Every day of our lives is a spot on our map. It can be a success, a failure, a turnaround, or maybe even simpler it could be traced by a smile, a frown, a sign or a memory.

A day can be a witness of our splendor and glory; a day can also be forgotten amidst the pages of our diary or deliberately disregarded from our accounts.

I wonder who woke up in the morning missing the motivation to get-up, lacked a cause to fight for, didn’t have a child to take care of, a smile to help you move-on, or someone to say “I am here for you.”

I wonder who didn’t wait for a chance, looked for a sign, stared at the sky envisioning a dream, who never had a wish, never welcomed someone to their life, who didn’t keep hoping for a dream to come true. Who?!

This story does not belong to me, it belongs to us as human beings. It belongs to the fact that we dream, we wish, we fall and we get-up, we get hurt and we get cured, we criticize and we flatter, we think and we act, we feel weak and we become strong.

We mark our lives with events such as the first time we fell in love, our first job, our first raise. We mark our lives with break-ups, engagements, marriages, birth, death, and with the hard lessons we gather on our way.

We sense our directions with great guts that does not prevent us from feeling a single piece of regret. We laugh at jokes, we cry at love scenes, we enjoy the gossip but never forgive being subjected to it.

We are who we are for some reasons, for some genes, for family matters, for experiences we went through, for challenges we faced, for social hazards, for whatever causes and whoever we have met. To those who have never been subjected to monumental changes or personal transformations, isn’t it time for you to stand on the crossroad where choice is calling? Either turn the chapter or stay trapped in the past. It’s your life and it’s your choice!

Our hands are vital for performing tasks throughout our daily lives and must be taken care of and cleaned regularly. They can easily spread germs, bacteria, or viruses such as Covid-19 (Coronavirus). Coronavirus has spread rapidly throughout the entire world in the past few months and health officials are very adamant that hand hygiene can help prevent further escalation of the virus. The reason is simple; viruses can spread from our hands to other objects that we touch, to which other people can touch those same objects and possibly contract the virus by putting their hands on their face. According to the World Health Organization, proper hand sanitation that uses alcohol-based rub or hot water and soap can kill Coronavirus and other viruses [1].

For some people, such as healthcare professionals, there are actually major consequences for neglecting hand hygiene. For example, the dirty hands of these professionals have a negative impact of 40% in the transport and spread of resistant microorganisms among patients. Hospital infections are actually among one of the main catalysts for increased disability and death rates in hospitals, along with additional healthcare costs [2]. In the United States, 1.7 million patients develop health-related infections every year, and 100,000 of them die. This increases the length of hospital stay by 20 times and the cost of treatment by 5 times [3].

It was not until the 19^th century that we began to understand that infectious diseases can be prevented by washing our hands. In the middle of the same century, the pioneer of antiseptic processes, known as the “savior of mothers,” Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, showed that microorganisms could be transmitted to patients via the hands of medical staff. This discovery began a new era of hygiene and healthcare. It is now well known that microbes reproduce rapidly, and that it is possible to prevent the spread of disease by keeping the hands and body, which is possible by following personal hygiene rules.

Hand hygiene is maintained in different ways in modern medicine. In daily life, washing hands with soap and water to remove dirt is called “social hand washing.” Common examples include washing after a meal and when visiting the toilet. For this purpose, it is sufficient to rub the hands and fingers for 15 seconds with a non-antimicrobial feature soap, rinse, dry with a disposable towel, and turn off the tap with a towel. Cloth towels used by many people in public places are not considered suitable for hygiene.

The more serious and professional form of hand washing is “hygienic hand washing,” where antimicrobial soaps are used in the washing process before and after contact with patients and bodily fluids. Other hand hygiene methods during surgical operations cover applications where alcohol-based 3-5 ml hand-disinfectant is rubbed until dry along with hand disinfection and surgical hand antisepsis, which includes washing the hands, including the forearms, with chemical solutions such as soaps, isopropanol, chlorhexidine specifically produced for this purpose for 2-3 minutes, and later wearing sterile gloves until the end of any procedures.

The World Health Organization published a guide on proper hand hygienics and explained when, how often, and how healthcare providers should wash their hands [4]. Despite the development of various programs and policies, especially hand hygiene, and increasing material expenditures in the fight against infections observed in health services, the control of infections remains well below the desired level.

Today, research also looks at the effects of hand washing on individual psychology. An experiment carried out by two psychologists from the University of Michigan, Spike W.S. Lee and Norbert Schwarz, shows that hand-washing reduces this classic post-decisional dissonance effect:

In individual sessions, 40 undergraduates browsed 30 CD covers as part of an alleged consumer survey as if they were in a music store. They selected 10 CDs they would like to own and ranked them by preference. Later, the experimenter offered them a choice between their 5th and 6th ranked CDs as a token of appreciation from the sponsor. Following the choice, participants completed an ostensibly unrelated product survey that asked for evaluations of a liquid soap; half merely examined the bottle before answering, whereas others tested the soap by washing their hands. After a filler task, participants ranked the 10 CDs again, allegedly because the sponsor wanted to know what people think about the CDs after leaving the store.

