitable to context, which is not automatically associated with the supposed “conditioning” of “normative religion”, and thereby accessible to people unaffiliated with or discomforted by such “belief systems”. It needs to be said, however, that this concession is itself testimony to the conditioned mindset of those who are unable to encompass the full range of terminology which describes the nature and origin of higher knowledge, and who imprison themselves in a restricted vocabulary which is nothing more than a reflection of their own “belief- systems”. But as Grace has written, “Secular schools as opposed to religious schools are not ideologically free zones. Secularism has its own ideological assumptions about the human person, the ideal society, the ideal system of schooling and the meaning of human existence. While these assumptions may not be formally codified into a curriculum subject designated ‘secular education’ as an alternative to ‘religious education’ they characteristically permeate the ethos and culture of state-provided secular schools and form a crucial part of the ‘hidden curriculum’”. (Grace, G.G., Catholic Schools: Mission, Markets and Morality. London: Routledge-Falmer, 2002, p. 14.

[xcvii] A survey has shown that among secondary school students aged 11 to 18, those who enjoy religious education (RE) and see positive benefits for their own lives from studying religion outnumber by four to one those who are negative about RE. The report also gives examples of statements by students which show that many students also like RE because of the opportunities it gives for expressing opinions, improving communication skills, acquiring knowledge of other faiths, developing inter-cultural awareness and sensitivity, developing the skills of philosophical enquiry and reflection, (my emphasis) and pondering the meaning and purpose of life. See Blaylock, L. (ed.), Listening to Young People in Secondary Religious Education. Professional Council for Religious Education (PCfRE) Report, 2001. This finding forcefully contradicts the opinion of a well-known atheist philosopher, aired on the BBC Moral Maze radio programme, that the teaching of religion in schools was “intellectual abuse”. The students themselves clearly to do not agree with him.

[xcviii] The original sense in English of the word liberal was ‘generous’ and ‘appropriate to the cultural pursuits of a free man. Its Latin root, liber, means to do what you want to do, to "do your own thing", and this root also gives us libido, an urge; libidinous, given to indulging ones urges; and (borrowed from the Greek) libation, an outpouring, libertarian and libertine (a rake or debauchee). However, its earlier origin is from the prehistoric Indo-European root leudh-, still intact in Greek eleutheros ‘free’, which may have denoted the sense of ‘being a member of a free people’ as opposed to ‘being a slave’.

[xcix] The “imagination” is another of those terms which describe a multi-layered hierarchical concept, ranging from the “imaginal” through the “imaginative”, to the “imaginary”, but which is widely used without any discrimination between different levels.

“Creative Imagination” in its highest sense (as used by Henry Corbin, for example, to describe the spiritual Intelligence of one such as Ibn ‘Arabi) is the faculty which penetrates to “imaginal” worlds. ~ See Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. It is the capacity for symbolic understanding, the spiritual perception which unveils the hidden realities behind and beyond observable signs and ‘similitudes’ (Arabic amthal). It needs to be distinguished from the lower levels of ‘creative imagination’ associated with those forms of ‘imaginative’ artistic exploration which are not connected with any awareness of the objective significance of universal symbols, but are rather based on subjective feelings, imaginings and even fantasies and delusions. Jean Houston (op. cit.) puts it well when she speaks of “the importance of teaching-learning communities in stimulating, supporting and evoking each other’s highest sensory, physical, psychological, mythic, symbolic and spiritual capacities.” In such a community, she says, “education is an adventure of the soul in which our personal themes become joined with those of universal reality.” (my emphasis)

Titus Burckhardt (op. cit., pp. 93-98), discussing human intellectual faculties, describes imagination (Arabic khayal) as “complementary to reason”. Chittick elucidates this complementarity by explaining that one of the basic differences between “ideas” and the “higher loci of vision” referred to by Ibn ‘Arabi, is that “the former is thought about, while the latter are seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelled. The imaginal world is a sensory world, while the rational realm is disengaged (mujarrad) from sensory attributes. The rational faculty works by a process of stringing concepts together and drawing conclusions, a process that the Shaykh calls ‘reflection’ (fikr). In contrast, the imaginal faculty works by inner perception that perceives ideas in sensory form. Hence, imaginal perception may be visual, but this vision does not take place with the physical eyes; it may be auditory, but things are not heard with the physical ears. Again, dreams prove that everyone has non-physical sense experience.” (Chittick, William C., Imaginal Worlds. Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1994, pp. 69-70).

