How to Live a Saintly Life: The Life and Times of Abu Umar al-Maqdisi

A book review and discussion

The book is available here
This book is a follow-up to A Word of Advice

Related podcast: What Is Tasawwuf?

Further reading: The 15th of Sha'ban

Book Review: The Big Step

 Plus a couple other announcements

Alhamdulilah, al-Hajj Abu Ja'far al-Hanbali has written this beneficial review. Please take the time to have a read. He has also included the interview we did for The Foreword podcast.

I have also learned that the book is now available from Amazon. 

So, to mark this progress, from today there is a 10% discount if you purchase the book from Lulu.

Related:
Book Release: The Big Step

Madness is Rare in Individuals

Book Review: The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010)

Blurb: A stevedore on the San Francisco docks in the 1940s, Eric Hoffer wrote philosophical treatises in his spare time while living in the railroad yards. The True Believer –the first and most famous of his books – became a bestseller when President Eisenhower cited it during one of the earliest televised press conferences. Completely relevant and essential for understanding the world today, The True Believer is a visionary, provocative look into the mind of the fanatic and a penetrating study of how an individual becomes one.

The author: Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) was self-educated and lived the life of a drifter through the 1930s. After Pearl Harbor, he worked as a longshoreman in San Francisco for twenty-five years. He is the author of ten books, including The Passionate State of Mind, The Ordeal of Change, and The Temper of Our Time. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 and died later that year.

This book first came to my attention in 2010, after the failed IPCC summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December 2009, followed by the “climategate” emails of the preceding months, had all of a sudden cast doubt on what was arguably the most significant mass movement of the age. The scare was not quite what is had been hyped up to be, but certain people, even to this day, still cling doggedly to the belief that the world is warming up and mankind is primarily to blame, especially through our emission of carbon dioxide. Back in 2010, I noticed that such people were being labelled as “true believers”, and the purport was that such people’s faith never wavered in the slightest, regardless of the ever-emerging cracks or even overwhelming evidence that what they had called for and advocated no longer held up under scrutiny.  For further details, one had to read Eric Hoffer’s book, which was first published in 1951.

In previous blog posts, it has been pointed out the truth is not something that everyone is sincerely seeking, and the proof is that the majority of humanity lives and dies upon other than Islam. Therefore, demonstrating that something is undoubtedly true is not always enough to convince someone, because it is not minds and intellects that are diseased; it is hearts. Furthermore, this book was first mentioned on this blog in relation to a post about the religiosity of the AGW movement, and the lady who appears in the debate with Viscount Monckton would fit the description of the “true believer” perfectly. Again, one can see that the truth is not the primary motivator.

An Utter Waste of Time and Money

Book Review: How to Watch TV News: Revised Edition by Neil Postman and Steve Powers (Penguin Books, London, 2008)

Blurb: ‘In 1992, renowned media theorist Neil Postman, author of the controversial bestseller Amusing Ourselves to Death, and Steve Powers, an acclaimed broadcast journalist, delivered an eye-opening message: anyone relying exclusively on their television for accurate news is getting a vastly distorted picture of the world. Instead of the vital information the viewing public needs, TV news shows pump out pseudo-news filled with entertainment and celebrity fodder in order to attract cash-cow advertisers. Today, this message is still appallingly true.’

The authors:

Neil Postman (1931-2003) was chairman of the Department of Communication Arts at New York University and founder of its program in media ecology. He wrote nineteen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. In 1986, he won the George Orwell Award for clarity in language.

Steve Powers is a journalist with more than forty-five years’ experience in radio and television news, including as a newscaster for the New York Times radio network, an anchor/reporter for Fox Television News in New York, a correspondent for the ABC Information Radio Network, and the host of a top-rated morning talk show. He has received an Emmy, a Clio, and a New York Press Club Deadline Award. Powers earned his Ph.D. in media studies from New York University in 1987 and was an associate professor of communications at St. John’s University in New York.

When discussing the ills of television, the ultimate excuse that the owner of a television will give is that they are using it for the ‘news’; in order to keep in touch with ‘current affairs’, but does television actually do an adequate job? This is the question that Postman and Powers manage to answer very decisively, and the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

It should be noted that the authors exclusively focus on TV news as it is in the United States, but the reader should be able to see parallels with other news networks, such as the BBC and the two major stations that have received acclaim recently, namely Al-Jazeera and Russia Today. While the two latter stations do provide the ‘other’ side of the story, the fact that the medium is still television should not be forgotten.  What is the point of television? In the first chapter we have the answer: ‘In fact, the reason popular TV series get on the air and stay there is that they can deliver the right audience for a sponsor, an audience that sees commercials and buys products or ideas. There is no escaping that fact: the whole point of television in America is to get you to watch so that programmers, performers and others can rake in the money.’[1] As they go on to explain, news shows are cheaper to produce than slick Hollywood dramas and laugh-track comedies, and this is why more news shows are being presented now than ever before.