For those who merely examined the soap, the preference for the chosen over the rejected alternative increased from before choice to after choice by an average of 1.9 ranks, replicating the standard dissonance effect. In contrast, for those who washed their hands, preferences were unaffected by their decision. Thus, handwashing significantly reduced the need to justify one’s choice by increasing the perceived difference between alternatives. “Washing one’s hands after making a choice eliminates post-decisional dissonance effects, suggesting that hand-washing psychologically removes traces of the past, including concerns about past decisions” [5].

In another study conducted in 2008, Schnall, et. Al. “hypothesized that physical cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. In support of this idea, they found that individuals make less severe judgments when they are primed with the concept of cleanliness and when they wash their hands after experiencing disgust” [6]. This effect of hand washing, which relieves conscience, is called the “Macbeth Effect.”

Washing hands is one of those simple but compulsory practices we tend to take for granted and lose interest in as we progress in science and education. Simple practices like using each of our hands for different purposes and frequent hand-washing will surely contribute to the fight against healthcare infections and infectious diseases that threaten public health.

There are several traditions of Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, in which washing hands is strongly emphasized.

“The blessings of food lie in washing hands before and after eating.”

“Wash your hands after you wake up; you do not know where your hands have moved while you were sleeping.”

The Prophet advised using each hand for different tasks. It is narrated that his wife Aisha said: “The right hand of the Messenger of God (peace be upon him) was for his purification and food, and his left hand was for using the restroom and anything that was dirty.”

Notes

1. “Advice for Public.” World Health Organization, World Health Organization, www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/advice-for-public.
2. Pittet D, Allegranzi B, Storr J, Donaldson L. Clean care is safer care: the global patient safety challenge 2005-2006. Int J Infect Dis. 2006; 10(6): 419–24.
3. Allegranzi B, Storr J, Dziekan G, Leotsakos A, Donaldson L, Pittet D. The first global patient safety challenge “Clean care is safer care”: from launch to current progress and achievements. J Hosp Infect. 2007; 65(Suppl. 2): 115–23.
4. WHO Guidelines on Hand Hygiene in Health Care, www.who.int/gpsc/5may/tools/9789241597906/en/
5. Lee SW, Schwarz N. Washing away postdecisional dissonance. Science. 2010 May 7;328(5979):709. doi: 10.1126/science.1186799.
6. Schnall S, Benton J, Harvey S. With a clean conscience: cleanliness reduces the severity of moral judgments. Psychol Sci. 2008 Dec;19(12):1219-22. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02227.x. Also see https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2014-20922-011.html in which Johnson, D. J. et. al. suggest that “researchers investigating the connections between cleanliness and morality should therefore use large sample sizes to have the necessary power to detect subtle effects.”

Is this life?
This drastic contrast?
This black and white?
This sunshine and rain?
Is it?

Is it normal
for worlds to collide?
Combine?
Crash?

And these emotions?
To effervesce differently, yet be present,
in the same world,
the same existence.

It is.
And, apparently this is life,
When your mind and heart will be playing a tug of war,
and you sit,
you sit and realize it’s your choice.

See…
It’s your choice to visualize what you want to see. It’s your choice to just stay in the sunshine, ignoring the rain.
It’s your choice to just stare at that white and don’t look back at that black.

So this is what they meant,
when they told us to look at the cup, half full.

Even when you’re grieving the half that is gone, half is still there.

It’s the choice.
It’s the choice to chose how we look at our lives, the good and the bad.
How we smile in our happiness,
and find strength in our sadness.

How we laugh when we hear something funny,
something fun,
and hold those tears
when the sadness stings our hearts.

It’s our choice.
Our choice to be those optimisms
who just look at the glass as half full.

And who know,

deep down,
Even if the glass isn’t half full,
even if it’s only a quarter, or even a tenth, full
it will still, to some degree, be full.

And that it’ll get better.
It will get fuller.
Just know
that it will get better.
It will fill up.

