Bombardment by “rootless” and “cluster” words
Munir Fasheh Director, Arab Education Forum Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University October 2006
Introduction
As a Palestinian, I experienced two kinds of bombardments: bombardment of bombs (from planes and tanks) and bombardment of words. Both are still very active against Palestinians at the time of this writing (October 2006). While bombs destroy and defeat people from outside, “rootless” and “cluster” words function like a Trojan horse or an AIDS virus and defeat people from within – they slowly kill the immune system of the “inner world” of each person and the immune system within the community.
Although bombardment by weapons has been directed (for 500 years) mainly against peoples outside Europe, bombardment of words first targeted Europeans themselves. [I will elaborate on this later] Controlling minds through institutionalized standard official language (later known as state-directed education) was first implemented in Europe: France, Sweden, Britain, then Germany and Italy and, later, was exported to other countries through colonization. In other words, while bombs and words have bombarded the “South”, the “North” was bombarded by words. In this sense, healing from words is a struggle common to all peoples. The belief in “universal thought” – in the sense that there are universal meanings and a single undifferentiated path for progress, equipped with universal tools to spread them – is an example of a word that bombarded all people. Healing from this belief and regaining a pluralistic attitude in living (which is crucial to regaining sanity and peace of mind and soul) is a struggle common to all people. Words that people are bombarded with are not always the same in the South and North but the purposes are similar: to distract from what is really going on; to rob people of their abilities (and in the South of what they have); to disvalue knowledges that cannot be put in words; to spread the consumption pattern in living; and to deepen control through competition and measuring the worth of a person by means that claim to be objective.
While the effect of bombs is easily felt, bombardment by words goes – for the most part – unnoticed; in fact, most people embrace them as sign of modernity and progress. Such bombardment has increased tremendously since WWII as a necessary accompaniment of “development”, which was launched in 1949 by US president Truman. Inventing rootless words – starting with the notorious, inhuman, disrespectful ‘underdeveloped’ – never stopped! Such words function like cluster bombs[1] – that’s why I like to refer to them as ‘cluster words’. Whereas aircraft, rocket, and artillery deliver cluster bombs, experts, consultants, professionals, big organizations, educational curricula, and TV networks deliver “cluster” words. “Underdevelopment” is an example of “cluster words”, which – for more than 50 years – has been spreading and exploding within people and communities, causing a lot of damage.
A word that is worth stressing here is that our situation in the “South” and “East” is still more hopeful than in the “North” and “West” simply because the control of minds by institutions and professionals is still not as deep and entrenched as it is in northern and western societies. Minds in the north and west, in general, seem to be formed mainly by texts and images (produced by professionals and institutions in all fields).[2] In other words, it is still easier for many in the South to recognize ‘cluster words’ planted in various fields of life, than for westerners who seem to have lost this ability and sensitivity. It is easier, for example, for a person in Baluchestan (than for one in Chicago) to see the fallacies of education. We can play a crucial role in today’s world in pointing to “cluster” words and, thus, avoid or reduce their harm. Asking, we Walk (the subtitle of this publication) is in harmony with this role. Visions from the global south cannot stop bombardment of “cluster words” in the contemporary world but can contribute to protecting people and strengthening “immune systems” of communities. My hope is that this article would contribute to this effort.
Since the early seventies, one aspect of my work in Palestine (and in Arab countries since 1998) has been to break away from the hegemony of official words, meanings, and measures. Living in Palestine helped me keep asking while walking about words, meanings and measures. The way I articulate it today is by stressing that every person is a co-author of meanings and measures, and by encouraging people not to use a word if they don’t have a personal meaning for it! This cautious attitude includes seemingly “neutral” words such as knowledge, rights, identity, equality, and empowerment.
Caution regarding expressing personal experiences and stories
A trend – that is fashionable throughout the world today – is to encourage people to express experiences and tell personal stories. Although I have been part of this thrust since 1971, I realized over the years that such a call could be naïve because it could be easily co-opted by expressing personal experiences and stories using dominant words and meanings. In other words, we would be carrying and spreading the virus of rootless words without realizing it and, thus, deepening the defeat within. I realized that there is a difference between expressing/ telling personal experiences and stories using dominant words and meanings and expressing them using words and meanings that stem from the place, community, context, and culture that one lives in and interacts with. Thus, we need to question not only master narratives but also our personal narratives when we tell them using dominant words and meanings, because then we would be spreading the virus without realizing it.