Burckhardt (op. cit.) expands thus: “In relation to the intellectual pole of the mind imagination may be considered as its plastic material; for this reason it corresponds by analogy to the materia prima on which the plastic continuity of the ‘cosmic dream’ depends just as, subjectively, it depends on imagination.

“If the imagination can be a cause of illusion by binding the intelligence to the level of sensory forms it none the less also has a spiritually positive aspect in so far as it fixes intellectual intuitions or inspirations in the form of symbols. For imagination to be able to assume this function it must have acquired in full measure its plastic capacity; the misdeeds of imagination come not so much from its development as from its being enslaved by passion and feeling. Imagination is one of the mirrors of Intellect; its perfection lies in its remaining virginal and of wide compass.

“Some Sufi writers, including ‘Abd al’Karim al-Jïli, have said that the dark pole of the mind is al-wahm, a term which means conjecture and also opinion, suggestion and suspicion and so mental illusion. This is the reverse of the speculative freedom of the mind. The power of illusion of the mind, as it were, fascinated by an abyss; it is attracted by every unexhausted negative possibility. When this power dominates the imagination, imagination becomes the greatest obstacle to spirituality.”

[c] The transferable cognitive benefits of learning to play a musical instrument have been well documented. The mental mechanisms which process music are deeply entwined with brain functions such as spatial relations, memory and language. Jean Houston believes that “the best schools will also use the power of drama to enrich the learning experience. Through dramatic enactment in theatre, the student explores the many guises of what it is to be a human being, using a rich array of skills – music, movement, rhetoric, expression and feeling – to tour the landscape of human experience. What is more, what is enacted is more readily remembered.” Houston, referring to research which has shown a correlation between proficiency in language arts and the amount of time spent in movement activities, also recommends dance as means to energize and stimulate the entire mind-body system. See Houston, Jean, Jump Time: Shaping Your Future in a World of Radical Change . New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. Sardello also emphasises the importance of art forms in the “education into soul”, including myth, fairy tale, story, symbolic imagery, poetry, drama, painting, music, and film…” (Sardello, Robert, Facing the World with Soul. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1992, p. 61.)

[ci] By “communication skills” I mean the whole range of productive and receptive linguistic and paralinguistic skills which are concerned with the communication of information, knowledge and wisdom, and the establishment of relationships, and not merely the use of modern technology to give visual impact to presentations! Power-point presentations may convey a sense of purposeful efficiency, order and conciseness, but, by virtue of their bullet-point style, may often never facilitate the depth and connectivity of ideas nor the subtlety of nuance typical of a mature “discourse”.

[cii] It might be hoped that with so much teacher talk in our schools, a good proportion of it might be directed towards the development of creative and critical thinking and problem solving. Not so. In fact, a wide-ranging survey of British secondary schools reveals less than ten percent of teacher talk is concerned with the development of higher order thinking skills. Most of it is directed to mere control and management, including keeping order and giving instructions. The rest of it (apart from the paltry amount involved in getting students to think) is low-level transmission of facts and information. Roland Barth reports the estimate of John Goodlad and others that 85 percent of lesson time in American schools is taken up by a prevailing pedagogy based on teachers talking and students listening, occasionally interspersed with teacher-directed discussion. (See Barth, op. cit., p.32).

Unfortunately, a rigidly prescribed content-heavy curriculum, with its emphasis on a narrow band of skills, does not foster a culture of discussion. “I learned most,” said St. Augustine, “not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.”

I also know from my experience observing teachers that a climate of inspection and accountability leads to over-managed lessons which deliberately leave no room for spontaneous and unpredictable events, creative departures (including unplanned digressions) or lively discussions, which might “get out of hand” and be construed by inspectors as a breakdown of effective “classroom management” or loss of discipline. Again and again, despite pleas to teachers not to produce supposedly “model” lessons but simply to show their normal practice, I have observed lessons in which nothing is allowed to happen except the “delivery” of a specific “objective”. Questioning is geared only to test that knowledge in conformity with the objective has been assimilated. Lateral thinking and divergent questioning is discouraged. The outcome is a culture of mediocrity which promotes “safety” in the “delivery” of “well-managed” lessons which never depart from rigidly controlled objectives.

“When a teacher complains that students are "off task" - a favorite bit of educational jargon - the behaviorist will leap to the rescue with a program to get them back "on" again. The more reasonable response to this complaint is to ask, "What's the task?" Not surprisingly, this way of framing the problem meets with considerable resistance on the part of many educators. More than once I have been huffily informed that life isn't always interesting, and kids had better learn to deal with this fact…Thus is the desire to control children, or the unwillingness to create a worthwhile curriculum, rationalized as being in the best interests of the students.” ~ Alfie Kohn, social psychologist, Punished by Rewards, 1993.