No one’s glass
is constantly full…

Occasionalism in Islamic philosophy and theology

Named after Imam Ash’ari (936 AD), a famous scholar on Islamic theology, the Ash’arite tradition was the first school to embrace occasionalism consistently. In Ash’arite cosmology, the universe can be analyzed in terms of two main categories: those of substance and those of accident. An accident can be simply regarded as a property and a substance is the thing to which properties are attributed. Substances are usually identified with indivisible particles (atom). Atoms are homogeneous, and the diversity in nature appears as a result of the heterogeneity of accidents inhered in these substance-atoms. Accidents are considered to be perishable by their nature. No accident can endure but perishes in the second-instant of its coming to be if God does not recreate it in its substance. This is the crucial point in support of occasionalism. Accidents cannot exist by themselves and the atoms which need accidents to exist cannot exist by themselves either. All atoms and accidents need the power of God in order to exist and subsist over time. In Ash’arite metaphysics, it is not the case that God can create anything. Some things do not fall under the extension of divine power. It is absurd that substances can exist without accidents and there is no rationality in saying that God can create a substance without accident. Logically contradictory cases are also excluded from the scope of divine power. In other words, to say that God can create round squares or logically contradictory cases is a category mistake like saying that number 2 is green. Numbers are not the things to which the color predicates apply. In other words, color-predicates have a certain range or extension of applicability which excludes numbers. On the other hand, the properties of “being odd” or “being even” apply to numbers, but not to material objects. Saying that this chair is even is another category mistake. So each predicate has a certain extension to which this predicate legitimately applies. Things or expressions which are not in the scope (extension) of a certain predicate lead to a category mistake if they are associated with this predicate. So the sentence “God cannot do something” includes a category mistake if that thing in question is a contradiction for instance, because contradictions are not within the scope of divine power. In brief, the general features of the Ash’arite cosmology present a discontinuous universe, which depends on God’s creative power to exist and subsist at each moment. Furthermore, it does not consider certain cases such as absurdities to be possible with respect to creation. Al-Kindi supports the Ash’arite picture of the universe by indicating the impossibility of a real causal link between natural objects. He points out that anything which is being affected or being acted upon cannot be a true agent. The true agent acts upon what is affected without itself being affected by any kind of effect. Everything in this universe is acted upon and affected by something else. So God is the only true agent. The rest are only metaphorically causes which do not have real causal powers. Later, al-Ghazali focused on the apparent causal relations between events and argues that the causal relation between any two events can be justified neither logically nor by experience. Let’s consider his following example where fire and a piece of cotton are found together and the cotton is burned. A piece of cotton and fire cannot have a logically necessary relation between themselves because we can think of one event without the other, which does not lead to any contradiction. Observation cannot justify that burning of the cotton is a necessarily causal effect of fire because we can observe only that fire and the burning of cotton appeared together, but not that fire caused the burning. This occasionalist metaphysics does not deny that human beings are free in their choices and will be responsible for what they do. The Ash’arites suggest the following formula with respect to human acts: human beings acquire their acts, while God creates these acts. Al-Maturidi later clarifies the nature of the acquisition of their act by human beings by considering human choice as the ground for this acquisition. The thesis that God is the only causal agent in the universe provoked discussion as to whether or not human choice is created by human beings. If human choice is created by human beings, then occasionalism is rejected because, in that case, humans will have causal power together with God. If God creates human choices, then human beings cannot be held responsible for their choices simply because they are not their choices. Sadr-us Sharia and later Taftazani offer an ingenious solution to this problem by denying that human choice falls under the scope of divine power. In their view, human choice is a relational and relative matter that appears between the inclination and the action. For instance, assume that I have a desire to drink water. I choose to drink it and then take a glass of water and perform the action. My choice is a relational matter between my desire to drink water and the act of drinking it. Relations are not things that have definite existence. Think of rightness and leftness. My pen is on the right side of my tea cup from a certain perspective and is on the left side from another perspective. Even though my pen and my tea cup have definite existence, the relations of rightness and leftness which appear between them do not have. These relations are relative matters and because of that they are not genuine objects to which divine power is applicable. In other words, human choice as a relational matter is not under the scope of divine power as round squares are not. As a result, it would be a category mistake to say that God could or could not create human choices. Let’s see how occasionalism is articulated in the West.

