Education Key to all success

Education Key to all success

1993 11 October 24-27 Education: Key to all success (1065) It is a widely accepted fact that present-day Muslims are faced with serious problems. It is also generally understood that the reason for this is the lack of leadership among the Muslims. But when we view this issue in the light of the facts, we come to realize that this is a totally baseless supposition. The actual problem besetting Muslims is not the lack of leadership but the failure to follow the right leadership. Many leaders capable of giving sound guidance have been born among Muslims, but the community has ignored their words of wisdom. When a community does not follow an inspired guide, how can It benefit from the leadership he offers?

Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) is one such example of a good leader, who gave clear guidance to his people, but who was not followed by the community as a whole – barring a handful of individuals. Later events testified to the validity and importance of his guidance, but his fellow Muslims, having dubbed him a kafir (infidel) and an enemy agent, were not at all inclined to give credence to his words. As such, they could not, and did not benefit from his advice.

In 1857, the Muslims waged a war against the British only to have a crushing defeat inflicted upon them. Not only did they fail to benefit in any way, but they also lost whatever had survived previous upheavals. As a community the Muslims founds themselves in an utterly ravaged condition. At the time of this tragedy, Sir Syed, who witnessed all the horror of it with his own eyes, was already a mature man of forty. He remained deeply affected by what he had seen, and in 1869-70, decided to travel to England to inquire into the reasons for the continuing dominance of the west and the state of subjugation of the Muslims. During his stay, Sir Syed learnt that the Muslim predicament was traceable not to enemy plots but to their own shortcomings, not the least of which was their failure to keep up with the rest of the world in the field of modern education.

It became plain to Sir Syed that the modern age was one of scientific revolution, a revolution in which European nations had already marched ahead. The Muslims, on the contrary, were in such a sorry state of backwardness that they could not even enter this field.

When Sir Syed returned from England, he found Muslim religious scholars and intellectuals busily propagating the notion that the Muslims’ real problem was political. That is, all their woes stemmed from the political dominance of the British, a dominance which would later be transferred to the Hindus. All Muslims were preoccupied with this thought and each was engaged in his own way in resolving the problem as if it were indeed political in nature.

Sir Syed was the first notability in modern India who pointed out that the Muslims’ real problem was not political but educational. He therefore advised Muslims against actively joining in politics and urged them to concentrate instead on education. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1/369). This was the best possible guidance. But Muslims rejected this very proper advice. Instead of exerting themselves in the field of education, they persisted in political struggle. And when guidance goes unheeded, what benefit can accrue from it?

Let us compare this with developments in Japan. In 1945, Japan had an atom bomb dropped on it by the US, the latter country thus gaining political supremacy over it. Hirohito, who was at that time Emperor of Japan, consulted his country’s intellectuals and military officers on what their course of action should now be. The majority of them were of the view that, although their air force had been destroyed, the army had emerged unscathed, which meant that the war could be continued until political supremacy was regained.

Hirohito was a wise and educated person. He maintained that there was no use in continuing political and military confrontation and that they should rather devote all their energies to the educational front. Peace was a prerequisite if this goal of education were to be achieved. Delivering a speech on the Japanese radio, Hirohito said: ‘We have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable.’

After initial differences, the entire nation heeded the guidance of Hirohito. According education supreme status, they started on a grand scale the struggle towards its acquisition. As a result, within a period of just forty years after the second world war, Japan has become the most educated society of the world, and in consequence, the most developed and aware society too. In 1945 Japan had become one of the weakest countries of the world. Today the world is compelled to acknowledge it as one of the most powerful. It has, in fact, become an economic superpower. And all this was achieved by dint of a 50-year struggle made in the right direction as advised by a right-thinking leader.

The advice to abandon political confrontation and to work hard in the field of education was given to the Japanese by Hirohito in 1945. Exactly the same advice was given by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in undivided India to Indian Muslims 125 years before, in 1870. Yet the Japanese have now become a superpower, while Muslims are yet to become even a minipower.

The reason for this difference is not lack of leadership but failure to follow leadership. The Japanese accepted the direction given by their leader, paying full attention to the achievement of the goal he set them, but all Muslims could do was blame their leader. They rejected him on the score that his advice reeked of enemy plotting. The Muslims continued to seek their future in the field of politics, instead of seeking it in the field of education. And those who are today engaged in this futile exercise will meet the same fate as that of the previous Muslim generations.