In 1988 – the first year of the first intifada – I realized something that puzzled me then. The Israeli authorities did not mind Palestinians having conferences denouncing Israel’s closures of educational institutions and demanding their opening. At the same time, however, Israel was intolerant and brutal against initiatives by people who started teaching children in their homes and neighborhoods or started communal farming (using lands of people in the neighborhood). The military order in August 1988 criminalized such actions and exposed people engaged in them to imprisonment and/or demolition of their homes! It was both shocking and revealing to realize how frightening it is – to those in power – for people to run their lives and manage their affairs. Complaining about Israel was not threatening, but acting autonomously was intolerable! [It reminded me of Sartre’s comment on Franz Fanon’s book “The wretched of the earth”: the danger of the book stems from that it “does not talk to us”.] The Israeli behavior inspired me to write an article entitled: “free thought and expression vs. freeing thought and expression.” I realized for the first time in my life that the slogan “free thought and expression” was really a distraction from something deeper:
freeing thought and expression; it is a slogan that robs people their freedom to think and act. Demanding the opening of schools is an example of free expression. It is quite another matter for people to free themselves from this slogan and simply live, think, act, and manage their daily affairs. I realized that a main role of modern institutions and professionals is to obliterate this option from people’s imaginations. Their role seems to be to rob people and communities of their abilities: the ability to learn, heal, raise children, give birth, marry, die, provide means for living, feel sense of worth, and construct meanings, understandings, and knowledges – without institutions and professionals. Such activities in modern societies have to be monitored and implemented by institutions and professionals. Along the same lines, the first intifada also helped me see that a challenge we face is to free our minds from models and paradigms – how to think, act, and relate outside the confines of a paradigm and outside rootless phrase “paradigm shift”. The challenge is to free self from models and not to be free to choose from various models! [Later in the paper, I will discuss “the worth of a person” as an example of thinking and living outside models.]
A fundamental characteristic of community is that it is a place where people take care of their needs and manage their affairs without institutions, professionals, and permissions. The first Palestinian intifada helped me see clearly the difference between institutions and structures that are run by people (that is, not institutionalized). Israel was able to close institutions but not people’s structures, such as: families, neighborhoods, and al-jame’ (the mosque). It was the first time I realized the true meaning and spirit of al-jame’. As a result of shutting down all institutions, the mosque immediately regained its original meaning and function: open public space, an assembly place (the literal meaning of al-jame’ in Arabic). The were immediately transformed into people’s mosques, to spaces open for all people and controlled by people. That still inspires me greatly. I have never experienced another structure (not universities, churches, clubs, or any other) that has the same ‘environment’ that I felt in mosques during the first intifada. They became welcoming places where people of all backgrounds met and ran their affairs. Whether people needed a place to teach, heal, inform, take care of the wounded, or distribute food, people’s mosques played that role in a natural way.
People are either nurtured by communities or controlled by institutions. Individualism, consumerism, and greed are the biggest threats to communities. This is why the Zapatistas have been very inspiring to peoples around the world and a nightmare to those in power. And this is why the Europeans even after they wiped out the vast majority of Native Americans, they were still afraid of their cultures and communities.[3] They went ahead with programs to obliterate them through various means. The story of residential schools is very revealing in how political, economic, religious, and educational institutions collaborated to kill the spirit of indigenous cultures and communities. The POW WOW in Albuquerque (which I attended in May 2006) is another example of how that spirit is being destroyed through commercialization and competition. Part of the immune system of a community is its social spiritual fabric; rootless words, competition, and consumerism tear that spirit and fabric apart.
The Oslo agreement was a clever – and criminal – way in tearing apart Palestinian community. Up till 1993, Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were intact, and hope was alive – in spite of attacks by the Israeli army and Israeli policies. Oslo was an attack on both: it substituted hope with expectations and communities with official lifeless structures that robbed people of abilities, responsibility, and initiative.
