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The Legacy of “Jini Abdelnoor Fasheh”
The Legacy of “Jini Abdelnoor Fasheh”
I. Manifestation of the problem
Every year in July, the Palestinian Ministry of Education (like most ministries of education around the world) declares to the whole world that around 40% of young men and women at age 18, after they had gone through 12 years of education, are failures – basing that on a shallow degrading meaningless general exam at the end of the school cycle! This criminal absurdity happens every year without people noticing there is something wrong; instead they blame the victims! Most people don’t notice the absurdity nor feel the crime because, put simply, educated people/ professionals developed the system and are drugged by it, their minds being connected to texts and not contexts. Education is absurd when it consists mainly of official words and meanings that are not connected to actions in specific contexts; when it is built on believing in a single universal undifferentiated path for progress; when the only reason teachers and students do what they do is because they follow instructions that come from authority; when students sit on their behinds most of the time for 12 years looking at words in books and on screens, and then get evaluated and measured along an arbitrary vertical line… such education, and not religion, is the opium of the people. I believe that institutional religion (just like everything institutionalized) ends up functioning as opium, even though the spirit and the essence of religions do not. And so, education (as described above) in practice and conception, functions as opium. I say this because there is no other way to explain declaring 40% of those who sat for the national exam as failures, claiming that this is the universal path for gaining knowledge, and then blaming the victims. Imposing by law one curriculum on all students and one source of knowledge (institutions), one way of learning (teaching), and one way of evaluation (grades), and then punishing those who do not fit is nothing but a crime committed annually against young people everywhere. With this and similar happenings, we should not be surprised that the world is the way it is. We follow bells at schools much the same way sheep follow the bell around the leading sheep’s neck. It is a crime to force young people move, by law, along one path and punish them if they don’t fit. Imagine imposing one type of suit and any person whose body does not fit it is punished. But we do this with minds: any mind that does not fit the curriculum is labeled a failure, and punished.
In short, a main source of corruption in today’s world is the belief in a universal (Western) path for progress, learning, knowing, and evaluating – and imposing that path on all. This dogmatic system needed math and used it as a tool to measure the progress and worth of people, countries, and communities. To complete the crime, we honor those who “excel” on tests. What do tests measure? They basically measure people’s ability to manipulate words, symbols, and technical matters. Knowledge as action, rooted in a particular context, is ignored, belittled, and suppressed.
Since I believe that corruption is characteristic of modernity and that the belief in a universal path for progress is a main factor in this corruption, it was natural for me to consider a pluralistic attitude in living and the well-being of people, communities, and nature as the main values in a vision that embodies wisdom in living. This means that we should live in a way that does not violate these values in action. I am not talking about diversity of cages, but of knowledge and ways of living and learning. Homeschooling, for example, usually refers to diversity of cages, whereas children learning something their parents do at home reflect real diversity in learning.
The state of the world and of the Arab region in particular, compels us to radically re-think what is considered sacred in modern life such as education, math, science, technology, progress, and development. Most crises that the world faces today are the result of decisions that were taken by graduates of elite universities; it is about time to raise the issue of the role that universities and mass media play in creating these crises. Threats to life should make us stop being timid in our thinking, actions, and expressions (which is instilled in us by academia). It is very difficult to name one institution that does what it claims it was established to do: the educational institution ignores learning as a biological ability and replaces it by compulsory education (declaring it a need and a right!); the health institution rarely works in harmony with healing as a biological ability and prescribes industrial drugs most of which kill that ability through side effects; the food industry produces make-believe foods; religious institutions replace the spiritual dimension in living by claims of superiority and hatred towards other religions; political institutions which are supposed to protect people and life from abuses of power were transformed into a main tool of corrupting life and controlling people and robbing them of what they have.
To understand what is happening globally, we need to look attentively at what goes on around us and its relation to our inner worlds. Palestine is particularly revealing in this regard, a ‘magnifier’ through which we can see the roots of much of what is wrong in today’s world, both in terms of corrupting and tearing apart communities, cultures, and life in general, and also in terms of what can be done to stop (even reverse) disastrous trends. Palestine can serve as a magnifier because everything that is settled in other countries is still alive in Palestine. The World Bank, for example, could not enter into Palestine until a “national authority” was installed in 1993. The Bank has been the main actor deciding crucial aspects and creating illusions: make-believe state, national development, national curriculum, national banks, national security forces, etc. In 1993, a ‘Palestinian’ curriculum was installed. I ask: “What is Palestinian about it other than the name and some slogans?” In all its details, it continues to be as Khalil Sakakini described (116 years ago) education brought into Palestine by foreign schools: “wearing someone else’s shoes”.
