Download Can Activist Scholars Learn Research Methods from Rumi

Can Activist Scholars Learn Research Methods from Rumi?
Radha D’Souza1
Draft only – Not to be cited
Comments may be sent to [email protected]
The Unhappy Scholar
Soon after I received the invitation to contribute to a ‘festival of dialogues’ in this
volume I had to sit in a research committee meeting where we were briefed about the
next round of research assessment exercise by the Higher Education Funding Council
for England (HEFCE) now renamed Research Excellence Framework. The HEFCE
proposes to introduce ‘bibliometrics’: a system that will measure the worth of
knowledge that scholars of the land produce by using quantitative metrics. The metric
system will be used to put a price on each piece of scholarly work through research
funding mechanisms so that mouse-clicks can be sold as music in the knowledge
bazaars of the world. I remembered a verse from Hazrat Maulana Jalal-ud-din Rumi:2
If in the world thou art the most learned scholar of the time, behold
The passing-away of this world and this time! [I: 2845]3
1
University of Westminster. E-mail: [email protected]
Rumi (30/09/1207 – 17/12/ 1273) needs no introduction. He is one of the greatest thinkers in the
philosopher-poet traditions of the East known both to the West and East.
3
Throughout this essay I use Reynold A Nicholson’s translations available in three volumes. See
Reynold A Nicholson (1926)and (1977[1930]). Nicholson’s translations published from 19251940 in six volumes with commentaries and extensive footnotes, is considered a monumental
contribution in its own right. Nicholson provides extensive footnotes to his translations to make
the meaning explicit without losing the poet flavour of Rumi’s writings. I have quoted the verses
verbatim with the footnotes and provided the book and line numbers in the text for reference.
Jalal-ud-din Rumi’s Mathanwi (also Masnavi) comprises six books and 25, 700 verses. The
purpose of the Mathanwi is primarily pedagogic.
2
I could readily envision the world ‘passing away’ drowned in mouse-clicks. Outside
the academe, notwithstanding many Nobel prizes awarded to economists, many
distinguished centres for study of economics, many thousands of volumes published
on the fickle behaviour of markets, on ways of taming its booms and busts, pensioners
faced prospects of living without pensions, workers of living without wages, and
children growing up with reduced funding for education. Yet everyone turned to the
very economists to bail them out of their situations. Further away daisy bombs, cluster
bombs, phosphorous bombs, biological weapons, land mines, all products of many
generations of enlightened scientific scholarship reduced ancient civilisations to
rubble. Would the Hazrat be laughing in his grave as his bibliometrics continue to soar
eight hundred years after he was published? Or would he be weeping at the destruction
of Palestine and Iraq, Jaffna and Afghanistan and Pakistan and many others parts of
the world including modern Turkey where he rests (in Konya), as he wept eight
hundred years ago for the trauma and destruction caused by the Crusades and
Mongolian invasions? The inspiration for this essay was born at that moment.
In this essay I wish to reflect on the condition of the unhappy scholar (not to be
confused with the critical scholar) in the present times by seeking inspiration from
Rumi, another unhappy scholar living in unhappy times amidst invasions, incessant
wars and economic turmoil.4 It is not the purpose of this essay to engage or even
present Rumi’s metaphysics, his ontology, conceptions of knowledge, views on freewill and determinism, the nature of Love and Reality and such. Instead, my purpose in
invoking Rumi is limited, even banal. I seek to use Rumi’s monumental work The
Mathnawi as a source of inspiration to reflect on an emerging sub-field in critical
scholarship that we know as ‘activist scholarship’, a field that sets itself the task of
building bridges between theory and practice in the present context.
4
For the historical and social context in which Rumi lived and wrote see: Afzal Iqbal (1983
[1956]).
Why Rumi?
One of our lived realities today is the dominance Euro-American ways of thinking and
being, institutions and ideologies, scholarship and activism. As shorthand we may
refer this dominant way of thinking and being as ‘modernity’ without getting into
definitional debates.5 Communication of counter-cultural ideas must take into account
the intellectual environment in which the engagement occurs. At this practical level
Rumi more than any other Eastern scholar is known and respected in the West by the
intellectual community. In the East, Rumi is sung, revered, and remembered by
ordinary people. Pop groups, Bollywood, beggars on trains, professional musicians,
continue to sing his songs. At a personal level, the year 2007 was declared by the UN
as the International Year of Rumi. This is my way of remembering Rumi.
More importantly many of the themes in Rumi’s works are re-emerging in the critique
of modernity that informs activist scholarship. Dominant amongst these are nondualism, the importance of ontology, the significance of absence and negation, the
nature of Reality, the importance of psychological and emotional dimensions of life,
immanence and transcendence, theory-practice relations, structural constrains, love as
a dynamic cause, ethics and choice, free-will and determination, and above all
emancipation and freedom themes particularly significant for activist scholars.