Being a student or an employee – more often than not – means being a coward and dishonest: having to lie most of the time, to say what you don’t mean and mean what you don’t say, always trying to please whoever is higher in the hierarchy, abiding by rules, regulations, laws, and instructional materials and judged by measures that ignore fundamental aspects. At best, a student or employee can demand rights as articulated by institutions – rights that have nothing to do with dignity. Dignity – just like wisdom – is a lost concept in modern life. An employee talks about rights, promotions, and awards and prizes, which – more often than not – means giving up dignity.
Knowledge that is dropped from above by institutions and professionals exhibit false connotations. If we look around us, we notice that in spite of the tremendous growth in knowledge during the past 300 years, life is deteriorating at many levels: at the level of the social spiritual fabric, of food, air, water and soil, at the level of happiness and meaning in life, of entertainment, and of relationships among people. We notice that knowledge that was produced during the past 3 centuries created many more problems than it has solved (and it solved a lot). Similarly, in spite of the tremendous growth in education, we witness the disappearance of thousands of languages and “worlds”.
Unlike bombardment by bombs, rootless or cluster words usually come nicely packaged with sweet labels such as progress, help, and assistance and with measures that claim to be objective and universal. They come with an aura of being academic, scholarly, and scientific. The declared purpose of bombardments by words is usually to civilize, reform, educate, transform, empower, and develop. Rootless words that flourished in the 20th century include: development, nationalism, nation-state, progress, universal thinking, education (formal, non formal and informal), human resources, basic needs, human rights, knowledge society, planning, identity, citizen, globalization, information, assessment, and capacity building. May be we have no control over stopping such bombardment, but we can – and we should – try to create better immune systems against them. Healing from the hegemony of rootless words is necessary for creating a happier and saner world. An important part of this healing process is to perceive us as co-authors of meanings and co-creators of measures.
Development as a rootless – and ruthless – abstraction
Underdevelopment and development were coined in their current usage in 1949 – just a short time after the two atomic bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, whereas everyone heard about the explosion of the two bombs, very few seem to have felt the explosion of the two words. They “exploded” without noise, in a much softer way and, with time, they became seductive, even addictive. Leaders of all orientations and in all fields embraced them. The damage that was caused by dropping these two words on countries around the world during the past 50 years exceeds – in my opinion – the damage done by all the bombs dropped during that period. We can witness ruins of all kinds: social and societal ruins, psychological and personal ruins, and environmental ruins. No bombs, for example – at least so far – wiped out forests and languages as much as development has. The disappearance of forests in Black Africa and the Amazon region, and of more than 1000 languages (during the past 50 years), all in the name of development, are indicative of the disasters to come – if current trends in development and consumption patterns continue. Much has been written about these two cluster words. I just want to cite a statement in 1995 by All Africa Conference of Churches, marking the 50th anniversary of the World Bank and IMF (and launching ‘Fifty Years is Enough’): “Every child in Africa is born with a financial burden which a lifetime’s work cannot repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as vicious as the slave trade.”
I said that the declared purpose of bombardments by words is to civilize, reform, educate, transform, develop, help, serve, and empower. In spite of thousands of examples that refute this claim, it is still active and alive. An article written on August 27, 2004 by John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president of the United States then, was entitled “An Unwavering Commitment To Reforming the Middle East”! Ignoring what was happening to people and communities (military occupations, stealing of lands and oil, destroying a whole country, Iraq) and, instead, talking about reform as a rootless abstraction, is beyond my ability to understand. This commitment to reform and help is a language that is used not only in politics, the mass media, and the military, but also by poets, scholars, and educators. Rudyard Kipling, the well-known English poet, for example, wasn’t ashamed to declare that it is the right of India to be ruled by Britain and the duty of Britain to rule India! At a completely different level, in the introduction to a series of books on education, Habits of Mind, (2000), the leading story that the two authors mention as embodiment of the main idea in the series is about 4th grade children in Minnesota who want to go to an African country where a genocide was taking place and help the people there by teaching them “habits of mind”! Somehow, habits of mind in the series do not seem to refer to genocides that are still being celebrated in Minnesota! Worse than that: I personally – through my studying and teaching of math and physics – carried the same virus. I wanted to ‘help’ my students be scientific and logical, which carried within it the assumption that they were neither! It is frightening how easy it is to deceive the mind when it is stripped of wisdom and connection to life. Living in Palestine helped me heal from many such myths, and instead embody other “myths” that I felt are much more human and respectful such as: “there is no child who is not logical”.