Palestine was always at the crossroads of many civilizations, but in 1917, after the British occupation, borders were arbitrarily constructed and Palestine was cut off from its surroundings. The condition was worsened in 1948 with the creation of Israel. Since 1993 it has been reduced to fragments on little more than 10% of the land, and we celebrate that every year as independence – without shame and without noticing the absurdity!
However, the conquest at the level of meanings, knowledge, and perceptions did not happen unchallenged. Two examples suffice to illustrate how people resisted this conquest. The first was the aforementioned Sakakini who noticed what foreign schools were doing to children and wrote his book “Wearing Someone Else’s Shoes” in 1896. He noticed that schools were grading children according to how well they could fit into others’ shoes. In 1909, Sakakini established his first school in Jerusalem, whose motto was “dignifying pupils, not degrading them.” In practice it meant “no tests, no grades, and no prizes.” Putting it bluntly, grading is degrading; it robs students and teachers of dignity, reducing them to commodities with enslaved minds. When the British occupied Palestine in 1917 and brought in their colorful books, their tests, grades, and prizes, people soon became addicted to grades and certificates and Sakakini could not compete. His schools were about enabling pupils to learn in a meaningful way through activity, aliveness, honesty, and dignity. British schools were about rewarding students who performed well on tests. The second example that manifested opposition to British education were peasants who called for a meeting in Jaffa in 1929, where they demanded the end of imposing British education on their children because it was tearing them away from families and land. Palestinians who were the product of the British educational system came to the rescue of the new education system by accusing peasants of wanting to stay behind!
The single experience, however, that had the deepest impact on me (especially in relation to learning and knowledge) has been the ‘dialogue’ I had with my non-literate mother – Jini Abdelnoor Fasheh – a dialogue without her using words, over the past 36 years (even after her death in 1984). Everything I want to say is embedded in that story and the Palestinian experience and everything I did since then was influenced by both. The story with my mother is not just a tale from the past but has been a living and active part of my life ever since I realized it in the mid-1970s. It was central in my doctorate thesis, in presentations at conferences, in establishing Tamer Institute for Community Education, in designing and directing the Arab Education Forum at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, in working with mothers and women in Shufaat Refugee camp, and currently in working with 16 young people at Dheisheh Refugee Camp.
II. The 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the decade of the 1970s
Before 1967, I was part of the dominant educational system doing my work (teaching math) the best I could. Sometimes I was critical about the system but I didn’t go beyond the belief that all what was needed was to improve it. The 1967 war was the first event that made me question education at its conception and practice. I was teaching math and physics at Birzeit College when the war broke out. I started asking: What is knowledge if it is of no use or relevance to the real world? That was the first big blow to my faith in education, but it was not extended then to include math and science as main tools causing much of the mess I was observing at many levels. Gradually, however, I started seeing that what was needed is a different vision.
I started experimenting with another vision through several acts in the 1970s: voluntary work, establishing math and science clubs in schools, teaching math to illiterate workers at Birzeit University and introducing a math course in it for first-year students (entitled “Math in the Other Direction”) built on the conviction that math starts with noticing regularities, relationships, and patterns in life, and trying to make sense of them, including realizing the logic that underlies them. Part of making sense is forming a mental system connecting various components. One example to illustrate: a student who was taking the course was jailed by Israel in the middle of the course. When released, he came to find out what he should do in relation to the course. He mentioned how the course helped him discover patterns in the thinking of Israeli interrogators. He asked prisoners what the questions were when they were first arrested, and noticed a pattern, which he wrote down and distributed to students! I said, “I never thought the course would go that far; by doing that, you have captured its essence; you need not do anything else.”
In 1989, during the first Palestinian intifada when Israel closed all schools and universities for 4 years, I established the Tamer Institute for Community Education whose main philosophy was to provide environments that were real, rich, and open where children learn without being taught. In 1997, I went as a visiting scholar to Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and established the Arab Education Forum, along the same principles of Tamer Institute. In 2007, I felt I needed again to be within a community, so I went back to Palestine, where I currently work with various groups mainly with women in Shufaat refugee camp and with young adults in Dheisheh camp.