What is interesting about the re-emergence of these themes in contemporary activist
scholarship is that in ‘indigenous’ societies and more particularly in Asia and the
Middle East, these themes have returned repeatedly in the wake of wars, economic
turmoil and crisis in the natural, social and emotional worlds of people. The salience
of these themes in indigenous cultures appear to provide the people with resilience
against adversities, an ‘inner strength’, that modernist scholarship finds difficult to
account for. How do people who have been abused repeatedly for centuries by
colonialism, caste, poverty and destruction of their natural, social and emotional
5
For an excellent non-Western, non-modern account of European modernity see J.P. S. Uberoi
(2002).
worlds remain human? What nurtures their humanity? Modernist scholarship reaches
its limits here.
It is not surprising therefore that these themes have re-emerged in dissident activist
scholarship today against the backdrop of widespread angst caused by the dislocation
of relations between nature and people, society and people and individuals and groups,
as well as dislocation between past and future where the present becomes the site of
multiple dislocations. Many of the points made in this essay could be inspired by other
equally influential thinkers of the East but I limit myself to Rumi in this essay for
reasons mentioned.
Activist scholars critique modernity with a purpose: they wish to become the
handmaiden of human emancipation. To work for emancipation they argue it is
necessary to be creative in their research and innovative in their research methods.
Can we learn anything at all from the Hazrat? And here, I desist from adding ‘about
research methods’ (the subject of this volume) for fear of sounding like the
grammarian in Rumi’s story referred to the next section.
Creativity and Scholarship
May we not commence our search for new pathways to creative research by asking
first of all: is it paradoxical to speak of creativity and research in the same breath?
What exactly are we, the activist scholars, seeking? Is it philosophical consistency
between the objectives of our inquiry and the methods of our inquiry? Is this
creativity? Or, are we seeking something else altogether that we mistakenly believe to
be research and scholarship? Can we attempt to discern something in this regard from
Rumi’s story of the grammarian and the boatman?
A grammarian once sat in a boat to be ferried across a river. Appalled by the
boatman’s crude language he derided the boatman saying: ‘have you not studied any
grammar at all?’ ‘No’ replied the boatman. ‘Half your life is wasted’ the grammarian
scolded. The boatman was hurt but kept quiet. Soon they were engulfed by a storm.
‘Have you never learned to swim?’ the boatman asked the grammarian. ‘No’ replied
the grammarian. ‘Your entire life will be wasted,’ the boatman replied.
Stitching this story into his commentary Rumi writes:
‘In self-loss,6 O venerated friend, thou wilt find jurisprudence of jurisprudence,
the grammar of grammar, and the accidence of accidence’ [I:2847]
We are carrying jugs full (of water) to the Tigris: if we do not know ourselves to
be assess, asses we are. [I: 2849]
Rumi is critical of disciplinary boundaries of knowledge but not for the reasons given
by critics of modernity viz., that it atomises knowledge and perforce impels us to see
the world through cracked lenses. Indeed why should the activist scholar bother with
how we see Reality? Whether it appears cracked, or unified or unreal or imaginary? Is
this not a rehashed version of knowledge for its own sake? A self-justification for
scholars? Rumi’s reasons for decrying disciplinary knowledge are different.
Because every pipe is connected with the reservoir. Dive, dive into (ponder
deeply) the meaning of these words.
(Consider) how the imperial grace of the homeless Spirit7 has produced effects on
the whole body;
How the grace of Reason, which is of goodly nature, of goodly lineage, brings the
entire body to discipline;
How Love, saucy, uncontrolled, and restless, throws the whole body to madness.
The purity of the water of the Sea that is like Kawthar (is such that) all its pebbles
are pearls and gems. [I:2824-2827]
For whatever science the master is renowned, the souls of his pupils become
endued with the same. [I: 2829]
6
7
‘Literally, “in becoming less.”’ Nicholson’s footnote.
”i.e. the spirit, which has no spatial relations” Nicholson’s footnote.
Knowledge includes reason and unreason, the rational and the psychological
dimensions of life, the space-less/timeless and space-time contingent aspects, the
mystique of how Reason and Love continue to animate the human spirit in every
context and situation. We the scholars circumscribe the souls of our students/recipients
of our knowledge such that the student of theology or law or grammar flounders when
confronted by poverty, the boatman, the quintessential fakir.
Here language itself becomes an obstacle for the activist scholar forced to work within
the constraints of modernist languages of discourse which divides and segregates the
language of philosophy and science from poetry and art. The fakir is literally the poor,
but also a mystic, a simpleton, an unassuming, non-ostentatious person, a humble
person, someone who is not egotistical or self-centred. The fakir is not the poor
standing in binary opposition to the rich therefore. The activist scholar seeking
creativity and new pathways to knowledge requires extensive footnotes and
commentaries even to begin to comprehend the gap between thought and language.8
While thought is developed through epistemologies (scholarship), language has grown
from deep ontological/cosmological conceptions of the world9.