“Our entire school system is based on the notion of passive students that must be "taught" if they are to learn…Our country spends tens of billions of dollars each year not just giving students a second-rate education, but at the same time actively preventing them from getting an education on their own. And I'm angry at how school produces submissive students with battered egos. Most students have no idea of the true joys of learning, and of how much they can actually achieve on their own.” ~ Adam Robinson, co-founder of The Princeton Review.

[ciii] See note 24 for references to the importance of dialectical thinking in human cognitive development.

[civ] In this category, I would include not only the subjects of literature, history, geography, archaeology, anthropology, sociology and languages (ancient and modern), but also psychology. By this, I mean an understanding of the authentic spiritual psychology which addresses the hierarchical structure and dynamics of all levels of the human psyche and which encompasses the higher possibilities of man, and not the degradation of psychology to a “psychologism” which reduces man only to the level of the “commanding self” (Arabic an-nafs al-ammara) – that is, to the level of a self-gratifying ‘consumer’ or ‘hedonist’ driven by passions and egocentric impulses. In the same way, “psychologism” reduces all higher human aspirations, metaphysical insights and religious beliefs to mere “constructions” of the human mind or mere “compensatory mechanisms” which seek to attach a hoped-for “meaning” to life. As such, it is the inevitable product of a more general “scientism” or “positivism” which denies any higher purpose to human life. Even so-called Western “depth psychology”, which speaks of the integration of the “self”, has little conception of a Higher Self as described by spiritual traditions.

[cv] By this I do not mean a bland multiculturalism or syncretism but an active engagement with other perspectives as a truth-seeking encounter.

[cvi] By this, I do not necessarily mean the kind of “adventure programs” praised by Roland Barth – see note 44 - as a means of developing “problem-solving abilities, leadership skills, social skills and independence.” Least of all do I mean the physical challenges presented by “extreme” sports, which substitute adrenalin rushes, the arrogant “conquest” of nature and the wonders of technologically advanced “equipment” for the peaceful absorption in its mysteries, accessed by no equipment apart from the innate faculty of contemplation.

[cvii] See note 69.

[cviii] The latest casualty, so I understand, is archaeology, until now kept alive by only one examining board. This goes hand in hand with the demise of history, a subject whose ‘A’ level standard is now regarded as such a narrow, limited and impoverished historical education that Cambridge University no longer requires undergraduate historians to have it. A Geographical Association survey has found that “geography has been dropped as a subject specialism by more than one quarter of initial teacher-training institutions”. Humanities simply do not have the status of core subjects such as English, mathematics and science, so “young teachers who want promotion will probably focus on core subjects” (Times Educational Supplement, 15 March, 2002). More recently, The Geographical Association has warned that pupils’ education is being damaged by teachers’ over-reliance on standard textbooks, (Times Educational Supplement, 2 May, 2003) largely because many of those teachers have not studied Geography themselves since the age of fourteen. A survey by the Association of Language Learning suggests that more than 1,000 schools in the UK are planning to drop foreign language lessons for pupils over 14. (Times Educational Supplement, 25 May, 2002.). In February 2002, the German, Italian and Spanish ambassadors had spoken out in an interview with The Independent about the “sad” standard of language teaching in the UK. Research from Sussex and Dundee universities, reported in The Independent of 6 August 2004 (“Monolingual Brits miss out on European study” by Dominic Hayes) found that among academics in the UK “the general feeling was one of exasperation, but also resignation, about the foreign languages scenario in the UK”. The report states that “the problem of UK students’ generally poor and declining knowledge of foreign languages came up again and again”.

[cix] Campaigners for a return to a more traditional History syllabus in British schools have branded as a “disgrace” for the state education system the results of a BBC poll (reported in The Independent of 5 August 2004) which questioned 16- to 34-year-olds on their historical knowledge, and I expect that a similar poll might uncover even worse ignorance in the USA. History specialists have declared the results to be “really surprising” even if they do not necessarily share the apoplectic outrage of the traditionalists. We need not necessarily have sleepless nights at the finding of the poll that only half of all age groups knew that the marches of the Orangemen in Northern Ireland on 12 July mark the Battle of the Boyne. However, we perhaps ought to be seriously worried that 15 per-cent of 16- to 24-year-olds thought that these marches celebrated the victory at Helm’s Deep at the end of The Two Towers, the second book in Tolkien’s Trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore, one in 20 thought it was Gandalf, the wizard, not Francis Drake, who had led the British fleet to victory against the Spanish Armada in 1588. One in 5, incidentally, thought it was Columbus. One in eight also thought Anglo-Saxon Britain had been overrun by Napoleon. We might want to concede that outraged traditionalists have an important point to make about the decline in historical knowledge, even if some of their concerns give undue prominence to facts over understanding and interpretation, and reflect dubious nationalistic obsessions.