Malebranche’s occasionalism and the Cartesian tradition

Malebranche (d. 1715) is a follower of Descartes. He accepts the basic principles of the Cartesian philosophy and inherits the problems remained from Descartes. What is the exact nature of causality? How is the mind related to the body? These are some of the important questions the Cartesian philosophers tried to answer. Malebranche’s occasionalism is a reply to such problems as well as a result of his theological concerns. As far as his theological motivation is concerned, Malebranche concluded that a belief in secondary causality, namely ascribing causal power to beings other than God, leads to paganism. For Malebranche, if we are under the control of a power belonging to a natural being, then we should serve it because of the following principle of St. Augustine: whatever truly acts upon us, it is above us, and inferior things serve the superior things. As a result, he denies any causal efficacy in the created realm. Malebranche calls his doctrine “occasionalism” because God creates events, not arbitrarily but in a regular manner, where certain natural events are “occasions” for God’s creation of certain effects. What people ordinarily call “causes or natural powers” are in fact “occasional causes” in the sense that they are depicting the uniformity of God’s operation in the world and providing us with an ordered system of created nature. If we use al-Ghazali’s example, we can say that the existence of fire near a piece of cotton is the occasional cause for God’s burning of that cotton. Because of the emphasis on occasional causes, occasionalists do not rule out scientific activity-on the contrary, they encourage it. In their view, scientists are looking for the secret and hidden occasional causes and try to understand how God operates on earth. God is the only true cause having genuine causal power. According to Malebranche’s analysis of true causation, there must be a necessary link between a true cause and its effect. A necessary link holds only between the will of an infinitely perfect being and some effect. This is the reason why only God can be regarded as a true cause. In other words, any event or effect needs an absolute power to become existent. It is impossible for finite beings to cause anything at all. That is to say, the two types of finite beings of the Cartesian metaphysics, namely bodies and minds are causally inefficacious. Malebranche accepts Descartes’s characterization of bodies and minds. Bodies are essentially extended substances, minds are thinking substances. Bodies are by definition impotent because the idea of extension does not include the idea of power; there is no power belonging to the essence of bodies. Malebranche believed that observation or sense experience leads us to imagine a causal link between two interacting bodies such as when a billiard ball hits another one. He holds that reason corrects sensation and shows us the truth about the inefficacy of the balls in question by reflecting upon the concept of extension which excludes the concept of power or causal efficacy. Minds also are causally impotent. However, people have free will by which they are responsible for their acts. Malebranche abstains from ascribing causal power to the human will by saying “I do not know if that can be called power.” However, he does not offer a detailed account like that of Taftazani regarding the question as how people can be free without having causal powers of their own. Nevertheless, his occasionalism offers a good solution to the mind-body problem which bothered Descartes and many Cartesians. This problem is quite complicated because mind and body are postulated as two completely distinct substances having nothing in common. How then are they interacting, for instance, when we feel pain whenever we cut our hand or when we move a chair should we desire to do that? Malebranche resolves this problem by claiming that every state in mind and body is created by God in accordance with each other. It is God who creates the desire to drink water and again God who moves our arms without any intervention between mind and body and creates the action of drinking water. Simply speaking, the human’s role in this picture is choosing to actualize or ignore the intentions they have in their minds. Malebranche comes closer to the Ash’arites in his approach to the matter of absurdities. Contradictions and similar absurdities are not subject to divine power and will. This contention of Malebranche diverts him from Descartes’s path because Descartes allows that God could have changed logico-mathematical laws. Malebranche rejects this view and excludes logico-mathematical contradictions from the scope of divine power.

Conclusion

For many people, the idea that the universe is constantly created and controlled only by divine power is difficult to grasp. Many tend to believe in a more naturalistic explanation of the universe, where everything has its own power and role in the whole system. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how we sometimes can be mislead if we remember of our inability to perceive movie frames. The picture of the reality is more complicated than its appearance. There are very good reasons to adopt an occasionalistic explanation of the universe. It is interesting to see that this explanation is advocated by both Muslim and Christian philosophers. We see many parallel lines between Malebanche and the Muslim philosophers on this issue. There are sufficiently strong arguments both from East and West showing that occasionalism is well justified, and has satisfying implications in terms of human responsibility and scientific activity.

The numerous movements of the past 150 years, characterized almost without exception as ‘Islamic movements’, have had little if anything to do with the resurgence of religious faith as such. Most of these have actually been political movements, with leaders whose underlying goal has been to solve a specific problem: the problem of the perceived backwardness of the Muslim peoples and their subservience, politically and culturally, to the West.

While none of the groups that operate within the definitional matrix of ‘Islamic movements’ can claim to be identifiable primarily as a faith movement, various individuals have appeared sporadically with the avowed aim of fostering renewal of belief – often to the extent of dedicating their whole life’s work to that aim – and around some of these individuals, movements of considerable size and import have accreted. The Turkish Muslim scholar Bediüzzaman Said Nursi (1877/8–1960) is one such individual.

Progenitor of the ‘service of belief and the Qur’an’ movement, Nursi is arguably the most influential, if woefully under-researched, Muslim thinker of the twentieth century. While the ‘service of belief and the Qur’an’ movement, a faith-based movement consisting of millions of followers worldwide, does not – strictly speaking – fulfill the definitional criteria of a New Religious Movement, it stands out from other contemporary Muslim religious and ideological groupings not only for its uncompromising focus on the renewal of individual rather than collective faith, but also for its eschewal of any kind of religiously-legitimized violence or militancy for the sake of politico-ideological ends.

Although often stereotyped as the pioneer of reform of an Islam declining under the pressures inflicted on it by the Kemalist secularization policy of the Turkish state, almost half a century after his death, Nursi continues to defy any attempts to locate him precisely within the generally accepted milieu of ‘Muslim scholars’. While his magnum opus, the Risale-i Nur, is for all intents and purposes a commentary on the Qur’an, it is not a work of exegesis in the technical sense of the word, although he was clearly an accomplished exegete. And while Nursi was well-versed in the principles of scholastic theology (kalām), devoting the lion’s share of the Risale to what he claims are rational proofs for the unity (tawhīd) of God, it is not a work of traditional theology either.