The current cluster word that is exploding all around the world is “security”. It is a fundamental word in the new world order, justifying wars and providing means for stealing, killing, and destroying.
Rootless words are dangerous because they are abstractions that do not stem from people’s lives. They are not abstracted from experiences, observations, and reflections that people go through over a period of time and who start noticing patterns and common traits or characteristics. They are abstractions of new kind, they are fabricated in political, educational, or other institutional laboratories, and dropped on people as new discoveries and presented with professional covers… The process of abstraction has been inverted!
Historically, education is one of the first and longest surviving rootless words. Arabic, for example, has no synonym for it. This is not a sign of weakness in Arabic but of the fact that the word does not stem from life. The two words used to refer to education – ta’leem and tarbiya – mean teaching and upbringing respectively. Education is an artificial word coined to correspond to the idea that Nabrija conceived of as a means to control people in an artificial political area called ‘state’. In contrast to education (which is an institutional word), learning is a ‘life word’. Today, almost everywhere around the world, education monopolizes learning. Without being aware of it the way I am now, I stressed in my teaching – during the 1970s – the importance of rooting meanings in learners’ experiences. [I did that mainly through math and science clubs in schools, and through Math 131 – a course for first year students at Birzeit University.] Rootless abstractions lead to consumption of meanings and to identifying words with shallow and pale manifestations: democracy with elections; civil society with non-governmental organizations; learning with schools and universities; a person’s worth with grades and certificates; knowledge society with power; and illiteracy with ignorance.
Words used by people in real life have rich, flexible, and diverse meanings. One example will suffice to illustrate. When Tristan, my grandson, was 4 years old, I noticed that he already discovered that even a simple word like “no” has as many meanings as there are people around him. When his father says no, it is different from his mother’s ‘no’, different from my wife’s and mine; and he used that diversity cleverly. He discovered that ‘no’ has no universal meaning. In a sense, his conception of “no” is broader and richer than dictionaries!
More examples of rootless words
Another rootless word that I would like to elaborate on is “identity” – because of its role and popularity in the world today, especially among Palestinians. I don’t remember it was popular before the 1980s. Stressing identity kills the rich dynamic sense of community by a shallow construct of the mind and of official language – where realities become secondary, and real people become unrecognizable. It is an institutional word whose aim is to create artificial and vague conformity and unity. Self-knowledge, self-rule, aliveness, and being attentive to one’s surroundings – which are the bases of freedom and of a real community – are marginalized through allegiance to the word identity. Identity is usually expressed in mechanical symbolic acts, such as dabke (Palestinian traditional dance), which is radically different from being part of one’s lifestyle. It becomes more an idea to write about and debate rather than a way of living. One aspect of the “cultural soil” in Palestine, an aspect of Palestinian life before the Zionist invasion, was the existence of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – in addition to many other communities, within harmonious relations. This spirit in addition to the spirit of the first intifada hardly fit the general criteria of identity. Palestinian identity grew as a mirror image of Zionism. Just like Zionism pulled the Jews out of the wonderful role they were playing in Europe, Palestinian identity pulled Palestinians out of the wonderful role they were playing in the Arab world. The concept of Palestinian identity transformed me from feeling that I belong to a civilization horizon to a “dream” that keeps shrinking!
If abstractions stem from a multitude of experiences and observations, then those who insist on using the word “identity” need to explain how it grew out of their lives and experiences – otherwise, their use of it would be rootless.
The same is true of the concept “nation state” that sounds wonderful at the beginning but slowly robs people of abilities and freedoms. Unlike words that grow from the “soils” of communities, cultures, history and daily living, words such as identity and nation state are dropped – like bombs – from above, with ready meanings.
I will mention very briefly few more rootless words as examples of how they distract, deform, or sicken people’s minds and perceptions. ‘Brain drain’ is one example: Doesn’t it imply that those who do not leave their homelands have no brains? Other examples: "marginalized people" and “deprived children”… although they sound caring, they are very disrespectful, because they refer to people who have a name, dignity, knowledge, and ways of living by adjectives that say basically that they are less. Other examples include “human resources” that replaced “human beings”, and “good citizen” that replaced “good person”. “Human resources” treats people as commodities that have a price in the market. “Good citizen” refers usually to a person who blindly obeys the state or authority. In contrast, a “good person” refers to one who ponders things in his/ her mind and heart and would refuse to do harm to any one or to the environment. Two more examples: “knowledge societies” which assumes that there are societies that have no knowledge, and “want to be left behind” referring to anyone who refuses to follow the catastrophic dominant path.