[cx] Although Islamic education is often defined as tarbiyah (see note 17) – a ‘nurturing’ process - Al-Attas (op. cit.) prefers to regard it as ta’dib, a word related to adab. He defines this term in its true sense (before its restriction and debasement of meaning to “a context revolving around cultural refinement and social etiquette”) as “discipline of body, mind and soul” which enables man to recognise and acknowledge “his proper place in the human order” (my emphasis) in relation to his self, his family and his community. This order is “arranged hierarchically in degrees (darajat) of excellence based on Qur’anic criteria of intelligence, knowledge and virtue (ihsan)”. In this sense, adab is “the reflection of wisdom (hikmah)” and “the spectacle (mashhad) of justice (‘adl)…Within the dual nature of man’s own self, the adab of his lower animal soul (al-nafs al-hayawaniyyah) is to recognise and acknowledge its subordinate position in relation to his higher rational soul (al-nafs al-natiqah). My appeal to “put thinking in its place” is no more than a request for adab, in its true sense of ordering human faculties in a proper hierarchy.

[cxi] Confucius anticipated all this research, and expressed it in much simpler language: “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

[cxii] By “visual input”, I do not mean sitting in front of a computer monitor. In the present climate of distancing from nature, fear of even the slightest physical risk, and declining powers of observation of the real three-dimensional world (as opposed to the increasing dominance of screens and monitors mediating and impoverishing our experience), we must nourish by every possible means the connection of our young people to the beauty of the natural world and the rich multi-sensory world of experience it opens to them. I also know from experience as a teacher of environmental studies that children gain far more from direct and active observation of wildlife than from any number of passive sessions watching videos or dvds about the natural world, no matter how good. Direct experience gives a much more memorable experience, not only in the sense of its impact (which seems to connect directly with the soul of the child and goes far beyond the mere accumulation of facts) but also in the sense of imprinting it on the memory. Again and again, I have heard children recall, even years later, details of garden birds or other animals observed in the wild, but the same children remember virtually nothing even a few days after seeing the same birds or animals on a video. They will say with a kind of deep wistfulness, recalling magical moments when they encountered living creatures, “do you remember when we saw such-and-such”?

[cxiii] John W. Gardner once said: “I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.” I don’t know when he said this, but I wonder if the “primitive” nature of the education system he critiqued has really been replaced by anything more advanced.

[cxiv] This process is clearly not just verbal, but involves the utilisation of non-verbal cues (spatial and visual for example) to create additional pathways for recall.

[cxv] The Head of History at Latymer School in North London (Times Educational Supplement, 28 June 2002).

[cxvi] Faith schools, including traditional Islamic madrasas, have traditionally kept alive the faculty of human memory through memorisation of sacred text. It is not unusual to find young children who have memorised the entire Qur’an. However, verbatim memorisation clearly does not, in itself, promote understanding of the text. We need to be clear about the differences between memory and memorisation. Research shows clearly that the most effective memory is memory for meaning. What is understood most deeply leaves the most prominent and resilient memory traces. Deep comprehension of text, for example, is based on an understanding of the deep structure of the text (its underlying semantic propositions and pragmatic intentions, and the inferences we derive from them), not simply from the surface arrangement of the words. While verbatim memorisation of the text cannot help us to understand it, processing the text in some other form can (taking notes, for example, or discussing it, explaining it to others, summarising it, making a diagram out of it, and so on). However, the combination of verbatim memorisation for surface form and memory for meaning is a powerful one.

[cxvii] Memorisation of stories, like that of poetry and sacred text, is becoming a lost art.

[cxviii] The Director of the National Theatre has recently bemoaned the fact that so few people today have even a minimal knowledge of such allusions in the corpus of great dramatic works.

Lord Quirk, the former President of the British Academy and an eminent Professor of English Language and Literature, has warned that fewer and fewer young people have even the basic knowledge of Old Testament stories and Greek myths which would enable them to understand literature written before 1900. Although schools should not be “captive to the past”, he said, “we are in an alarming downward spiral towards a culture that values only the contemporary.” Modern kids, he said, are increasingly baffled by allusions which a hundred years ago would have been “mother’s milk to any child at Sunday school.” (Adapted from an article in The Independent, 30 June 2003).