To the extent that modernist knowledge wrenches people from the ontological
premises of their languages it violates the depths of their beings. Not surprisingly
scholarship critical of modernity in recent times grew within the discipline of Cultural
Studies. Cultural Studies does not however transcend the divide between philosophy
and poetry, science and art by developing a new language that can articulate the
convergence of immanence, transcendence and everyday human life. Activist
scholarship aspires for the convergence but must choose between the language of
philosophy or the language or poetry, not both. Consequently transdisciplinarity,
immanence and transcendence itself become intellectualised categories distanced from
the storms that engulf everyday life. Ontology is reduced to an epistemological
problem and ceases to be self-awareness of ways of being in the world.
8
Note the extensive footnotes that Nicholson needs to use to get across the message of the
Mathnawi.
9
See Clifford Greetz (1993 [1973].).
More pertinently it is the fakir with nothing to his name who remains unperturbed
during a storm. The point may be contextualised by a recent event that most people
today are familiar with viz., the overwhelming opposition to the invasion of Iraq in the
Euro-American world. The impulses for the anti-war protests that erupted everywhere
were many but the one slogan that captured the sentiment of anti-war protestors was:
‘No Blood for Oil’. A popular slogan, it was seen on placards in many marches and
countries. Can we live without oil though? There is enough scholarly research out
there on the politics of oil that tells us oil has been the curse of ordinary people in
many parts of the world throughout the twentieth century. Yet, the slogan was not:
‘No Oil. Oil is Blood’. The slogan ‘No Blood for Oil’ acquired the meaning: ‘we want
oil but without the blood’. Whether this is possible or not is not the point here. The
point is that the angst about oil lurked under the surface. Few if any had the
confidence or daring to say publicly: ‘we can get by without oil’. If such voices were
around they were clearly drowned by the oil-angst.
This is a world where a vast majority of people are poor and live without electricity, or
heating or cars or the benefits of industrialised life. They live all the same. The peace
marchers were not inspired by the world’s poor to live without oil even when they
knew the price was blood of Iraqi children, women and men. The ‘no blood for oil’
slogan was inspired by critical scholarship in economics, politics, military,
environmental sciences and philosophy which provided economic, political, military,
environmental and philosophical reasons for opposing the war. Critical scholarship
interpolated ethics into dominant scholarship as if ethics is an ingredient that can be
thrown into the cauldron of scholarship to right the wrongs of the world. Critical
scholarship could not provide the courage and inner strength in people that could
prompt them to say: ‘Life did not begin with oil; it will not end without it’. We know
beyond doubt that the world existed without oil one century ago and hopefully it will
survive the oil-wars and continue to exist with or without oil.
Put the grammarian, the egotistical scholar, into wider perspective of Life’s infinity,
Rumi tells us, but he tells us this using syntax and grammar, using ghazals and ruba’is,
carefully choosing his meter and rhyme. It is the ghazals that touch our hearts,
transform reason and logic into unreason and passion with transformative powers.
It is possible to see the philosopher-poets of the East as pre-modern activist scholars.
The philosopher-poet traditions in the East deliberately broke with the language of
scholars to make philosophy accessible to ordinary people through combinations of
poetry and stories. Rumi was accused by his peers of hanging out too much with ‘the
tailors, the cloth-sellers and the petty shopkeepers’ (Iqbal A. 1983 [1956]). In India,
Tulisdas wrote the Ramayana in vernacular verse (as opposed to classical Sanskrit)
because he said he wanted to awaken the Ram that was in every dhobi (washerman)
and chamar (cobbler)10. Kabir sang to fellow weavers, and Bahinabai to housewives.
Meera wandered the bye-lanes of Brindaban singing her songs to ordinary people. The
philosopher-poets composed philosophy in verse. The songs of Rumi and the Bhakti
philosopher-poets of India are sung everywhere in the East over centuries.11 Sung over
centuries by ordinary people they infuse life into philosophy and make philosophy a
living force. Their songs imbue ordinary people with a world view, an outlook on life,
which essentialist discourses on nationalism, or reductionisms of scholars writing
about the ‘Persian soul’, ‘Islamic civilisation’ or the ‘Hindu mind’, fail to capture, and
often misunderstand and misrepresent.
In South Asia the colonisers did not recognise the philosopher-poets as philosophers
proper and treated them as poets. Consequently the only texts that came to represent
Indian philosophy were those comparable to doctrinal works of Western philosophers
penned down by dominant, mostly Brahmin scholarship. In the Islamic world
philosophy’s place in society was transformed by the profound influence of European
scholarship such as Aristotle, neo-Platonians, Plontius and others. Rumi reversed that
influence. Once dissident philosophers were downgraded as poets it was an easy next
step to brand popular resistances against the social order, including colonialism, as
madness without intellectual foundations. Nevertheless, the songs of philosopherpoets define the self and the Self (higher/cosmic self), unify the human with the
10
See Amritlal Nagar’s historical novel in Hindi based on Tulsidas’ life: Manas Ka Hans, 1972,
New Delhi, Rajpal & Sons.
11
On Bhakti poets in India see essays by A.K. Ramanujan in: Vijay Dharwadker (1999: Section
3).