In the second chapter, the authors ask the question: what is news? ‘The law, [Justice Oliver Wendell] Holmes said, is what the courts say it is. Nothing more. Nothing less. In similar fashion, we might say that the news is what news directors and journalists say it is. In other words, when you turn on your television set to watch a network or local news show, whatever is on is, by definition, the news.’ This issue is very similar to the question: what is history?[2] In the same way that a historian decides what events are worth writing about, and which facts concerning that event should be included, the journalist decides which events are newsworthy, which facts from those events should be included and so forth. This is an inevitable situation, as the journalist, like the historian, cannot be expected to cover every single detail and to do so exhaustively. However, just as it is better to read more than one account of an historical event, it is better not to rely on one journalist, or one news network, for one’s news. Furthermore, a historian can cram far more information into a book, or article even, than a journalist can cram into a thirty-second or maybe two-minute news slot. The authors give this example, ‘Let us suppose that a fourteen-year-old Palestinian boy hurls a Molotov cocktail at two eighteen-year-old Israeli soldiers. The explosion knocks one of the soldiers down and damages his left eye. The other soldier, terrified, fires a shot that kills the Palestinian instantly. The injured soldier eventually loses his sight in the damaged eye. What details should be included in reporting this event? Is the age of the Palestinian relevant? Are the ages of the Israeli soldiers relevant? Is the injury to the soldier relevant? Was the act of the Palestinian provoked by the mere presence of the Israeli soldiers? Was the act therefore justified? Is shooting justified? Is the state of mind of the shooter relevant?’

In the same chapter, the authors go on to discuss who owns news networks and how this will obviously affect what ‘news’ is presented, with General Electric owning NBC given as an example. This is followed by a discussion on the psychological effects of television. ‘Studies conducted by Professor George Gerbner and his associates at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that people who are heavy television viewers, including viewers of television news shows, believe their communities are much more dangerous than do light television viewers.’ One early twentieth century journalist, called Lincoln Steffens, proved that he could create a “crime wave” by writing about all the crimes that normally occur in a large city during the course of a month.

The book then goes on to discuss the various means used by news shows, and their networks, to make sure you ‘stay tuned’, such as the short blurbs that appear before a show starts, which are actually called “teases”. Their purpose is to grab your attention and keep you watching, and once the show has started you forget why you’re actually watching it. You also have “bumpers” before commercial breaks, telling you what’s ‘coming up’ so that you don’t stray towards another channel during the interval. Then there is the crafting of the news show; how it is presented to you and how it is supposed to make you feel:

‘So there you are, ready to watch the news presented by a high-priced anchor[3], and on comes the show, complete with a fancy opening and music that sounds as though it was composed for a Hollywood epic. The host appears: an anchor god or goddess sculpted on Mount Arbitron – at least the best of them. But even the worst looks authoritative. Of course, the anchor has had plenty of help from plenty of craftspeople in creating the illusion of calm omniscience. After all, it’s not all hair spray. That glittering, well-coiffed, commanding presence has been placed in a setting that has been designed, built, and painted to make him or her look as wonderful as possible. Consultants have been used to make sure the lights are fine-tuned to highlight hair and fill in wrinkles. Colour experts have complemented the star’s complexion with favourable background hues. Short anchors sit on raised seats to look taller. Makeup has been applied to create just the right look: accenting cheekbones, covering baldness, enlarging small eyes, hiding blemishes, perhaps obscuring a double chin.’

In the sixth chapter, entitled ‘The News Director’, the authors restate a point that Postman made in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is the importance of image, or the importance of the ‘photo op’:

‘The photo op is, obviously, a particularly important source of news for television. In America, politicians are known by their image on television. As a consequence, politicians like to do things that show them in a positive light: visiting a hospital, welcoming a visitor from another country, observing the aftermath of a train wreck, and so on. News directors accommodate the visual needs of politicians because television needs pictures. There is not much television news to be made of a congressman’s twenty-two page-position paper on the decline of education in a particular city. But a photo op of the congressman inspecting a decaying building is useful.’