[cxix] Houston, Jean, op. cit.

[cxx] See my Foreword to Wholeness and Holiness in Education: An Islamic Perspective by Zahra Al Zeera. Herndon: International Institute for Islamic Thought, London, 2001 for a discussion about the importance of dialectic in holistic education. It is worth noting that Fowler associates dialectical thinking with the development of faith. See Fowler, J.W., Faith: The Structural Development Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.

[cxxi] I have commented as follows in a recent paper on the myth of Jason’s passage through the Clashing Rocks as a symbol of going beyond polarised thinking:

“In the mythology of the ancient Greeks, among the greatest dangers faced by Jason and the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece were the Clashing Rocks, or Symplegades, which guarded the entrance to the Black Sea like a gigantic pair of sliding doors, smashing together and crushing ships between them. “As the Argonauts rowed along the Bosporus, they could hear the terrifying clash of the Rocks and the thunder of surf. They released a dove and watched it fly ahead of them. The Rocks converged on the dove nipping off its tail feathers, but the bird got through. Then, as the Rocks separated, the Argonauts rowed with all their might. A well-timed push from the divine hand of Pallas Athene helped the ship through the Rocks just as they slammed together again, shearing off the mascot from Argo’s stern. Argo had become the first ship to run the gauntlet of the Rocks and survive. Thereafter the Clashing Rocks remained rooted apart.” [cxxii] (From the End Notes to Symplegades by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. The whole article is available for downloading on symplegades.htm or symplegades .htm).

“Now… I could have chosen many other examples of the same motif from many other cultures and traditions – that is, the motif of the “Active Door” dividing the known world from the unknown Beyond, and through which the hero or seeker must pass to succeed in the quest, which is none other, in essence, than the return to his or her original home. To pass between the Rocks is to pass through the “strait gate” or the “needle’s eye” between the contrary pairs of opposites and beyond the polarity which necessarily characterises the conditioned world. It is to be guided by the lamp “lit from a blessed tree – an olive-tree that is neither of the east nor the west” (Qur’an 24:35). It is to follow the Middle Way, to find the Truth which, as Boethius puts it, is a “mean between contrary heresies”. I chose the Greek version of the story because the image of the Clashing Rocks has a startling relevance and resonance at a time when there is so much talk of a Clash of Civilisations, and because it shows us so clearly that the true hero is not the one who takes up an adversarial position on either side but the one who has the courage and intelligence to pass beyond the opposites to the essential Unity which is both our original identity and our ultimate goal as human beings.” From Henzell-Thomas, J., ‘Passing Between the Clashing Rocks: The Heroic Quest for a Common and Inclusive Identity’, The Journal of Pastoral Care in Education, Spring, 2004.

It is important to realise that the Argonauts needed divine assistance (in this case “a well-timed push from the hand of Pallas Athene”) to pass through the rocks. The final push beyond the duality symbolised by the rocks can only be made through an act of divine grace.

[cxxiii] By “deep reflection” I mean the contemplative activity defined by Malik Badri as a “cognitive-spiritual activity in which the rational mind, emotion and spirit are combined” (Arabic tafakkur). See Badri, M. Contemplation: An Islamic Psychospiritual Study. Herndon: IIIT, 2000. This does not necessarily imply a defined ‘method’ of meditation, or a visualisation ‘technique’, although it may include such.

[cxxiv] Deep reflection also promotes the self-awareness and self-criticism which impels learners to seek change within themselves. This is more than simply a metacognitive awareness which gives one the ability to analyse one’s own thought processes, but goes deeper into the depths of the soul, allowing one to take conscious control of one’s own development and, with grace, to transform one’s whole being. “Verily, God does not change men’s condition unless they change their inner selves” (Qur’an 13:11). The Prophet Muhammad said: “He who knows his own self, knows his Lord.” And according to Lao Tzu, “One who knows much about others may be learned, but one who understands himself is more intelligent.” This stage requires the realisation, embodiment or actualisation of knowledge.

[cxxv] The interconnectedness of all things is beautifully illustrated by the discoveries of the Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. Bell’s work, now supported by numerous experiments, shows that, contrary to Einstein’s golden rule that nothing can travel faster than light, things have ‘non-local’ effects that stretch out instantaneously through infinite distance. The movement of one atom in this galaxy can immediately affect one in another galaxy, as long as they began by being associated in a way called “entanglement”. Bell showed that this action at a distance is not just an idea, but an essential aspect of reality.