In fact, on one level, the Risale is as resistant to compartmentalization as the Qur’an itself, which it claims to mirror and to elucidate. And if, as Nursi often asserts, the aim of the Qur’an is to guide man to belief, then the teachings of the Risale should be seen as consonant with that aim.

The three supreme matters in the worlds of humanity and Islam are belief, the Shari’a, and life. Since the truths of belief are the greatest of these, the Risale-i Nur’s select and loyal students avoid politics with abhorrence so that they should not be made the tool to other currents and subject to other forces, and those diamond-like Qur’anic truths not reduced to fragments of glass in the view of those who sell or exploit religion for the world, and so that they can carry out to the letter the duty of saving belief, the greatest duty.

Part of Nursi’s appeal lay in his uncompromising belief that it is belief (īmān) which must be renewed and protected, and that all other endeavors must be approached with the primacy of belief in mind: the fact that, unlike many of the popular Muslim thinkers of his own epoch, he repudiated the dubious art of politics – and, more importantly, the dubious art of politicking that is buttressed by religion – earned him respect and conferred on him a sense of authenticity that would perhaps be found wanting in so many other Muslim thinkers. Another part of his appeal lay in his shrewd interpretation of the forces ranged against him. For Nursi, unlike many of the Muslim scholars, leaders and ideologues who came later, realized that if there is a conflict between Islam – or belief – and modernity, it is not a conflict fought over issues of government or technology, over science or democracy. As Nursi’s own evaluation of the problems facing the Muslim world shows, the conflict is ultimately over transcendence, with the post-Enlightenment experiment claiming a centrality in the universe’s affairs for man that Islam, with its emphasis on the dependence of man on God, cannot countenance. Man is faced with a choice: belief in the sovereignty of God or belief in the sovereignty of man, with all that such a choice entails. For Nursi, the way to salvation consists solely in choosing the Other over the self, and it is in the dynamics of this choice that the key to an understanding of Nursi’s take on spirituality and man’s place in the cosmos may be found.

Renewal and reform, then, do play a central role in the Nursian Weltanschauung, but, unlike so many of his coevals, it is the renewal of belief and the reform of the individual that constitute his primary and overriding concern. In this respect, he is one of few Muslim thinkers in the twentieth century who has little if anything to say about the socio-economic or political externalia of Muslim life. Over the past century and a half in general, and the last twenty-five years in particular, ‘Islam is a complete way of life’ has been the mantra of choice for the vast majority of Muslim movements. As a corollary, emphasis has been largely on the ‘implementation’ of Islam at the socio-political level, with debate and discussion focusing mainly on issues such as Islamic law, Islamic education and the concept of the Islamic state. As such, the lion’s share of Muslim movements can be said to adopt an ‘externalist’ approach to the Islamic revelation, seeing in the strict adherence of Muslims to the shari‘a – and, where necessary, the imposition of such adherence through legislative means – the key to the formation of the ideal Muslim society. For the ‘externalists,’ reform has come to mean chiefly the reform of society, the underlying aspiration of which must be to return to the ‘golden age’ of Islam typified – for the externalists at least – by the community-state of Medina during the lifetime of the Prophet. These ‘dreams of Medina’, and the concomitant desire to share – or, even, impose – those dreams on others, are responsible in part for the current Western perception of Islam as more political ideology than divinely-revealed religion. The relative merits and demerits of ‘Islamism’ or ‘political Islam’ as terms by which to describe this over-politicized approach to Islam need not occupy us here. Suffice to say that in the last analysis, this approach rests on the fulcrum that is the return of ‘Islamic rule’, the transformation of the Muslim world into an umma analogous to the community-state of Medina and, wittingly or otherwise, the reduction of the Islamic revelation to the single issue of governance. While Islam made political and transformed into ideology is a relatively recent phenomenon, the ‘externalist’ approach to Islam which informs it is almost as old as Islam itself. However, whereas for the likes of ‘non-externalists’ such as Ghazali in the twelfth century and Mulla Sadra in the seventeenth it was the nomocentrism of the externalist scholars and the over-emphasis on fiqh (jurisprudence) which constituted the greatest obstacles to the health of the Muslim community, for the Ghazalis and Sadras of today – of whom Nursi is undoubtedly one – it is the over-politicization of religion which is the danger.