Human in ways that aid people, de facto, to transcend the banality of everyday life and
sustain their humanity.
Of all the disciplinary divides we see the one between science and aesthetics has been
the most devastating. The divide makes it difficult to unify the internal and external
worlds, immanence and transcendence in life and Life. Social science speaks in the
language of reason and intellect and produces its anti-thesis the novel, that popular
product of modernity, that speaks the language of passion and the psyche. The
philosopher-poet traditions recognised that language must fit with thought and that if
we are to speak of non-dualism, of the convergence of immanence and transcendence
in the human spirit, if we are to unify that which has gone and that which is yet to
come and unify it in the moment, philosophy had to switch to a different language as
its vehicle.
If the head and the heart speak in different genres how shall we bridge the two? How
shall we get them to speak to each other? What language shall we invoke to be
creative? The pathway to creative research is confronted with a roadblock right at the
start of the road.
Method and Madness
Activist scholarship seeks to build bridges between theory and practice, head and
heart, by exhorting us to become activist-scholars such that activism may be infused
scholarship and scholarship with activism, and knowledge could be put to work for
social transformation, for a more just and equitable world, whatever that may be. They
hope that creativity in research will help us overcome the paradox that scholars have
rarely had transformative effects on the world, and people who have had profound
transformative effects on the world have rarely been professional scholars. A recent
campaign by human rights activists in the UK (on-going at the time of writing) affords
an opportunity to interrogate the assumption that activist scholars make about
knowledge and action, about knowing and being.
The ‘Release Binayak Sen Now’ campaign in the UK is a human rights campaign
against the detention of Dr. Binayak Sen in India. In the contemporary world Dr. Sen
fits the image a pir or sage in pre-modern societies. He is an award winning
paediatrician (a man of knowledge), who devotes his life to the service of poor
(humility and service), lives simply (life of renunciation) and speaks for human
dignity (higher ideals) as a democratic rights activist. Amnesty International declared
him a Prisoner of Conscience after he was imprisoned by the Indian state for two
years. A signature campaign was launched and thousands of people signed the petition
for his release in the UK and elsewhere including many Nobel Prize winners and
many very ordinary people.
Pertinently, very few of the two thousand odd signatories to the petition were human
rights scholars. This was notwithstanding the fact that many individuals who had
written scholarly books on human rights, criminal justice, global justice and related
matters were personally invited to sign the petition. Many who signed the petition
knew very little about human rights or criminal justice or international law. Indeed for
many ordinary people the fact that a ‘good man’ was put behind bars was all the
information they needed to impel them to act, even when they did not know the man
or his goodness or the legalities of his imprisonment. The pertinent point that requires
consideration is this: if there is no logical nexus between knowledge and action, can
activist scholars hope to bridge the divide through creative research, a goal they set for
themselves?
Rumi tells the story of a drunk man and a police inspector. A police inspector finds a
drunk man fallen by the wall. An argument ensues between them. The policeman
interrogates him about the drink. ‘What did you drink?’ the policeman asks. The man
knows nothing about the properties of the drink except that it made him happy. ‘You
are drunk’ the Inspector tells him, ‘get up and come to prison’ to which the drunk man
replies:
Said the drunken man, “O Inspector, let me alone and go away. How is it possible
to carry off pledges from one that is naked?
If indeed I had the power to walk, I should have gone to my house – and (then)
how would this (affair between us) have occurred?
Were I (still) possessed of understanding and of contingent (unreal) existence, I
should be on the bench, (giving instruction) like the Shaykhs.” [II: 2387-2391].
Knowing the rules, definitions, causes, and conditions of drunkenness is something
entirely different from actually being drunk which is not contingent on the knowledge
of wine and its effects. A doctor knows a great deal about medicine but still falls ill
just like the others with no knowledge of medicine12.
Indeed the powers that be, the police inspectors of this world, portray those who act,
‘do the thing’, ‘get drunk’ in Rumi’s story, as madmen. Newspapers routinely refer to
activists as irrational, unreasonable, ‘loopy lefties’ and such. Pictures of bra burning
women, tree hugging anti-logging activists, guitar stringing ‘peaceniks’ or suicide
bombers are seldom represented as ‘normal’ rational people. Rationality required that
Dr. Sen set up practice as a paediatrician and earned money some of which he could
reasonably give away in charity. But giving everything away is unreason, irrational.
Yet, it is irrationality that survives, provides new insights, in Dr. Sen’s case insights
about the ways in which the social context of the poor negates the assumptions that
medical science research makes about ailments. Irrationality keeps the flag of human
freedom fluttering high. Rumi, contrary to received wisdom, ridicules the policeman
instead, who could very well see that the man is drunk and yet commands him to walk
to the prison as if his command can override the effect of drunkenness. Finding
happiness in drunkenness, joy in renunciation, fulfilment in activism, requires grasp of
another more fundamental reality, namely that the human spirit is not contained by or
even contingent on scholarship, and that scholarship is not the exclusive repository of
knowledge.