Chapter 8 discusses the bias of pictures and language, but more importantly the use of music and sounds:

‘The music is crucial, for it equates the news with various forms of drama and ritual – the opera, for example, or a wedding procession – in which musical themes underscore the meaning of the event. Music takes us immediately into the realm of the symbolic, a world that is not to be taken literally. After all, when events unfold in the real world, they do so without musical accompaniment. More symbolism follows. The sound of Teletype machines can sometimes be heard in the studio, not because it is impossible to screen this noise out, but because the sound is a kind of music in itself. It tells us that data is pouring in from all corners of the globe, a sensation reinforced by the world map in the background (or clocks noting the time on different continents).’ This is done even though Teletype machines were replaced by silent computer terminals years ago. Viewers will also often see news workers scurrying around in the background, answering phones and taking notes, even though it would be easy to build a set in which they weren’t seen. In short, all of this is meant to give the viewer the impression that, despite the hectic pace and volume of world events, the news team, and particularly the anchor, are in full control, making sense of the events for you and presenting them in a calm and collected manner.  

Is this problematic? The authors give us the answer:

‘The fact that television news is principally made up of moving pictures prevents it from offering lengthy, coherent explanations of events. A television news show reveals the world as a series of unrelated, fragmentary moments. It does not, and cannot be expected to, offer a sense of coherence or meaning. What does this suggest to a TV viewer? That the viewer must come with a prepared mind: information, opinions, a sense of proportion, an articulate value system. To the viewer lacking such mental equipment, a news program is only a kind of rousing light show. Here a falling building, there a five-alarm fire, everywhere the world as an object, much without meaning, connections, or continuity.’

Chapter 9 deals with the commercial, ‘the backbone, the heart, the fuel, the DNA (choose whatever metaphor you wish) of non-public television in America.’ As mentioned before, the whole point of these news shows is to get the viewer tuned in, and to remain tuned in, in order to watch the commercials. If you watch as much TV as the average American, you may watch over thirty-nine thousand minutes of commercials in one year.

The psychological harm of commercials cannot he understated: ‘But commercials are also about the serious manipulation of our social and psychic lives. There are, in fact, some critics who say that commercials are a new, albeit degraded, means of religious expression in that most of them take the form of parables, teaching people what the good life consists of. It is a claim not to be easily dismissed.’

The authors give an example of a typical mouthwash commercial, in which a woman’s first date with a man doesn’t go as well as planned. She thus consults her friend, who tells her that the problem is her bad breath. Her current mouthwash doesn’t last long enough, but if she were to use (enter brand name here) her potential boyfriend would fall head over heels in love with her. She therefore follows her friend’s advice and the story has a happy ending, but what lessons are actually being conveyed in such a commercial? The message is that there are quick-fix solutions to all of life’s problems: ‘whatever problem you face (lack of self-esteem, lack of good taste, lack of attractiveness, lack of social acceptance), it can be solved, solved fast, and solved through a drug, a detergent, a machine, or a salable technique. You are, in fact, helpless unless you know about the product that can remake you and set you on the road to paradise. You must, in short, become a born-again consumer, redeem yourself, and find peace.’

This is largely what American culture and civilization is all about; advertising fuels a capitalist economy. ‘For a market economy to work, the population must be made to believe that it is in need of continuous improvement. If you are quite satisfied with your teeth, your hair, your 2003 Honda, and your weight, you will not be an avid consumer. You will be especially worthless to the economy if your mind is preoccupied with worldly events. If you are not an avid consumer, the engine of the economy slows and then stalls. Therefore, the thematic thrust of advertising is to take your mind off earthquakes, the homeless, and other irrelevancies and to get you to think about your inadequate self and how you can get better.’

Chapter 10 discusses television in the courtroom, and to what extent the ‘public’ has the right to know about court proceedings. Because television gives the ‘public’ this access, does this mean that it should? The response is as follows:

‘First, what’s wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies. Every technological advance has its advantages and disadvantages. It is our job to control the uses of technology so that what is best about our culture can be preserved. Second, television does not turn trials into a public event but into a public spectacle. Let’s be honest about this: what the public is shown is intended only to entertain them, even titillate them. TV stations are not, in fact, interested in showing trials but only in showing fragments of “sexy” trials, those that involve murder, rape, kidnapping, and other horrifying crimes…’

‘As for the courtroom being a semipublic space, that’s exactly what it should be. Its rules have been worked out over centuries. The procedures are not perfect, but they are determined to give everyone a fair shake, and there is no good reason to alter them. And keep this in mind: reading about a trial and seeing it on television are two quite different experiences. A man who is found not guilty ordinarily may resume his life. A man who is found not guilty but who has been seen on television during his trial may find it impossible to resume his life. Audiences may even forget if he was found guilty or not. In any case, he becomes notorious in one way or another, which is to say, he is tried twice: once in the courts and a second time in the court of public exposure.’