Arguably the most important common denominator among Islamic/Islamist groups and leaders of the past fifty to one hundred years has been the tendency to favour the use of force to change ‘religiously suspect’ regimes in the Muslim world and bring about Islamic revolutions. And it is precisely on this point where one sees a fundamental difference between Nursi and his contemporaries. For not only is Nursi distinguished by his staunch opposition to any kind of uprising or revolution in the name of Islam, but also he stands on account of his aversion to politics in general, and the politicization of Islam in particular. Nowhere is Nursi’s ideological departure from the majority of his contemporaries delineated more sharply than on the highly contentious issue of jihād. As emphasized above, for Nursi, the way to salvation consists solely in choosing the Other over the self, and it is in the dynamics of this choice that the key to an understanding of Nursi’s take on spirituality and jihād may be found.

There are many for whom it is clear that humanity is in a precarious position. We are told on a daily basis that we live under the threat of pollution, global warming, terrorism, famine and a thousand and one different ills. Our time is, we are told, a time of global crisis. Yet few are able to fathom the real cause of this crisis. It is not that we do not understand the problems around us. Our crisis – the crisis of modernity – is that we do not understand ourselves. Indeed, postmodern thought – if such a thing exists and is not really just another name for the confused ideas of late modernity – nurtures a scepticism in which the very possibility of understanding anything is called into question.

Most people, Nursi claims, have been reduced to hardship and misery by the demands and dictates of modern times. Man’s innate nobility has also been marred, he says, as the gradual divorce from religious values has opened the floodgates of ‘dissipation’, encouraging dissolute living and the ‘appetites of the flesh.’

Socio-economic inequalities are also the hallmark of this modern civilization, Nursi adds, with the Western attitude being “So long as I am full, what is it to me that others die of hunger?” and “You work so that I can live in ease and comfort’. By allowing the rift between the classes to widen, the West has engendered so much strife and sedition that it is on the brink of bringing humanity to its knees, giving rise to the struggle between capital and labor – itself the precursor of two World Wars and bloodshed and disorder on a hitherto unknown scale.

One could go on, but surely the point has been made: it was impossible for Said Nursi to approve of a civilization in which the negative aspects outweighed the positive so decisively. For Nursi, the only way forward for man is to embrace a civilizational form which brings true happiness and prosperity – and if not for all, then at least for the majority.

Human beings are faced with a choice: belief in the sovereignty of God or belief in the sovereignty of man, with all that such a choice entails. For Nursi, the way to salvation consists solely in choosing the Other over the self, and it is in the dynamics of this choice that the key to an understanding of Nursi’s take on the ‘true civilization’ may be found.

For Said Nursi, for man to be truly human, he must establish for himself not an Islamic state, but an Islamic state of mind. If, in secular shorthand, ‘civilization’ is the highest thing towards which man as a social being can aspire, let us see how Said Nursi redefines the term to make it truly meaningful for limited, impotent man, giving it the ability to ‘confront the awesome silence of the grave’ in a way that no other civilization is able. Comparing Western civilization with the ideational entity known as Islamic civilization, he locates the source of the former in human artfulness (daha) and that of the latter in Divine guidance (huda). These sources, he holds, impact in very different ways on society in general and the individual in particular.

Artfulness, writes Nursi, functions in the mind and confuses the heart. It looks to the material and to the corporeal, considering the body and the evil-commanding soul, which it seeks to nurture. It develops the potentialities of the nafs while making of the ruh a servant or slave. In its love of this world, which is the only world it recognizes, it turns man into a satan, worshipping deaf nature and, in its blindness, drawing a veil of ingratitude over the face of the earth. It sees the bounties before it as ownerless booty, which it usurps like a common thief.

Guidance, on the other hand, works in the heart and lights up the spirit. It develops man’s potentialities and spiritual capacities and, in so doing, illuminates nature. It makes of the soul and the body and in so doing produces happiness in this world and the next. It sees Divine art everywhere, and the wisdom and power of God in all things. It worships Allah, the possessor of art and power. It is both seeing and hearing, and as it benefits from Divine bounties, it scatters the light of thankfulness all around it.

In Nursian terms, then, to be truly civilized, man must be truly human, and to be truly human, his goal is not the kind of khilafa that engenders power but the kind of khilafa which engenders worship – namely the nurturing of each individual soul into its true state as khalifat Allah fi al-ard, vicegerent on Earth. This, for Nursi, marks the true civilization to which man should aspire.

Dr. Colin Turner from Durham University, UK, is the co-author of Said Nursi, 2009, Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and IB Tauris, London, New York.

If you find something hard to grasp, do you immediately conclude that you have reached the limit of your cognitive ability and give up? Do you usually associate successful outcomes with smartness and failures with lack of intelligence? Do you consider intellectual ability an indispensable component of every accomplishment, or it is the effort-plain, sweaty hard work-that brings about the desired outcome?

The above questions tackle the dilemma of effort versus ability. Although it can be relevant to more than one topic and domain, this article will elaborate on the dimension of intelligence. Is intelligence a fixed, innate talent bestowed by heredity? Is it an accumulated, cognitive reservoir constructed through such personal factors as effort and motivation, and such environmental factors as held in common by family and community members?