Scholarship is about method, about subjecting the objects of knowledge to rigorous
investigations, testing and evaluating, following rules of inquiry that the scholars set
for themselves. Activism is about madness, about negating method, to be drunk in
preference to knowing about the properties of wine. The non-method, the madness, is
12
See Afzal Iqbal (1983 [1956]: p.78)
based not on ignorance but on superior knowledge, knowledge that transcends the
intellect and grasps intuitively the human spirit. As Rumi points out intellect and
reason are necessary but not sufficient, and intellect does not exhaust knowledge. It
takes us thus far and not further after which there must be a reversal of roles between
reason and unreason, intellect and intuition:
When a man’s understanding has been his teacher, after this his understanding
becomes pupil.
The understanding says, like Gabriel, “O Ahmad (Mohammad), if I take one
(more) step, it will burn me;
Do thou leave me, henceforth advance (alone): this is my limit, O sultan of the
soul! [I: 1065-1067].
Since antiquity rational scholarship has always presented ‘roadblocks’ in the pathways
to creative search for knowledge of Being and Self. But modernist scholarship more
than any other erects impenetrable fortresses and systematically disarms us from every
possible tool that human civilisation may have equipped us with to transcend the
boundary between intellect and intuition. In this activist scholarship is no different.
Activist scholarship seeks to establish equivalence between scholarship and activism,
put them on par in a reciprocal relationship. In contrast, Rumi invites us to consider
them in an evolutionary order where human mind transcends from instinct to intellect
to intuition. Madness is a mature intellect that gives up method because of its very
maturity. This is a foundational difference and one that prompts us to examine, not the
obstructions to creative scholarship, but the ways in which scholarship can become an
obstruction to creativity and human emancipation.
Emancipation and Knowledge
Emancipation requires two types of knowledge: knowledge of constraints, the cages
that imprison us, and knowledge of how to be free, how to get out of the cage. From
the knowledge of constraints it does not follow automatically or logically that we will
know the way out of it. Rumi highlights what is entailed in going from one type of
knowledge to the other in his story of the parrot and the merchant [I: 1547-1574;
1587-1602; 1649-1658; 1691-1825-1848].
A merchant set off on a business trip to India. He had a caged parrot that he had
brought from India on one of his earlier trips and he was very fond of it. Being a
generous man he asked his slaves and hand-maidens what they wanted from India and
the slaves asked for different presents. He asked his parrot what she wanted from
India. The parrot said: ‘tell my fellow parrots in India I long to be free, that it is very
unfair that they should fly in freedom while I live in this cage’. When the merchant
conveyed this message to the parrots in India, one of them collapsed and became
motionless. The merchant, believing the Indian parrot to be dead, regretted conveying
the message and unwittingly causing the parrot’s death. When he returned home he
told his caged parrot about what had transpired. His parrot too collapsed and became
motionless. Believing his parrot to be dead the merchant threw it out of the cage. No
sooner she was out of the cage the parrot flew up swiftly, perched at a height and
looked at the merchant. The distraught merchant asked the meaning of the message of
the Indian parrot. Rumi writes:
The parrot said, “She by her act counselled me—‘Abandon the charm of voice
and thy affection (for thy master),
Because thy voice has brought thee into bondage’: she feigned herself dead for
the sake of (giving me) this counsel,
Meaning (to say), ‘O thou who hast become a singer to high and low, become
dead like me, that thou mayst gain release.’” [I: 1830-1832].
We, the activist scholars focus on the constraints, the cages that imprison us and we
highlight the structures and sources of oppression and injustice. We expect that
freedom from the cage should follow. When it does not follow we become
disillusioned and bitter or resigned and fatalistic. It is the very superiority of our
scholarship however, like the beautiful voice of the parrot that makes emancipation
illusive. Our affection for the merchants of knowledge who imprisons us, our loyalty
to the more liberal/progressive research and academic institutions, keeps us in
bondage even when we long for freedom. We seek better rules of scholarship instead
of freedom from rules. Elsewhere I reflect on the institutional and ideological
constraints on activist scholarship.13 What Rumi is telling us is to give up the very
things we do best; the very generosity and kindness of the merchants of knowledge
that we depend on stops us from making the transition from intellect to intuition. Is it
possible that by seeking to improve our research methods we are actually replacing an
iron cage with a golden one? And will doing so bring us the emancipation we desire?
Miscommunications occur at every stage between knowledge and emancipation. The
merchant says one thing the Indian parrot understands it as something else. The
merchant thinks he caused the Indian parrot’s death, the Indian parrot has something
else on mind; the merchant does not discern the meaning of the message when he
repeats it to his parrot but his parrot grasps it straightaway. We emphasise so much on
communication and so little on miscommunications. Few revolutionary upheavals that
have shaken the world and transformed it were predicted or anticipated: that the
Bolshevik revolutions would succeed, that Russia would defeat Hitler’s invasion, that
the Afghans, with nothing to their names, would fight two of the worlds largest
superpowers for over thirty-five years, or that the global financial systems would
collapse like a pack of cards at the pinnacle of their dazzling success.