As Palestinians, we are living several occupations: military, political, economic, financial, and cultural as well as occupation at the level of knowledge and perceptions. This last occupation is the most dangerous because it is least visible, yet goes deepest; in fact, it is embraced! A main theme with which I work at Dheisheh camp (through the Home of Wisdom) is unplugging us from this occupation (mainly from professional terms and academic categories). I asked each participant to tell one’s learning journey without referring to schools and universities.
The strategy the British used to rule Palestine was the same they used everywhere, starting with India. It consisted of three components: degrading what people have; drilling in their minds that English civilization is the best; and showing readiness to help people be more like the British. This strategy was formulated by James Macaulay, the British advisor on education in India. Those of us who are educated usually act as small Macaulays. As a math teacher, I acted in my early years as one: I treated students as if they have no knowledge; as if the only worthy knowledge was created in the West; and I was ready to help them gain it. In other words, I was a knowledge agent – worse than political and military agents.
I often tell the story of what a friend of mine and I did in resisting what we felt would ruin our friendship. We were in the 8th grade, and academically at the same level. One semester, our teachers tried to put us into competition by suggesting, “Let’s see which of the two of you comes first this semester”. This meant that we had to compete against each other. We were too young and too shy to confront the teachers and, at the same time, we didn’t want our friendship to be affected in any way. So we devised this unusual system to ensure that despite the teachers, we would remain friends. We wrote what we had studied on our exam papers but each put the other’s name on the paper. In this way we felt that we were not competing with each other. When the teachers finally discovered what we were doing, they accused us of cheating. We said that we did that to keep our friendship intact, which we obviously valued more.
The basic difference between education and learning is that knowledge in education starts with words and remains connected to words, whereas learning is connected to action and to context. My educational experience from kindergarten to the doctorate level was always connected to words and mostly had no action; it had no roots in life and no real context. Learning on the other hand starts with experiences, actions, and rootedness in life.
III. My “dialogue” with my non-literate mother and her world
(Two non-comparable and non-commensurable worlds)
In the first draft of my doctoral dissertation that I submitted to the dissertation committee, I put two lists of references: the usual list of books and articles and the other consisting of references from life, in which I included my non-literate mother. That was not appreciated by the committee. I tried to convince them that she was an important source of my knowledge, but that was not accepted [the story has continuation but I will leave it to another occasion.]
What is knowledge? To me, it is what deepens and nurtures wisdom in living. A characteristic of knowledge that nurtures wisdom is usefulness in one’s life in a way that does not violate the values of pluralism and well-being. Part of wisdom is feeling both joy and pain and having meaning and purpose in life. Knowledge as a ready commodity, as exists in institutions, deepens the consumption pattern, rather than nurtures wisdom.
The story of my mother is revealing in this regard. She had knowledge and used it fully, although she was not an educated person, as we understand the term. What was amazing about her knowledge was the fact that she never did anything which she didn’t know why, and she did it with no harmful consequences. This was true in relation to her knowledge of math, religion, child upbringing, and managing family affairs. It made me ask: “with no formal education, how did she learn and acquire all those knowledges?” That awareness still puzzles and amazes me; it can only be explained by realizing that life is much richer, wider, and more mystical than what the mind can comprehend and words can express, and what is acknowledged by academia.