A Historical View

The effort/ability dilemma has been very controversial in the West. It has not been a mere academic debate, but one with political and social implications and a very eager public interest. The publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) had a major impact on biology and other fields.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, advocated applying Darwinian principles to human society and coined the term eugenics, from the Greek words of “good in birth.” In his Hereditary Genius (1869),(1) he argued that mental features are as hereditary as physical features, and that a selective breeding of human beings (similar to horse breeding) could raise the proportion of people with a better-than-average genetic endowment. This new approach helped Darwin extend his evolution theory in The Descent of Man (1871).(2)

Galton believed that intelligence and ability are fixed, innate, and determined by heredity. This idea is proven by accomplishments in competitive careers.(3) He proposed the encouragement of good marriages as a way to create a superior human race, not so much as a way of “unwanted” ones. Gregor Mendel’s work on genetically transmitted dominant and recessive traits increased interest in eugenics.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed an overwhelming belief in eugenics in academia and among intellectuals, politicians, and businessmen.(4) It became “an established fact” that single-unit genes determined such traits as alcoholism and mental incompetence.

Such conclusions naturally had political and social implications. For example, beginning in 1911, the United States tested arriving immigrants to assess their “worthiness.” Since many of those tested did not speak English and had just endured a long and difficult sea voyage, scores were low, and particularly lower for certain ethnic groups.(5) As a result, the US Congress passed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which enforced quotas for unfit ethnic groups. Many American states also passed laws mandating sterilization of inmates judged to be genetically inferior.(6)

The fiercest implementation of eugenics happened in Nazi Germany. The 1933 Eugenic Sterilization Law required compulsory sterilization of all German citizens deemed to be suffering from presumably hereditary defects, including offensive physical deformities. Sterilization of the unfit was later transformed into many of the war crimes committed during World War II.

Eugenics’ association with World War II era war crimes and genocide ruined its popularity and reputation. However, some parts of its principles are still considered valid by some scientists in various fields. Two examples are the nature and causes of difference in human intelligence, and whether intelligence is hereditary or not. In other words, people are not identical to each other in the areas of comprehending complicated material, reasoning, learning, and solving problems. Researchers do not agree on the sources of these differences, and hence ask: “Is there a general mental ability called ‘intelligence’ that causes these differences, or is the underlying cause something else?”

Theories about Intelligence

Presented below are some contemporary theories about intelligence and its determinants.

The Psychometric View: This view claims that individual differences in human cognition or mental ability can be measured adequately by intelligence tests.(7) Many widely used tests seek to measure some closely related criteria, such as scholastic aptitude and academic success-not intelligence itself. Examples of such tests in the Unites States are the SAT or ACT (college admission), GRE (graduate school), and GMAT (graduate business school) exams. Although test administrators try to distance themselves from testing one’s actual intelligence (namely, one’s I.Q.), it is generally accepted by the research community that one’s IQ and the above tests are closely related.(8)

IQ tests are offered in many verbal and non-verbal forms. The general practice for IQ scores is to scale them around 100 in such a way that 95 percent of the population falls between 70 and 130.

Psychometricians assert that people are born with unequal intellectual potentials, just as they are born with different physical potentials, such as height and eye color. They also state that no amount of social engineering can make individuals with different mental competences into intellectual equals.(9)

One American social engineering program is Affirmative Action. This program encourages underrepresented minority groups in society to pursue education and business through required quotas. For example, state universities are required to accept a certain percentage of minority freshmen. If the psychometric view is true, these programs will fail and amount to discrimination against the capable. In their controversial book, Hernstein and Murray maintained this view together with the heredity of intelligence and genetic IQ differences between races.(10)

In short, this view states that a single factor known as “intelligence” can be measured with IQ tests and predict success in life.

The Cognitive-Psychology View: Adherents of this theory view intelligence as a process, not an innate ability. The process consists of creating a mental representation of problems encountered, retrieving apparently related information, and devising a solution. In short, it emphasizes experience for success in life, but does not completely eliminate the relation between general intelligence and experience.

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence Theory: In his Frames of Mind, Gardner argues that psychometric tests ignore several aspects of intelligence. He also claims that the tests’ paper-and-pencil format rule out many kinds of intelligence performances that are important for success in life.

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory: This view asserts three dimensions of intelligence: Analytic intelligence (similar to the psychometric, IQ-based view); creative intelligence (involves insight, synthesis, and intuition); and practical intelligence (the ability to grasp, understand, and solve real-life problems).(11) Although Sternberg does not reject some heredity in intelligence, he strongly believes that all three aspects of intelligence can be developed.