Activists know it is impossible to predict the actual outcomes of their struggles in
advance and that every struggle or fight can go one way or another. Did the coalmine
workers of Britain anticipate that their strike would unleash a series of events
installing neo-liberalism as the ruling order? Did the textile workers of Mumbai know
that their year-long strike in 1984 would mark a break with India’s ‘tryst with destiny’
that Nehru announced on the mid-night of 15 August 1947?14 Activists continue to
struggle even when they know that the outcomes of their struggle is indeterminate.
13
Radha D’Souza (2009).
Nehru’s well known radio broadcast to the world announcing India’s Independence at midnight
on 15 August 1947 where he spoke of ‘India’s tryst with destiny’.
14
Their actions are based on their faith in the justness of their cause. Scholarship does
not recognise faith however.
Scholarship as we know it, activist or otherwise, cannot accommodate that which is
indeterminate, unknownable, infinite or absent, except as an abstract theoretical idea,
because scholarship is about certainty, about knowing, about the finite and that which
is present. Any talk of the unknown, the absent, the infinite or indeterminate becomes
therefore something mystical. Mysticism is cast in antithetical terms to reason and as
the source of faith. Consequently, faith is cut adrift from humanity and reason and
appears as something blind and inhuman (supernatural). The point may be exemplified
by a question that is particularly vexatious to activist scholars: is socialism dead?
Those who answer ‘yes’ use philosophical and theoretical arguments to contradict
historical determinism, vanguard role of the working class, the transformations in the
structure of capitalism since the early twentieth century and so forth. Those who
answer ‘no’ point to equally sound philosophical and theoretical arguments about
regimes of accumulation, polarisation of wealth, human alienation caused by
capitalism, the continued expropriation of masses of people and the continuities
between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries that continue to make socialism
relevant. The arguments become mired in all sorts of logical and empirical questions.
Both overlook a more important point. Is it possible that the resilience of the idea of
socialism has little to do with reason or scholarly arguments?
Struggle for life is an attribute of Life and struggle for freedom an attribute of society.
Every worm turns when squashed and societies have rebelled against injustices since
times immemorial. In a specific geo-historical context oppression takes the form of
capitalism and resistance to it takes the form of socialism. Socialism continues to
inspire because it is in sync with social ontology of which quest for freedom is an
essential attribute. Socialism is therefore in sync with an uninterrupted continuum of
humanity’s struggle to sustain Humanity. Regardless of the consistencies or
inconsistencies in our arguments for or against socialism humanity will rebel against
injustices and their struggles will be informed by the context and the specific forms
that injustice takes within it.
The growing emphasis on ontology should therefore point to the inevitability of
struggle, not because of determinism, but rather because of our understanding of
ontology, the nature of being, and our understanding that action is an attribute of being
human, and to act for freedom, an attribute of society. Given that capitalism persists
the struggles against it will bear a strong imprint at least or be advancements over
previous anti-capitalist struggles. Grounded this way in ontology and without
empirical or theoretical reasoning (in modernist epistemologies) the argument appears
to appeal to faith, the mystical human spirit, and appears to be outside the domain of
reason and intellect properly speaking. If ontology is about being, then does it not
follow that a call for ontological awareness should transform the way we see, act and
be in the world?
For Rumi, the mystical is an invitation to action and struggle, a gauntlet that must be
picked up.
Do thou arise and blow on the terrible trumpet, that thousands of the dead may
spring up from the earth.
Since thou art the upright-rising Israfil (Seraphiel) of the time, make a
resurrection ere the Resurrection.
O beloved if one say, ‘Where is the Resurrection?’ show thyself, saying, ‘Behold,
I am the Resurrection.
Look, O questioner who are stricken with tribulation, (and see) that from this
resurrection a hundred worlds have grown!’ [IV: 1478-1481]
What is it that impels us to pick up the gauntlet, to step forward and say to the
doubters, the ‘questioner’: I am That, I am the proof and the participant, the subject
and the object, the route and the destination? A very different type of knowledge is
needed to pick up the gauntlet, to be free and to fly from the cages that imprison us.
Knowledge that addresses the intellect, that focuses on difference, explanations,
causality and such, do not provide knowledge of actions, why and how we act, what
propels it and where. Action is beyond the realm of the intellect and belongs to the
realm of emotion and psyche. How do we transcend from the realm of the intellect to
the realm of intuition and passion?
For Rumi, Love is the key to action. Love is what helps us transcend from knowledge
of constraints, the cages that imprison us, and know how to be free, how to fly the
cage.
Love and Knowledge
Struggles for emancipation are everywhere around us, have always been around us at
all times. The eternal struggles against injustices should not surprise us because the
quest for emancipation and freedom is an attribute of society by virtue of its
ontological characteristics. What is novel however is how and why some of us feel
inspired by the struggles and wish to jump into the fray and others are content to stay
of safer grounds as witnesses from a distance. The point is particularly pertinent for
activist scholars.