There are profound philosophical and spiritual implications arising from this discovery, which has been called the most important discovery in science. Every particle in the Universe was once entangled because they all came out of the Big Bang together and share identical origins. Every particle retains a ‘memory’ of every other particle in the Universe, and thus every particle in a profound way ‘knows’ what every other particle is doing at all times. In his holographic model of this interconnected Universe, the physicist David Bohm shows that each bit of the Universe – including each of us – contains the entire Universe, so that Blake’s notion of seeing the world in a grain of sand is not at all a poetic fancy but an accurate observation.

We too, like every particle, share identical origins. This is precisely where our identity lies, in that primordial nature which originates from the divine singularity. And because it originates from that singularity, in which everything is entangled, our identity is in essence the same as everyone else’s, even though the diversity of forms is infinite. It is this common identity which is expressed by the Arabic term fitrah, ‘essential nature’ or ‘primordial disposition’.

[cxxvi] “All men at times obey their vices: but it is when cruelty, envy, and lust appear as the commands of a great super-personal force that they can be exercised with approval. The first symptom is in language. When to ‘kill’ becomes to ‘liquidate’ the process has begun. The pseudo-scientific word disinfects the thing of blood and tears, or pity and shame, and mercy itself can be regarded as a sort of untidiness.” (C.S. Lewis, “A Reply to Professor Haldane , in Of This and Other We”, in Of This and Other Worlds, Collins Fount Paperbacks, 1982, p.109. (my emphasis)

“The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere υλη, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1947, paperback ed. 1955. p. 85.

George Orwell pointed out that, In order to defend the indefensible – “things like the continuation of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan” – “political language has to consist largely of euphemisms, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness” Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic limber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.” (my emphasis) George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, in George Orwell, A Collection of Essays, Harcourt Brace, 1981, pp. 166-167.

See also Sandra Silberstein, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. London: Routledge, 2002, for a penetrating analysis of the “strategic deployment of language” and the “troubling underside of patriotic rhetoric” which fashioned a post-9/11 American identity.

[cxxvii] It is worth noting that the -ism suffix, one of whose chief grammatical functions is to denote a doctrine, theory, system or ideology, became very active in English from the sixteenth century. This suffix was borrowed through French –isme or directly from Latin –ismus , -isma, from Greek –ismos, isma, a suffix forming nouns of action from verbs in –izein –ize.

[cxxviii] It is instructive to note that the English words origin and orient both come from the same source: Latin oriri ‘rise’. The verb orient (and its variant orientate, which emerged in the nineteenth century) originally meant ‘turn the face to the east’, the direction of the rising sun. Orientation is an essential spiritual concept, whether exoterically in terms of physical direction (as in the qibla, the direction Muslims face in Islamic ritual prayer, or facing east towards the altar for Christians) or esoterically as the light of God, “neither of the East nor the West”, the point of unity within the Heart which the spiritual seeker strives to make his or her permanent focus. Spiritual orientation entails the constant remembrance of our origin, our point of ‘arising’, and our inevitable ‘return’: “Verily, unto God do we belong and, verily, unto Him we shall return.” (Qur’an 2:156).

[cxxix] The connection Al Zeera (op. cit.) makes between this transformative state and the theory of dissipative structures developed by the Nobel-prize winning physical chemist, Ilya Prigogine, is instructive, for, according to Prigogine, physical systems have the capacity to go through periods of instability and then self-organisation, resulting in more complex systems. Thus, “instability”, in its positive sense of freedom from one-sided, crystallized thinking, is the key to greater coherence and complexity. On a more mystical level, the ultimate “resting place” of the one who has attained to God-consciousness (taqwa), the station of permanent “abiding” in God, is paradoxically a state of total openness and surrender, a place of “no-place” in which the limited self is extinguished. This can be equated with the sixth and final stage of Fowler’s map of faith development (See Fowler, op. cit.), the stage attained only through grace, in which there is a complete sacrifice of stability.

[cxxx] See note 80.

[cxxxi] The science based on that sense of the mysterious is, of course, a sacred science, or scientia sacra, “a science which lies at the very center of man’s being as well as at the heart of all authentic religions and which is attainable by the intellect, that supernaturally mental faculty” (Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, The Need for a Sacred Science. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993, p. 2).

[cxxxii] See note 97 for a discussion of the higher faculty of Imagination as a “mirror of Intellect”.

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