Of course, the sharʿī principle of preserving people’s honour is discarded. Someone may be found innocent but they now have a tarnished reputation, and this obviously makes things difficult for them in their personal and professional lives.

Before concluding this review, a note should be made about how television affects children, and this is what the authors do in the eleventh chapter. By the end of high school, the average American will have spent 30% of their waking hours in front of a television, including approximately 13,000 killings, 200,000 violent episodes and 650,000 commercials, most of those being for fast food, beverages and sweets. Research has led to the following conclusions:

• The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that too much TV can make children fat since TV viewing is a sedentary activity.
• ‘According to a 2007 study published in the journal Pediatrics, watching television more than two hours a day early in life can lead to attention problems later in adolescence. The research showed that there was a 40 percent increase in attention problems among heavy TV viewers in both boys and girls.’
• The National Institute of Mental Health supported a study by Robert Kubey of Rutgers and Mihaly Csikszentmihayli (pronounced Schwartz) of the University of Chicago. ‘Their research spanned thirteen years and involved 1,200 subjects in nine different studies. Their conclusion: television makes people passive, tense, and unable to concentrate; more skill and concentration are required in the act of eating than in watching television; although people assume that TV watching offers relaxation and escape, it actually leaves people in worse moods than they were in before watching television.’
• Regarding television and violence, ‘the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that TV violence “promotes a proclivity in violence and a passive response to its practice….Kids who view violent events, such as kidnapping or murder are more likely to believe the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them.”’

The authors also comment on the problem of “information glut”, i.e. there is so much information available, coming from all directions, that we are no longer able to decide what it all means. We become information junkies, addicted to more and more news, but we do not have a clue as to what to do with it. 

In the final two chapters the authors give their advice as to what we can do about the problems of television, and television news in particular, and as Muslims we can take some of these on board and add to them:

 1)  In terms of commercial TV news stations, and I would include the BBC in this, Muslims should absolutely avoid appearing on them. These people are looking for sensation and for ratings, at best, and at worst they are looking to paint an unsavoury picture of Muslims and Islam. The truth, of any event, is the least of their concerns. Live radio, on local stations, can be far more effective as there are fewer advertisements and statements cannot be edited or cut and pasted and put together afterward. There is also a lot more time to get a point across.

2)   In terms of getting information about current affairs, go on the internet and check out different sites. Read articles, and especially articles that attempt to analyse events. To deepen your understanding, look at how different media outlets report on events, such as the BBC vs. Al-Jazeera, or CNN vs. Russia Today, or the Daily Telegraph vs. the Guardian. Sticking to just one news source is pure folly. All media outlets have political and commercial interests.

3)   Get your children to read more, or read stories to them. This allows their imaginations to develop, in addition to their general language skills, such as speaking, listening, and grammar. Memorizing parts of the Qurʾān, along with some of the basics of creed and fiqh, should be part of their daily schedule. If you feel that you as a parent are too busy to give them that time, get audio recordings of the Qurʾān, or stories, for them to listen to. This will not only make your children more intelligent and sagacious, but also happier and more content, as the abovementioned research has shown.

And with Allah alone is every success!

How to Watch TV News is available from Penguin Books as well as Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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[1] While networks like the BBC, Al-Jazeera and Russia Today are not entirely dependent on commercial sponsors, they still have a lot in common with their American counterparts.

[2] The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch is an excellent book that deals with this topic.

[3] Who, most likely, will be more of a qualified anchor than a qualified journalist, as is explained in the same chapter.

American Genocide

Book Review: A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present by Ward Churchill (City Lights Books, 1998)

Alhamdulilah, a review of A Little Matter of Genocide by Ward Churchill is now available from Jurjis's blog. It is books like this, along with (but not limited to) A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, that believers should be reading in order to inform and educate themselves about the self-styled "greatest country on earth" and "the leader of the civilized world".

Is this really the country and civilization we should all be imitating?

And with Allah alone is every success.