A rational explanation for the choices people make often omits something living and
vital. For example, the Meerut Conspiracy case is an important moment in India’s
freedom struggle. The case concerned the arrest and trial of thirty-two men ostensibly
for conspiracy to overthrow the British government in March 1929. Of the thirty-two
men three were Englishmen and they too were convicted alongside the Indians. What
made the three Englishmen come to India and jump into the political struggles there
exposing themselves to charges that carried the death penalty? It could not be only
because of their knowledge of what colonialism did to people, because many in
England had the same knowledge as the three men and yet they did not pack their bags
to come to India. Why did knowledge of colonialism animate the three men and not
others?
When workers go on strike or when displaced peasants protest against eviction from
their lands some of us support the workers and peasants and others the employers and
corporations even though we ourselves are neither workers/peasants nor
employers/corporations. Both parties appeal to higher values in us. The workers
appeal to our sense of fairness when they ask for fair wages and the employer appeals
to our sense of community arguing the strikers deprive people of cheap goods and
services; the peasants speak of the unfairness of their eviction, the corporations of the
need for economic development. Yet the question remains, why do the arguments of
the workers and peasants appeal to some of us and the arguments of the employers and
corporations to others?
Activist scholars invoke ethical and moral philosophy and theory and invite us to
choose a superior ethic. If the aim of activist scholars is to unify knowledge and
action, the appeal to higher morality, a superior ethic, does the opposite: it reifies the
knowledge-action dualism. Furthermore the appeal to intellect does not guarantee that
ideas will have transformative effects. Marx said when ideas grip the masses they
become a material force. Can appeals of activist scholars to superior reason give ideas
their transformative powers? Make us ‘just do it’?15. Can we learn something from
Rumi?
For Rumi, Love is the life force that animates, energises and activates everything.
Love is not an idea capable of philosophical comprehension as an object of
knowledge. It is not a philosophical category associated with Beauty, Truth,
Goodness, Perfection, nor is it a unifying principle or a cosmological principle or a
mediator between two contending forces, the arbiter between good and evil.16 We
cannot articulate Love in words, nor comprehend it, but we know it exists because of
its transformative powers. However, Love does not exist in opposition to knowledge
and reason or as something antithetical to it, but to grasp its existence and its ways
calls for higher, more advanced knowledge.
By love bitter things become sweet; by love pieces of copper become golden;
By love dregs become clear; by love pain become healing;
By love the dead is made living; by love the king is made slave.
15
16
Ibid D’Souza (2009: p.19).
Dr. Khalifa Abdul Hakim (1965).
This love, moreover, is the result of knowledge: who (ever) sat in foolishness17 on
such a throne?
On what occasion did deficient knowledge give birth to this love? Deficient
(knowledge) gives birth to love, but (only love) for that which is (really) lifeless.
When it sees in a lifeless being the colour (appearance) of a desired one, (‘tis as
though) it heard the voice of a beloved in a whistle.
Deficient knowledge cannot discriminate: of necessity it deems the lightning to be
the sun. [II: 1529-1535]
Love transforms nature, it transforms the way we see phenomena, the way we
experience the world, yet it remains invisible. It provides us with the capacity to
discriminate between the light of a candle and the light of the sun.
What exactly is Love though? Rumi replies:
Then what is Love? The Sea of Non-Being: there the foot of the intellect is
shattered.18
Servitude and sovereignty are known: loverhood is concealed by these two veils.
Would that Being had a tongue, that it might remove the veils from existent
beings!
O breath of (phenomenal) existence, whatsoever words thou mayest utter, know
that thereby thou hast bound another veil upon it (the mystery)
That utterance and (that) state (of existence) are the bane of (spiritual) perception:
to wash away blood with blood is absurd, absurd. [III: 4723-4727].
17
“[…] translate: “When did he (the fool!) in his vanity sit on such a throne?” Nicholson’s
footnote.
18
“I.e. the intellect is unable to swim in that Sea.” Nicholson’s footnote.
Love is “Non-being”, that which is not (absent), that which is yet to be (come into
being). As the absent non-Being, Love transcends and subsumes paradoxes. It can
only be lived and experienced. When we experience something and speak about it, we
speak about the effects produced by our actions, not the impulse that is the action.
Phenomenal world can only swap one veil for another. Love is life’s mystery, its
greatest secret, that which makes life immanent and transcendent and unites the self
with the Self. Our capacities to wonder, be amazed, be confounded and surprised, to
hope and fear, to laugh and cry, be heroic and cowardly, to be inspired and depressed,
to reach out to the sun with an immediacy, cannot be explained with words, it can only
be experienced. Living means: being open to the experience, to be receptive and
sensitive to the unknown.
Love as non-Being transforms the way we are in the world. When transformed by it
we see the world differently. Those who speak about Love, non-Being, ontology and
such without actually being in the world differently, their knowledge of these things is
at best deficient.
O balmer (of lovers), safety be thine! O seeker of safety, thou art infirm19.