Rootless words vs. knowledge that is inseparable from the knower
Talking about rootless words is intimately connected to how we perceive knowledge. Rootless knowledge belongs to institutions; it is more like a commodity that is packaged and sold and bought – usually at an incredibly high price. Institutions rarely recognize knowledge that is inseparable from the knower, and that often cannot be expressed in words and concepts. The kind of knowledge that I became increasingly aware of and fascinated by is the one that grows with the person and becomes part of him/her, without anyone recognizing it. The first person who made me aware of this inseparability of knowledge and knower was my mother who was an amazing embodiment of it.[4] It was so much part of her life that neither she nor I (nor any one else) saw it. Only when I was 35 years old and struggling to make sense of math to teachers and students that I realized her knowledge and her mathematical knowledge in particular. How (without formal instruction of any sort, and without ever reading or writing a word) she was able to know – as manifested in her way of living – profound aspects in life, such as math, religion, and upbringing of children, which people in modern times spend years to understand through words and concepts, will remain a most inspiring, most puzzling, and most revealing mystery in life for me. The realization of how much people understand without instruction set me free from much of what I learned in institutions. It reminded me that Jesus’ disciples were common people – fishermen, shepherds… and mostly illiterate; yet, they understood Jesus well. We are told today that we have to study many years in order to understand Jesus! Same with Islam: Prophet Mohammad was illiterate and many who first understood his words were common people. Same with Marx, ordinary workers had no difficulty understanding him… Such knowledges form the real wealth that many people have – yet totally ignored by institutions. This suppression of significant knowledges and expressions was the underlying purpose of education as was conceived in Nabrija’s mind 500 years ago.[5]
Reflecting on my mother’s story and many similar stories, we notice something interesting: when learning is happening, we don’t notice it and we do not use ‘learning’ to refer to it. And when learning is not happening, we use ‘learning’ to refer to it! If, for example, a child is playing soccer – through which s/he learns a lot – we say s/he is playing soccer, not learning; similarly, if a child is swimming or riding a bicycle or cooking or planting. It is ironic that we use ‘learning’ only when there is no real learning going on, such as when children are at school!
The combination of ignoring knowledges that are inseparable from knower and bombarding people with rootless or cluster words have been a most destructive combination to human life and communities.
More examples of knowledges that are inseparable from knower: Alan Bishop, a mathematician at Cambridge University in England, tells some interesting stories about his experience in teaching geometry outside England. In the university of Papua New Guinea, for example, he was explaining the concept of equal areas of geometric figures. He noticed that his students were laughing. He asked why and the response was, “Where would you use such a concept?” He said in measuring areas of land lots for example. Their laughter became louder. They said that two lots of land have different shapes, soils, elevation, position, distance from town… saying that they are equal in area makes no sense, and if it does, it is insignificant. In another place, Bishop tried to understand people’s concept of space among the Aborigines in central Australia. During a visit to a friend there, he thought he had a good question through which he would understand their concept of space. He asked his friend, “If you start walking in the desert in Central Australia and you get lost, what would you do?” His friend looked at him in astonishment and said, “I will go home.” Bishop thought that his friend misunderstood the question so he repeated it, and his friend again said that he would go home. It was difficult for Bishop to realize that in his friend’s culture, getting lost never means not knowing where one came from, but not knowing which direction to take next.
During the 1970s, when I used to go around asking children about math, I was always fascinated by the insightfulness of their answers. No mathematician or book or educator that I know of, for example, ever gave a definition of a point like that 7-year old girl in a remote Palestinian village: “a circle without a hole”! Such experiences made me feel that what can be taught are usually the less important aspects of a “subject” or field!