Firstly, my mother had knowledge of a craft, namely sewing and she learned several other skills so as to make this knowledge useful. In order to do that, she had to have an understanding of math in her own way. For sewing, she needed to deal with geometric shapes and cut cloths that women brought her and then sew the pieces to fit the body of the person. Since women are of different shapes and sizes, the clothes that are sewn must fit each woman perfectly, not one size fits all. She sewed thousands of customized and designed clothes in her life time. Her knowledge was a living knowledge. How did she get that knowledge? She got it by immersing herself in real life settings and learning from people who sewed clothes – and not in a textbook fashion. Such method of learning is probably the oldest and most effective way of learning but mostly ignored in academia (it is called mujaawarah in Arabic, neighboring). The second field where my mother possessed a deep understanding was Christianity which she got not through words but through Jesus’ spirit being transmitted from one generation to another over 20 centuries. Jesus was, literally, a neighbor to my great-great… grandparents. My mother was the last person (in my family) who carried that spirit. Thirdly, she had tremendous knowledge regarding upbringing children, about food and healing, caring and sharing. She with my father created loving atmosphere at home. She had grace and she served the family continuously. The fourth field where I started realizing that my mother had a completely different concept (as embedded also in her practice) from dominant Western ones was management. After we were expelled from our home in Jerusalem in 1948, we lived in Ramallah, eight people in one room for several years. That’s what we could afford. My mother was managing her business of sewing clothes, managing daily living for eight people, managing life with the little money she was getting from sewing (my father had no work at the time, he lost his work in Jerusalem), managing time in order to do all what was needed to be done, managing the little space we had (one room) to function as a sleeping place at night, a working place during the day, and a play place for me and my sisters during certain periods in the day and during winter, and managing the ‘environment’ at home so that there was happiness and love in the family. If management means managing the little resources that a person has efficiently and effectively, and if wisdom embodies doing a lot with very little, then my mother was an exemplary wise manager. I don’t know of schools of management (which are again mostly Western-centered) that recognize her kind of management, and I don’t know of any management ‘expert’ who can comprehend (let alone manage) the kind of life she was leading. [After expulsion from Jerusalem, she and her sisters worked for months making children clothes and opened a small shop (which was broken into and robbed, except for a pot of plant, which we still have!] She was never an employee and didn’t think in employee terms of rights and salary, but of dignity. Her sense of worth did not spring from degrees or official committees but from what she was doing well, which was appreciated all around.
She possessed all those kinds of knowledge and yet she was termed illiterate, marginalized, ignorant, uneducated, and needed empowerment! What she knew was not visible by institutions and textual minds, something which characterizes educated people. In contrast, I am considered learned because I have been to school and to college and have a doctoral degree to prove it.
I don’t find adjectives such as indigenous, traditional, or local fit her knowledge. It is more appropriate to call it rooted living knowledge. In her knowledge, there was richness, diversity, and connectedness, not fragmented like mine. Her sewing, her math, her Christianity, her managing home activities and bringing up children were all interconnected; they formed a universe. In contrast, my knowledge claims to be universal – without forming a coherent universe. In reality, it was mostly and useless in my life – even harmful. Reflecting on it now, its main purpose was drilling in our consciousness the illusion that the source of knowledge is the West; if we don’t find it useful, then it is because we are not advanced and developed enough!
My math was visible as a separate subject; it consists of books that have “MATHEMATICS” in big colorful letters in the title. It has departments that carry the name. In contrast, it was difficult for me to even see my mother’s math although I lived with her for many years! It was embedded in life so well that it was invisible; it was like salt in food: invisible but tasteful. My knowledge consists mainly of words, concepts, theories, and technical skills and information, whereas my mother’s was part of real life. Thus, when I hear a person who uses math in one’s daily living say: “I was never good in math at school”, I say “that’s because it has no meaning in your life”.
On the surface, my mother and I belong to the same culture, the same world. I lived with her in the same home until she died in 1984 – I was 43 years old then. At another level, however, and in a deeper sense, we belong to radically different worlds. The dialogue with my mother’s world started in 1976 when I ‘discovered’ her math. [I use ‘discovered’ here in the same sense Columbus ‘discovered’ America!] My first reaction was to try to understand, express, and transform her math along lines connected to my math. It took me several years to realize that my math and hers are worlds apart – as different as real and plastic flowers, hers being the real. I realized that even if I studied math in universities for another 20 years, I still wouldn’t be able to do what she did: cutting a rectangular piece of cloth that a woman brought in the morning into 30 or so pieces (scattered all over the room by noon), and re-stitching the pieces to make a new whole: a dress that fit that particular woman! She made all those dresses without needing the ‘geometric box’ they make us buy at school; all what she needed was a measuring tape.
My mother’s life and her multiple knowledges were interconnected (which is radically different from interdisciplinary). Her world was not a mixture of different disciplines put intellectually together but, rather, they were parts of her daily life. She didn’t study math separately, then art, then science, then communication and dealing with people, then bringing up children and managing family affairs… and finally trying to tie them all together; they were part of her daily life, united by values and convictions that governed her actions and interactions.