This problem will be solved only if Muslims stop blaming others, refrain strictly from entering the arena of confrontation and fully engage themselves in the acquisition of education. Learning is the key to all kinds of success. It is the only ladder to all kinds of progress. With learning, all else follows: without learning there is much to lose.

From denial to belief

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1993 11-12 November-December 24-25 From denial to belief (850)

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, a Sri Lankan who heads the department of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy at University College, Cardiff, Wales, has been conducting research into the origin of life since 1962 in collaboration with the eminent English scientist, Professor Sir Fred Hoyle. The results of their research have been published in the form of a book entitled, Evolution from Space.

When the two scientists began their research, they were both agreed on one point: That the notion of a creator is inconsistent with scientific principles. But they were so shocked by their ultimate findings that they had to make a drastic reappraisal of their thinking. “From my earliest training as a scientist,” says Wickramasinghe, “I had been thoroughly brainwashed into believing that science cannot be consistent with any kind of deliberate creation. That notion has had to be very painfully shed. I am quite uncomfortable in the state of mind I now find myself in, But there is no logical way out of it.”

Both scientists made separate calculations of the mathematical probability of life on earth having begun spontaneously. Quite independently of each other, both arrived at the same conclusion that the odds against life on earth having had an accidental beginning were staggering – in mathematical jargon, 10 to the power 40,000. Add 40,000 noughts to the number one and you have the figure. ‘‘That number is such an imponderable in the universe that 1 am 100 percent certain that life could not have started spontaneously on Earth.” says Wickramasinghe.

As they write in their book: “Once we saw that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it became sensible to think that the properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate.”

“Sir Fred Hoylk was tending much more than I towards the higher intelligence Creator,” Wickramasinghe explains. “I used to argue against it, but I found myself losing every argument. At the moment I can’t find any rational argument to knock down the view which argues for conversion to God. If I could have found an argument – even a flimsy one I would not have been a party to what we wrote in the book. We used to have open minds; now we realize that the only logical answer to life is creation, and not accidental shuffling. I still hope that one day I may go back to favour a purely mechanistic explanation – I say ‘hope,’ because I still cannot come to terms with my conversion.

“My being a Buddhist – albeit not an ardent one – was never a problem, because it is an atheistic religion which does not profess to know anything about creation and does not have a creator built into it. But I now find myself driven to this position by logic. There is no other way in which we can understand the precise ordering of the chemicals of the universe except to invoke creation on a cosmic scale.

Until recently, belief in God was considered to be a mere personal creed, unsupported by rational thought. In recent decades, however, this situation has changed. Now evidence has again and again come to light which makes belief in God a scientifically credible concept, rather than just an institutionalized form of anthropomorphism providing a personally desirable creed.

The latest findings of science impress upon man the abstract reality of God’s existence. Granted that there is a God, what should man’s relationship with Him be? Science does not and cannot occupy itself with this problem. This is a question which can only be answered by religion.

Basically, all religions do attempt to answer this question, but to what extent they are successful is difficult to determine considering that, besides Islam, no world religion has been preserved in its original form. Other shortcomings in present-day religions, no matter what their antiquity, are, in some cases, the absence of the concept of a God, (or Creator and Sustainer) and in other cases, the proliferation of gods and goddesses. The definition of man’s relationship with God (or the absence of one) by such religions is impossible to accept, because the premises on which they base their doctrines are false. Science certainly does not support polytheism, just as it does not support unconscionable ‘religious’ tenets such as discrimination on the basis of colour and race.

Just as science brings one to belief in God, so also does it bring one to belief in Islam, for Islam is the only religion which is completely consistent with scientific facts. Science shows that the universe has a God – a fact, which in itself, is enough to prove the agnostics wrong. A study of the cosmos shows that it operates in unity and harmony, thus ruling out the possibility of there being many gods, as is claimed by certain religions. Conversely, such a study makes it abundantly clear that there can be only one God – a concept faithfully presented by Islam, but by no other religion. And as for man’s relationship with God, the only religion which can properly define it is, again, Islam.