One last example: when my grandson was 15 months old, I was putting pieces of cereal on the table in front of him and he was picking them up and eating them. What I noticed was that every time a piece was dropped, he would look down, not up and not sideways. He – like every child – discovers gravity at an early age. The claim that Newton discovered it is thus not quite true, but that does not mean that what Newton did was insignificant. Thus, the way we deal with gravity in schools embodies two lies: (1) Newton discovered gravity and (2) not telling what his contribution was (abstracting from several phenomena that he observed: falling objects, rotation of the moon, tides…)
Healing from rootless and cluster words through co-authoring meanings, unplugging self from dominant patterns, and regaining wisdoms
Although we witness increasing deterioration around the world at many levels, we also witness signs of “healing” that have been gaining momentum in recent years. The shift that we witness in many parts of the world and which is manifested in groups and movements around the world, embodies respect for diversity and faith in people and regeneration of cultures. Increasing numbers of people are disillusioned by the dominant logic embedded in education, nation states, development, and progress, and are seeking more meaningful ways. The search moves in several directions: direction of “old” cultures and wisdoms, direction of new discoveries that are in harmony with old wisdoms, direction of self-rule and self-knowledge, and direction of protecting and creating spaces where people live, learn, interact, express… outside institutions and professionals.
In order to get out of the mess we are in, we need to free ourselves from the mental cages that imprison our minds and imaginations; to unplug ourselves from the pattern of consumption, especially consumption of words, meanings and measures; and to re-integrate in our daily lives the sources that nurture us: land, history, and culture. These require working at several levels: healing from rootless words by perceiving ourselves as co-authors of meanings and measures; liberating ourselves from universal thinking and regaining a pluralistic attitude in living; and becoming again searchers for truth and for what was made invisible or worthless in our cultures.
In the rest of this article I will elaborate on an example that has been the guiding principle in my thinking, life, and work for the past 8 years, and that embodies the various aspects mentioned above: freeing our minds from the mental cages, unplugging from dominant patterns, co-authoring meanings and measures, regaining pluralism as a core value in life, regenerating aspects in our culture that embodies wisdom and dignity, and protecting and creating spaces outside institutions and professionals. The example I am talking about is Imam Ali’s statement concerning the source of worth of a person.
The worth of a person
Over the years, I became increasingly convinced that the British conquered the Palestinians (as well as others) from within, by shifting the locus of the worth of a person from the person and the community to rootless symbols such as grades, degrees, prizes, and symbols that claim to be objective and universal and to bestow real value on the person, and whose source and legitimacy came from London, through licensed professionals, legitimized by official institutions. London matriculation became (in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s) the main measure of the worth of Palestinian youth. Over the years, the virus has gone much deeper.
This triumphant march of arbitrary and rootless symbols was accompanied and supported by some “cherished pillars” of Western civilization, two of which are: the belief that experience can be reduced to theory (i.e. the intellect can completely understand life/ being), and the belief in universals (including the belief in universal meanings and the belief in universal thinking by which I mean a single undifferentiated path for “progress” – the Western path). Western civilization is not the only one that believed in universals. What is distinctive about it, however, is the fact that it is the only civilization that produced universal tools to impose its ways and beliefs on others, one of which is measuring people along a vertical line.
The shift of the worth of a person from the person and the community to vertical measures led to the tearing apart of the person’s “inner world” and of the social-cultural-spiritual fabric in the community. In spite of its destructive impact, we seem to embrace this shift as a savior! In other words, we embrace what robs us of natural capacities and abilities – to learn, think, express, relate, know, play, be healthy, and feels one’s worth.
The well being of people, and of children in particular, is intimately connected to having the source of worthiness come from inner harmony and from the relationship that one has with the world around him/her. What is needed, thus, is shifting the locus of the worth of a person from institutions and symbols back to the person and community. Such a shift has been central in my thinking and work since the early 1970s but had to wait for more than 20 years to find an articulated principle that captured it: a statement by Imam Ali (1400 years ago!) I found in it great insight and inspiration, and it became the guiding principle of the Arab Education Forum, which I have been directing since 1998 (and of al-jame’ah project within it)[6]. It is relevant and inspiring in the world today. Imam Ali’s statement in Arabic is: qeematu kullimri’en ma yuhsenoh ÞíãÉ ßá ÇãÑÆ ãÇ íÍÓäå . According to it, the worth of a person is what s/he yuhsen. Yuhsen, in Arabic, has several meanings, which together constitute the worth of the person: the first meaning refers to how well the person does what s/he does, which requires technical knowledge and skills; the second refers to how beautiful/ pleasing what one does to the senses, the aesthetic dimension; the third refers to how good it is for the community, from the experience of the community; the fourth refers to how much one gives of oneself and not what one transfers from one place to another; and the fifth meaning refers to how respectful (of people and ideas) the person is in discussions.