Realizing my mother’s math led to a main conviction in my life: every person without exception is a source of meaning and understanding. That, in turn, led to what became the main ingredient in my interaction with people: every person is a co-author of meanings of words s/he uses in living. Co-authoring meanings is a natural ability, a right, and a responsibility; it is the basic building block of one’s knowledge. Realizing my mother’s math helped me co-author meanings of words such as math, knowledge, learning, pluralism, and one’s worth. The fact that I realized pluralism first in relation to knowledge and in particular to math paved the way to see pluralism in almost all aspects of life. That helped me heal from modern beliefs such as: believing that words have universal meanings and that the source of meanings is professionals and institutions. Pluralism has been a main value guiding my life, which in the 1970s, was manifested in my insistence that there is no child/ person who is not logical (many teachers did not agree).
In addition to pluralism, my encounter with my mother’s math taught me humility. When a person talks about “empowering women”, I say, ‘my mother empowered me, rather than me her’. My dialogue with her world was most profound and transforming for me. It touched my whole being and shook the foundations of much of what I acquired through institutions. At the same time, it brought back into my life aspects that were made invisible by modernity such as wisdom (which was imprisoned when the mind rose to the throne), dignity (which was overshadowed by rights); wellbeing (which was replaced by development), hospitality (which was eclipsed by Aristotelian logic where strangers are perceived as not-I), and self-rule (which was overcome by the rise of mimetic desire: wanting what others want). Although my aim at the beginning was to transform my mother’s math, I ended up being transformed by her without her saying a word!
I feel I was lucky because I lived most of my life without a nation-state; in the pre-development age; and the teacher I learned from most was a non-literate woman. I was lucky because they provided me with a worldview that is not attainable through institutions and experts. I had to think constantly of meanings of words, and be responsible for doing what was needed depending on what was available. The periods that were most inspiring in my life were the 1970s and the first intifada when institutions were paralyzed or people thought and acted outside them and depended mainly on what they had – as people, communities, and culture.
The genocides that Europe committed in the Americas and Australia, and also in parts of Africa and Asia, were augmented by genocides at the cultural and knowledge levels. I personally lived two such genocides in my home, and was enlisted as a soldier in one without realizing it. I contributed to wiping out the rooted knowledge of my mother’s math, and I witnessed how Christian missionaries from Europe and USA contributed to wiping out her Christianity which was transmitted from one generation to another over 20 centuries. There is no word to describe what happened to her multiple knowledges (which were buried with her) other than ‘genocide’.
My dialogue with my mother helped shatter much of what I internalized via institutions. It shattered the myth westerners tried to instill: “Arabs are lazy” (which is probably true about institutionalized Arabs but not of people like my mother). It shattered the belief in a universal path for learning, and that a person’s worth can be measured along a vertical line. It made me see education as a source of racism, fragmentation, fundamentalism, and individualism which are all around. I learned if a person looks as if s/he has nothing, not to conclude that that person has nothing, but what s/he has is invisible to the educated textual mind.
I would like to end this section about my mother by quoting a poem from Tagore’s Gitanjali first published in 1901 (2 years before my mother was born), which I feel describes her very well:
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Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
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Where knowledge is free;
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Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; …
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Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert of dead habit; …
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Into the heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
IV. My work and experience with the ‘Home of Wisdom’ at Dheisheh Refugee Camp
Since February 2012, I have been working with 16 young men and women (most in their twenties) from several refugee camps near Bethlehem (refugees since their families were driven out of their homes and villages when Israel was created over Palestine in 1948). They are registered in a special program “Campus-in-Camps” at al-Quds University. It is an experiment in ‘higher education’ which I believe can have tremendous impact on learning and knowing (in a variety of ways) not only in Palestine but also beyond, including countries considered developed. The way we work together is very close to what I mentioned earlier: mujaawarah (neighboring).
One aspect we agreed to adhere to at the Home of Wisdom is to think, act, express, relate, and perceive outside the ideology of consumption – including consumption of official meanings, professional terms, and academic categories. An integral part of the vision is to build on what people can do by themselves, with their sources of strength, with what is abundant in people, community, culture, and nature, and in harmony with well-being and pluralism. [After they strengthen their roots in community and culture – in their projects – they may want to broaden what they do to include help from outside.]
A main distinction between Campus-in-Camps and dominant universities is that knowledge in the second is mainly ideological and useful in the world of consumption, while in the first it is mainly rooted and useful in the context in which they live. The problem I see in academic knowledge is not that it is too theoretical but that it is too ideological serving power that strives to win and control starting by ignoring/ degrading people’s systems of knowledge. ‘Theoretical’ for me refers to knowledge abstracted from, and making sense of experiences, observations, experimentation, reflections, and from attentiveness to context. All these together form what we refer to as theory in the Home of Wisdom: it is very practical! It stems from practice and goes back to practice. Starting with a ready “theory” just because it comes from a prestigious university or well-known expert is ideology; theory and ideology are worlds apart.