Western Mass “Education”

Book Review: Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, 2009)

Blurb for the 2009 edition: ‘Thirty years of award-winning teaching in New York City’s public schools led John Gatto to the sad conclusion that compulsory government schooling has nothing to do with education, doing little but teach young people to conform to the economy and the social order. Dumbing Us Down reveals the shocking reality of today’s school system and has become a beacon for parents seeking alternatives to it. This edition celebrates the fact that the book continues to be highly relevant in setting the agenda for a complete overhaul of how we educate our children – and for what.’

The author: John Taylor Gatto is an internationally renowned speaker who lectures widely on school reform. He taught for 30 years in public schools before resigning on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal during the year he was named New York State's official "Teacher of the Year." On April 3, 2008, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard credited Mr. Gatto with adding the expression "dumbing us down" to the school debate worldwide.

Since its first publication in 1992, John Taylor Gatto’s damning exposure of compulsory schooling (not “education”) in America has sold over 150, 000 copies, and by writing this book review I would like to see that number rise further, as the information this rather short book contains opens one’s eyes and explains why school, especially in America but also Canada and the United Kingdom, was a miserable experience for so many of us and is now a miserable experience for our children. Furthermore, we can’t actually recall what we were taught that was of any benefit.

The 2009 edition includes a brilliant foreword by Thomas Moore, who mentions that Gatto’s understanding of education is that it should include the community: ‘John Gatto makes the important point that a community needs old people and children mixing together.’ For Muslims, this is extremely relevant for a number of reasons. First of all, it is very common in Muslim households, throughout the world, to find three generations living under one roof. One of the benefits of this is that the children can benefit directly from their grandparents. For example, while the father is at work, the son can spend his time with his grandfather, who has most likely retired after living a long life full of experiences and stories. Also, in addition to being retired, the grandfather is approaching the end of his life and is preparing himself to meet his Lord, so he is devoting more of his time to supererogatory acts of worship, such as extra fasting, night prayers and recitation of the Qurʾān. Think of the benefit that the grandchildren obtain by watching their grandparents doing these things, by watching them in this state. What better education could there be for children at that age? As a second point, Muslim institutions of learning have never (until the colonial age) categorised their students according to age, i.e. the grade classification system. How can children grow, develop and mature when they are constantly around their own age group? As a former schoolteacher in the UK, I myself have seen children behave horribly while at school but then behave the complete opposite later that same day while attending a class with adults at a community centre.

The book itself is a collection of five lectures and essays delivered and/or written by Gatto. The first lecture is called ‘The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher’, in which Gatto explains the seven lessons that teachers actually teach. The first is confusion. How is this so? Gatto says: ‘Everything I teach is out of context. I teach the un-relating of everything. I teach disconnections…’ In other words, it’s all information with no meaning. Gatto states: ‘I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a world where home is only a ghost because both parents work, or because of too many job changes or too much ambition, or because something else has left everybody too confused to maintain a family relation, I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny. That’s the first lesson I teach.’

The second is class position, i.e. teaching children their place in society. The third is indifference, in which children are taught not to care too much about anything. Gatto makes an interesting point about bells: ‘Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of school time; their logic is inexorable. Bells destroy the past and the future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.’ Isn’t it interesting that in the Muwaṭṭa of Imām Mālik and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, and other collections, there is the ḥadīth: “The angels do not accompany a group that has a dog or a bell.”?

The fourth and fifth lessons are emotional dependency and intellectual dependency. The first is a direct attack against individuality. Pupils are not allowed to express any form of individuality but instead must conform to the system. As for the latter, intellectual dependency, Gatto says: ‘This is the most important lesson of them all: we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.’ Please see the article below ‘The religiosity and idolatry of the AGW movement’. Is it any wonder that so many of these brainwashing organisations exist and are flourishing in the west; from Greenpeace to Salafiyyah to a whole host of ‘sufi’ tareeqas? As Gatto says: ‘Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends on this lesson being learned. Think of what might fall apart if children weren’t trained to be dependent: the social services could hardly survive – they would vanish, I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which they arose. Counsellors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun. Restaurants, the prepared food industry, and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too, as well as the clothing business and school teaching, unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people continued to pour out of our schools each year…We’ve built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don’t know how to tell themselves what to do.’

The last two lessons are provisional self-esteem, so that children’s evaluation of themselves is based on certified officials as opposed to parents, families and friends, and one can’t hide, so that children can be groomed into accepting constant surveillance throughout their lives.