Problems with the Psychometric View

The psychometric view claims that intelligence is the single best predictor for individual performance at school and on the job, as well as for chances of divorce, dropping out of school, unemployment, or having illegitimate children.(12) However, the interactions and correlations of various factors in social studies make it very difficult to draw such conclusions. One cannot know for sure if intelligence is the cause or the result of the above-mentioned factors. It may very well be the case that some other criteria contribute to both the outcomes outlined above, and to the high scores as measured by IQ tests. Here are some remarks on the psychometric view of intelligence and its relation to success in life:

• Many people with high IQ scores fail to become successful due to a lack of motivation, personality, laziness, or short attention span. In contrast, some people with low IQ results succeed due to personal dedication, vision, systematic effort, and motivation. A low IQ score can be changed through conscious choice and effort. As an analogy, consider a gifted athlete. Some athletes have special talents for a particular sport. However, they fail to perform as well as those without those talents, for the latter depend on systematic effort. Readers familiar with sports can name several specific examples of this phenomenon. • An IQ test may be a speed issue. That is, it may measure only how quickly people learn or solve complex problems. It is a well-known fact that once something is learned, the performance of a person with a lower IQ is not significantly different from that of a person with a higher IQ.

• A certain amount of intelligence seems to be needed to gain entry into an intellectually demanding field. However, beyond that point, success is determined by the effort put into the job, social support, and experience.

• Average IQ test scores have been increasing in the West for several decades. However, school performance has remained almost constant, if they did not actually decrease. This clearly indicates that success in life is not directly related to IQ scores.

• People can improve their test scores by becoming familiar with the test. This implies that expending the necessary effort can affect the outcome.

• Cultural and family environments (e.g., beliefs, oppression, poverty, fear, and lack of health care) together with such biological factors as nutrition and exposure to toxic substances (e.g., alcohol), affect IQ scores. Flynn analyzed Asian Americans’ IQ test scores and found that they were always around 97 or 98. However, their academic and professional achievements were remarkable; equivalent in achievement to people with IQ scores of over 120! This can be attributed to a cultural belief in learning, as summarized in Gorner.(13) According to Claxton, Western cultures focus on ability as the major determinant of success. If you fail, it is probably because you were not smart enough. Asian cultures, however, emphasize effort and generally consider failure the result of a lack of effort.

• A common error is to assume that something heritable is unchangeable. Infants adopted into advantaged families tend to have higher IQs in childhood than would have been expected, had they been raised by their birth parents.(14) This is further proof that how a child is raised and what he or she is exposed to have very long-lasting effects. Further, and individual’s personal choice has considerably more impact on one’s life than usually thought. A recent initiative at the University of Chicago, the RealAge Program led by Michael F. Roizen, stresses the importance of an individual’s choice on how long and how well they will live. He claims that 70 percent of this is determined by one’s personal choice.(15) So even if heritability is high, intervention is possible.

• Some claim that IQ tests measure nothing more than cultural conditioning, education, and language fluency. As these are not inherited in the same way as eye color and other physical factors, they can be modified.

Conclusion

Considering the above remarks, it is very difficult to conclude that intelligence can in any way be a fixed, innate ability that determines success in life. If the very few exceptionally gifted and mentally retarded people are left out, most people have an almost equal potential for success in life. Men and women were created for the purpose of learning. This lifelong learning process and its outcome are closely tied with the effort expended. Anybody can become better at anything, provided that they strive for it with the means available to them. Encountering difficulties should not prevent people from trying harder. Learning to learn is possible, and depends upon the willingness to stay engaged when faced with uncertainty. Without rejecting the effect of genetic factors, we can have a significant effect on our own well-being and success in life through conscious choice and effort.

Footnotes

1. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius, reprint (Peter Smith Pub., 1990).
2. Encyclopedia Britannica, “Sir Galton Francis.”
3. Leslie Jones, “Social Darwinism Revisited,” History Today (August 1998).
4. Paul Gray, “Cursed by Eugenics,” Time, 11 January 1999.
5. Rawat Rajiv, “The Return of Determinism,” Cornell Science and Technology Magazine (summer 1995).
6. Sterilization is defined by American Heritage dictionary as follows: “To deprive (a person or an animal) of the ability to produce offspring, as by removing the reproductive organs.”
7. Earl Hunt “The Role of Intelligence in Modern Society,”American Scientist (July-August 1995); Report of a Task Force established by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7 August 1995.
8. For historical reasons, intelligence tests are termed IQ, which stands for “Intelligence Quotient.”
9. Linda S Gottfredson, “The General Intelligence Factor,” Scientific American, (November 1998).
10. Richard Hernstein, and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995).
11. Frank Miele, “Interview with Robert Sternberg on The-Bell Curve book”, Skeptic Magazine, 3, no. 3 (1995).
12. Guy Claxton, “Wise Up,” Bloomsbury (September 1999), 26.
13. Peter Gorner, “Interview with Dr. Richard F. Roizen,” Chicago Tribune (Perspective section), 28 November 1999.
14. Report of a Task Force established by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7 August 1995.
15. Gorner, “Interview.”