Most people would agree (at least in words) that the basis of all knowledge is a mixture/ a mental system of experiences, observations, experimentations, and reflections; such mixture forms the foundation of one’s knowledge. This guarantees diversity and a pluralistic attitude in perceiving, living, thinking, expressing, doing, and one’s worth – where I find Imam Ali’s statement as the most insightful sentence I ever read. It says: the worth of a person is what s/he yuhsen (which in Arabic means what s/he does well, beautiful, useful, respectful, and comes from within).
In the Home of Wisdom, the stress is on what the participant searches for in one’s life. Research refers to what may deepen and clarify one’s search. Since we agree in the Home of Wisdom that knowledge is action, then the backbone of their learning are the projects that participants decide to work on, built on what is abundant and on sources of strength in people and community, and in harmony with pluralism and well-being.
V. My dream
The word for university in Arabic is jame3ah, which literally means a ‘gathering place’ that brings together people within real, rich, and pluralistic environment that helps them learn and do things, in freedom, honesty, and with enthusiasm. In this sense, Jame3ah is much closer in meaning to multiversity than to university. This is what I and the 16 young men and women are experiencing at the Home of Wisdom within Campus-in-Camps in the Dheisheh refugee camp.
Put briefly, my dream and hope is to eventually have ‘jame3ah’ (or better, ‘home of wisdom’) in as many camps and villages in Palestine as possible, where around 10 people rooted in their community, form a lively group and choose words, construct meanings, form visions, and create useful rooted knowledge through actions in their communities, in harmony with pluralism and well-being. It is crucial to stress here that what we do at Dheisheh is not a new model or a shift in paradigm but a different old/new vision whose core is wisdom. For me, a vision consists of three main components: how we see reality; how we perceive our place and role in it; and the values we agree not to violate in our actions. These require attentiveness to what is around. The only aspect of the vision, which all in the group need to adhere to, is the values. Saying that everyone has full autonomy in one’s place does not mean each works in isolation but in constant interaction, with no one having authority over another. They interact in freedom, honesty, and respect. Adopting Imam Ali’s statement as a guiding principle in ‘homes of wisdom’ guarantees every person has worth and is able to learn, which means that there are no failures, and that one’s worthiness comes from one’s relations to surroundings and not from abstract arbitrary numbers. One’s worthiness is related to the various meanings of yuhsen in Arabic which I mentioned earlier: what one does well, beautiful, respectful, giving, and good. This way we reclaim learning as a biological ability and one’s relations and actions as source of one’s worth. Perceiving every person as co-author of meanings is a basic and on-going conviction within the vision.
The 1970s and the first intifada were the most significant periods in my life, they provided me with convictions that I consider crucial in modern life. One conviction is: there is no substitute for small groups, formed in as many places as possible by their own initiative, outside the institutional framework in order to decide what they want and can do – something that is meaningful, useful, rooted, and contextual. Replacing local self-formed initiatives is destructive to human communities. (In our quest along this path, we should not go to the other extreme in the sense of trying to replace every other form of organization.) My first experience along these lines was the voluntary work movement which I started with some friends in 1971. My second experience was encouraging students in schools (in the 1970s) to form math and science clubs which revolved around questions that they had and wanted to pursue. My third experience along this path was creating a course at Birzeit University in 1979 (which I mentioned earlier) where every student or group of students try to notice patterns, regularities etc. and make sense out of them. The next experiment was encouraging the formation of groups in every possible place within the reading and expression campaign (at Tamer Institute for Community Education which I established in 1989, during the first intifada when Israel closed all schools for four years). That was followed by Qalb el-Umour project within the Arab Education Forum. Today, it is manifested in the dream of having a jame3ah in as many villages and refugee camps as possible.
Within the House of Wisdom, we don’t have a reading list of books or articles, but people areI encouraged to deepen their wisdom and understanding by interacting with the elders in their community, by reading books in Arabic from the period between the 7th and the 15th centuries (which reflected hikmah, wisdom), and get acquainted with movements that embody wisdom in modern time. [I hope it will be possible for them to visit places like Mexico, Peru, India, Iran, Egypt… where they engage with people in a process of mutual nurturing and reclaiming of wisdom… and where the spirit of regeneration is the essence of sustainability.