In the next chapter, ‘The Psychopathic School’, Gatto enumerates eight pathologies of the children he teaches, which are: they are indifferent to the adult world, they have almost no curiosity, they have a poor sense of the future, they are ahistorical (i.e. have no understanding of how the past has affected the present), they are cruel to each other, they are uneasy with intimacy or candour, they are materialistic, and, last but not least, they are dependent, passive and timid in the presence of new challenges. Is this really what we want for our children? To fix this, Gatto suggests: ‘Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships – the one-day variety or longer – these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling.’ In other words, education should be taken out of the hand of so-called experts, who really know nothing about children and education, and be put back into the hands of families and communities.

The third chapter, entitled ‘The Green Monongahela’, includes the beautiful story of a girl called Milagros, of student of Gatto’s who was a brilliant reader but put in a low-level reading class, because the ‘administration’ had deemed that that was her place. After much struggle, Gatto finally managed to get her into the advanced reading class, and that same girl went on to become an award-winning teacher herself.

The fourth chapter is called ‘We Need Less School, Not More’, in which Gatto says: ‘No one survives these places with their humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents.’ He then goes on to discuss the key differences between communities and networks. ‘A community is a place in which people face each other over time in all their human variety: good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible – lives of engagement and participation.’ Networks, on the other hand, divide people and make them feel lonely, because they are inhuman mechanisms. Belonging to various networks eventually makes one feel alone in the middle of a crowd. For further discussion on this matter, read this article by Malcolm Gladwell. How human is Facebook, really?

The final chapter is called ‘The Congregational Principle’, in which the author condemns the idea of central planning and explains how the early European settlers in New England were Congregationalists and strictly individualistic. Each congregation has its own way of raising and educating children and even within each congregation there was a lack of uniformity. This allows for people to do their own reading and research, but still within set parameters. Orthodox Muslims (Ahl us-Sunnah wa Al-Jamāʿah) have the set parameters of the four madhabs and the creedal disciplines of the Ḥanbalīs, Ashʿarīs and Maturīdīs, while it is the Salafī cult that advocates central planning and ‘one right way’ of doing things. Central planning always stunts and numbs people because it prevents them from growing and developing naturally. Imam Muhammad Saeed Ramaḍān Al-Būṭī, in his great work Fiqh As-Sīrah, explains why the prohibition of alcohol in Islām worked and why it failed miserably when the US government tried to do it from 1919 to 1933. The key is that love of Allah and His Messenger, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, was planted firmly into the hearts of the Companions first, so that when the prohibition came they readily and willingly accepted it. In the US, the love of alcohol hadn’t been removed from the people’s hearts, so they resorted to clandestine methods of acquiring booze, which led to the formation of bootlegging syndicates and people like the notorious gangster Al Capone. Grassroots, family-based and/or community-based education, produces genuine, long-lasting changes in people, whereas government education and moralising, planned from central headquarters and issued from the top, always fails miserably.

In conclusion, Muslims living in the US, UK or Canada, and other countries, should consider the options of homeschooling or founding their own schools. In addition to the harms and dangers that Gatto mentions in his book, we should also be wary of the content that is taught, the beliefs and values that are being inculcated, such as atheism, secularism, evolution theory, the unity of all religions and other brands, forms and doctrines of kufr. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that our great scholars and jurists, such as Imam Ibn Al-Ḥājj [1], the great Maliki, Imām Yūsuf an-Nabahānī [2] , the great Shafiʿī, and Imām Aḥmad Shākir [3], the great Ḥanafī, have declared it impermissible for Muslims to send their children to such schools, and their ruling is the consensus of the Ummah.

The consensus of our scholars should be enough to dissuade us from sending our children to these schools, but for people who may think that it is pragmatic or practical, or even beneficial to do such a thing to their children, Gatto’s work should leave them in no doubt as to what is the best option for them. Furthermore, for Muslims who think it would be a good idea to borrow the western model and call it ‘Islamic’ when setting up their own schools, Gatto’s work comes as a stark warning and admonition. It is not just the content of these schools’ curricula that is the problem; the methods and means used are also damaging.

And with Allah alone is every success!

Dumbing Us Down is available from New Society Publishers as well as Amazon US and Amazon UK.

UPDATE: A podcast based on this post is available here.
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[1] See Al-Madkhal under the chapter ‘The Prohibition of sending Muslim children to Christian schools’
[2] See the Imām’s book Taḥdhīr ul-Muslimīn ʿan Madāris in-Naṣārā (A Warning to the Muslims about Christian Schools)
[3] See the Imām’s book Al-Khawātir fī At-Taʿlīm (Dangers in Education)