According to the statement, a person’s worth is not judged by professional committees or official bodies, or by measures that claim to be objective and universal, but by the five meanings embedded in the word yuhsen. It is only in relation to the first meaning – technical knowledge and skills – that professionals and institutions may be needed.
When I realized the wealth and depth of that statement, I realized how ignorant, empty, and criminal the rootless term ‘underdevelopment’ is, and how easily we were deceived by it. In spite of the on-going destruction it has been causing within us and around us, we still cling to it as if it reflects reality! In order to heal from it (as well as from similar words), we need to shift our source of worth back to what we yuhsen.
It is worth mentioning here how the authors of the Arab Human Development Report 2002 treated Imam Ali’s statement. They translated it into English without realizing that it embodies a world that cannot be translated into English! They translated it: “the worth of a person is what he excels at”. The authors are Arabs, yet failed to see the richness in the Arabic word. Instead, they fell victims for the dominant rootless word “excellence”!
Every language is a world of its own. Such realization is crucial in order not to fall easy prey for “universal” words and meanings. In our case as Arabs, the Arabic language provides a world that is rich with aspects that currently are forgotten. In addition to the word yuhsen, I would like to elaborate on the word: al-muthanna – the dual. Although I am using ‘dual’ to refer to al-muthanna, the two concepts are worlds apart. Al-muthanna does not exist in European languages. Its absence is crucial in how Europeans perceive and relate to others. Al-muthanna embodies a logic that is different from Aristotle’s and Hegel’s. In Aristotle’s logic, you are either identical or a copy of I, or not-I. [Bush embodies this logic, “If you are not with us, you are against us.”] In Hegel’s logic, you and I can form a new synthesis (one expression of which is referring to one’s spouse as “my other half”). In contrast, within the logic of al-muthanna, you remain you and I remain I, but there is a third “creature”, which is the relationship, separate from both – similar to a common baby. This third creature becomes so important in both persons’ lives, almost inseparable from them. The absence of al-muthanna is much more serious than what Europeans can comprehend and, unfortunately more than what most Arabs realize. Al-muthanna reflects the importance of the relationship between two people – without dissolving either one; it is neither a higher synthesis nor a replacement of them. The absence of al-muthanna from European languages explains – at least partially – why a person like Huntington could not and probably would not be able to build an authentic dialogue with others – he sees others at best through Aristotle or Hegel’s logic. Unfortunately, in Arab schools, al-muthanna is usually taught in a mechanical way. I personally believe it should be taught in Arabic classes as an example of pluralism and in math classes as logic different from Aristotle and Hegel’s logics.
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Living and working in harmony with Imam Ali’s statement is what I personally see as a “vision” for “education” – at least in Arab countries. It does not waste time fighting the dominant logic; it transcends it by naturally embodying pluralism, wisdom, health, respect, dignity, humility, and that every person has worth (which is what s/he yuhsen). The idea of al-jame’ah is one way of realizing this “vision”.
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[1] "What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs," the head of an Israeli military rocket unit in Lebanon said. [M. Rappaport, “IDF commander: we fired more than a million cluster bombs in Lebanon,” HAARETZ Sep 12, 2006.] Cluster bombs are small explosive bomblets carried in a large canister that opens in mid-air, scattering them over a wide area, creating dangerous landscapes.
[2] A modern researcher, who wants to study India, for example, does not start with India, but with concepts, a statement of purpose, and a methodology and carries all that as his tools to understand India! The belief that concepts are universal and fit all countries is rarely questioned. It is frightening how easy it is to deceive the mind can be so easily deceived. To try to fit life into professional abstractions, rather than let abstractions be formed as a result of many diverse and rich experiences, is a dangerous inversion.
[3] The story of the British towards Mahdi of Sudan in the 1880s is relevant here.
[4] See my article “Community Education is to Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible,” in the Harvard Educational Review Feb. 1990.
[5] See Ivan Illich’s Shadow Work, Marion Boyars, Inc, 1981 (Chapter II).
[6] See www.aljami3ah.com for more details.