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The point I wanted to stress in this paper is the following: I got my doctorate degree from Harvard University, I was on committees that granted doctorate degrees to students at Harvard, and I worked for 10 years at Harvard, yet the nurturing, transforming, insightful, and wise aspects I learned did not come from Harvard (or any so-called “world-class” university) but were connected to my non-literate non-institutionalized mother. I say this with all honesty, conviction, and much appreciation. Even after her death in 1984, she continued to heal me from modern superstitions and provide me with a perspective and perception that are beautiful, inspiring, and hopeful. In particular, she provided me with a concrete response to the unimaginative pitiful question concerning what exists in today’s world: ‘But what is the alternative?’ I usually respond: alternative to what? to distractions and destructions by dominant ideologies, including academia? to corruption of life, communities, and nature done mainly by advancements in science that lack wisdom? to nuclear threat to life on Earth that was developed and manufactured in first-class universities and research centers such as Princeton and Los Alamos? In fact it was education and academia (in their dominant forms) that are poor and dangerous alternatives to learning from life in harmony with wisdom. Nature and communities are what is real in life; they should be the basis, reference, and norm. My mother’s world points to thousands of alternatives (she being one) that exist all around us, but our institutionalized minds cannot see or accept them. Learning through texts, tests, and grades is a poor alternative to her learning from life in harmony with wisdom; the math I know is a destructive alternative to her math; the missionaries’ Christ was a detached ideological alternative to Christ that was part of her daily living; and control, competition, and rights were pitiful alternatives to her love, faith, and dignity.
When I started working with participants at Dheisheh and they started calling me Dr. Munir, I said, “Look, the word Doctor has many connotations that basically reflect illusions which usually lead to elitism, racism, and to superior and inferior feelings. So, let’s choose another word.” I suggested that they call me Mu’allem Munir. Mu’allem in Arabic (which in English is ‘teacher’) refers to a person who follows an independent path in investigating meaning and understanding, and deciding action, in a way that is connected to a place, community, and culture and is ready to share that with others so they would also follow independent learning journeys, within a web of friendships. Reclaiming mu’allem necessitates reclaiming other words connected to it, such as hospitality, generosity, harmony, pluralism, well-being, responsibility, and wisdom.
What I also hoped to bring out in this paper is the fact that, without wisdom, life on Earth is seriously threatened. I was lucky that my mother’s mind was not enslaved by institutions, academia, and the onslaught of universal thinking and universal claims. All aspects of her world fit together in harmony and goodness. She helped me reclaim my biological abilities that were either suppressed or corrupted by modern claims. However, it is crucial that people do not get the impression or conclusion that my mother was exceptional among women; most mothers I knew and worked with – like those in the Shufaat refugee camp near Jerusalem – are manifestations of the miracle of creation. They (and not political parties, universities, and NGOs) form the backbone of Palestinian ability to survive. Those mothers form the spring of wisdom and of life. They are like natural springs of water that never dry up – except through dogma, like academic claims. Academic disciplines are like bottled water. If natural springs dry up, the bottles become empty. If my mother’s knowledge dries up, my knowledge is empty words. If the spirit of Christ that was transmitted over 20 centuries dries up in people’s hearts and souls, then Christianity becomes awful and destructive. If the spirit of regeneration is gone, life will be gone.
What is common to the social majorities of the world is wisdom. What brings us together in Alor Setar is wisdom, where we meet in mutually nurturing environment and where everyone has something to give and something to take. This is what can unite all peoples against destructive ideologies governed by control and winning. Wisdom is a main characteristic of almost all civilizations prior to the dominant modern one: it is a main characteristic of African civilizations, of first nations in the Americas and Australia, of India and China, of Persia, of the Arab-Islamic civilization… and many others. That’s why I would like to suggest that we use ‘wise’ instead of ‘indigenous’ to describe peoples, knowledges etc. The word indigenous is closer to being an academic term than to life. I only hear it in conferences and the like. In contrast, wisdom is a word that people used throughout history. It is significant, to mention again, that the name of one of the first universities in history was “The Home of Wisdom”.
Munir Fasheh
Director, Arab Education Forum
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