al-Raghib al-Isfahani #72 – The Monocrop of Western Academy

then are also Hani draws our attention to the importance of not over specializing we it's important to be well rounded and we can really take a cautionary tale from Western scholarship and this because Western scholarship before the whole move to interdisciplinary work and things like that had fractured so much that the historians don't talk to the political theorists and the political theorists don't talk to the economists and the economists don't talk to the psychologists and all these sorts of things. So you end up with absurdities. Honestly, you do, you end up with complete absurdities. Most historians and the Western Academy are very weak, theoretically, they don't have a

sufficient where a requisite understanding of political theory or of human psychology. And so the historian inevitably ends up making sort of assumptions or claims about how human psychology works in their accounting for well, this event happened because of this, or because of that, or what were the causes that took place. Right? And the same thing with economists, economists are probably even worse, where they're talking about consuming and you know, consumption and production and supply and demand and and how do consumers behave? And yet, most of them are woefully ignorant of psychology, right? And how, how humans are actually motivated. And so you have some absurdities, like in

microeconomics, and they say, Well, we're starting out from the premise that all individuals are rational or make rational choices. It's like you must live under a rock, because that's not true. People don't make decisions rationally. They make decisions emotionally. And so this is partly a product, you get these absurdities from the fracturing and the over specialization, right? So Robert, also, he wants us to avoid the same thing. And it's a testament to the soundness and the holistic nature of Islamic scholarship that you really didn't find a whole lot of that if you go to the Islamic scholars like the use of Imam Akhmed, and these folks who are specialists, and Hadith

and specialists and FIP, and you have many people who are specialists in Koran and specialists in the UK or something like that, you you find polymaths you find people who are extremely well rounded in multiple different spheres, a Shafi writing poetry, right? You have got countless examples of the sorts of things so dogmas for honey wants us to understand that being well rounded is extremely important, why there are several reasons one is that you need to be able to relate to other people, if all you know is one thing, then you're going to have an extremely, extremely limited ability to relate to other people and to explain things to them. Right? If the only thing that I know is

medicine, I get up and give a clip every Friday, and the only analogies or illustrations that I can use come from medicine, well, how am I going to relate to the carpenter? How am I going to relate to the Uber driver? How am I going to relate to the student? How am I going to relate to these different people and communicate my message I'm not going to be able to write I'm also not going to be able not just about communicate, but I'm not going to be able to analyze things from different angles, right, I'm only going to be able to see things from one perspective, we saw this actually with the with the pandemic, you know, we had a lot of doctors that approach things from the the

science or the medicinal science sort of point of view, and for them, and they follow the studies and they're like, I don't understand what's the big deal. It's like this is very clear, we should be doing X, Y and Z, we should be doing this, that and the third, but they didn't understand politics, or they didn't understand how the pandemic was politicized, or they didn't understand the social aspect and how things got loaded in with different symbolic meanings. And so it became a whole virtue signaling thing. Well, are you left? Or are you right? And which tribe Do you belong to, and these sorts of things. And so people were making decisions based off of those political or social

concerns, and they were making decisions based off of medical concerns or scientific concerns, you know, we say in English, if you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail, right? If you only have one tool or one lens to look through things, then you're only going to be able to see things from a very, very limited perspective, and you're not going to be able to even hermeneutically Understand how other people are making sense of things. We can bring an example or an analogy from the from the natural world, right? Allah subhanaw taala created things in a system of biodiversity, right? And so our knowledge should be like that biodiversity, right, you can

compare two sorts of fields, you have one field, which is sort of we go back to indigenous sort of planting and agricultural techniques, you have the three sisters, you have co cropping, right, you have different things that are growing together, you've got cover crops, and you've got food crops, and you've got different sorts of things that are doing all different types of things for the soil, for the insects, for the birds, everything has something within that piece of land, right? Humans can go and benefit from that land. You've got something for the birds and something for the squirrels and something for the bugs and something for the earthworms. And some Everybody's got

something there. Okay, well, what if we go the whole modern agricultural route and we make it just a mono crop, just corn, as far as the eye can see, okay, what we're doing is we're really putting all of our eggs in one basket. Now, the things that survive off of the corn, they come to that one square acre, or that one square mile, and everything else that needs something else, it's useless to them, right? They don't there's certain bugs that won't go there. There's certain birds that won't go there. There's certain animals that won't go there. It's dead to them. Right. And so this can't be how our knowledge is right? Those actual by the way those mono crops are extremely weak when it

comes to being able to be

drought resistant or being able to be flood resistant. Or when it comes to, you know, what you actually find is you find extremes, right, the bugs will be, you know, extreme in one year, like too many. And then too many of this type of bug and too few of this type of type of bug, everything's out of balance, right. So this is a metaphor for our or an analogy for our knowledge, right, you can't just have one type of knowledge, you need to be balanced, you need to have a diversity of things that you are aware of, and perspectives that you can take on because it will not only enrich your knowledge, it will make your knowledge more beneficial to others. So now I'm gonna come off to

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