My soul is a furnace: it is happy with the fire; ‘tis enough for the furnace that it is
the fire’s house.
For Love, as (for) the furnace, there is something to be burned20: any one that is
blind to this is not a furnace. [II: 1375-1377].
To do is to be, and to be alive.
Where does this leave the contemporary activist scholar? The kings under whom Rumi
lived were despots, nevertheless in his times a despot demanded the bodies and minds
of those they ruled, he had no way of claiming their being. We live under conditions
of Market despotism which demands our Being itself, the premise of our souls. When
19
20
“Literally, ‘having weak stays or handles.’” Nicholson’s footnote.
“I.e. the dross of sensual qualities.” Nicholson’s footnote.
we speak of ‘modernity’s dismissal of ontology’ we experience it in every day life as
the rule of Market despotism. We may speak what we wish, we may criticise,
radicalise, globalise, revolutionise things, be capitalist or communist, or obscurantist,
anything will do as long as what we do sells; as long as we remain obeisant to the
Market’s diktats. This includes activists and scholars alike: if the markets like the
scholarship or the activism, if it translates into mouse-clicks and monetary returns for
the knowledge institutions, into funding grants and projects for the social movements,
they survive, not otherwise. We are in a Catch-22 situation of means and ends: serve
the Market to critique it; or critique the Market to serve it.21
What is the activist scholar to do? Are we to abandon our scholarship and become
activists? Are we to become poets and wandering minstrels? Philosopher-poets may
have been the forerunners as activist-scholars, but do we not live in a completely
different historical context? Perhaps we could make a tentative beginning by trying to
grasp what the philosopher-poets actually did and what they aimed to do: their
“research objectives” and “research methods” if we wish to call it that.
Everyday Life, Love and Knowledge
The philosopher-poets did not abandon philosophy for poetry. Nor did they use poetry
as a vehicle for philosophical contemplation. The philosopher-poets did not
differentiate between philosophy and poetry. They used words in activist ways to
uncover Reality and to unify the head and the heart. The activist scholar of today
wishes to do the same: unify the head and the heart, but feels overwhelmed by the
task.
The activist scholar’s heart is with the activists and head is with the scholars. The
personality of the activist scholar becomes torn between head and heart, between
method and madness, reason and unreason. Often the activist scholar acts as a scholar
to the activist and, as an activist to the scholar; or remains equidistant from both. As a
21
The problem of means and ends in activism, scholarship and activist scholarship is a
problematic in its own right and merits proper consideration at another time.
result the activist scholar becomes an unhappy scholar. Who is the activist scholar
writing for? The conventional scholar is clear on this count: they write for fellowscholars. The activists act. But the activist scholar?
The philosopher-poets engaged in a more basic dialogue: the dialogue between the self
and the Self; they sought out the universal within themselves and marvelled at the
particularities of the world around them. To do that, to unify their inner and outer
worlds, they took everyday life as their source of inspiration and their point of
departure for their philosophy. From stories of everyday life they drew out the
universal everlasting nature of reality, life and existence. Their teachings remain
intelligible to this day to ordinary people for that reason.
Scholarship looks down on everyday life. Scholarship treats everyday life as banal,
without value; it justifies and rationalises the specialist knowledge of the scholar as
something superior and valuable. It commands a specialist language of scholarship.
When scholars do turn to everyday life as the object of philosophical contemplation,
they strip off the flesh and blood that sustains it. By emphasising differences,
opposites, contrasts, disputations, contradictions they are unable to experience Love,
the life-force that unifies everything and keeps the world going.
Philosopher-poets revelled in everyday life. Not only did they draw their inspiration
from everyday life, they broke with the methods of scholarship in their pursuits of
knowledge of reality and, their goals of unifying heads and hearts. They insisted that
Being must dictate knowledge not the other way around. It is not enough to talk about
Being and ontology; it is more important to walk the talk, to produce knowledge that
is premised on reflexivity of Being and Reality.
Modernist knowledge takes the demeaning of everyday life to extremes by reducing it
to numbers, statistics and generalisations, in other words it averages out human
experience. The human spirit is thereby expunged from the accounts of the world.
Discourses about theory-practice-theory dialectics sustain the duality of theory and
practice conceptually. The philosopher-poets unified theory and practice actually as
opposed to doing it discursively, by rejecting the methods of scholarship. They turned
to everyday life as an inexhaustible source of living stories, as Life’s treasury.
Stories from everyday life help to describe, explain and justify human experiences as
well as to illuminate, reveal and inspire. They provide knowledge of the world without
snuffing out its mysteries. Stories provide analogies and metaphors that help us
uncover layers of meaning, over come dualities, understand Reality in ways that
inspire us to act. The philosopher-poets saw their purpose as being to help people
transcend the difficult barrier between intellect and intuition, between knowledge and
action.
Activist scholars seek to break with modernist rules of scholarship, the research
methods, but only to redefine them and reinstate them. A fleeting moment of
dissidence becomes fossilised and lifeless after the moment has passed. For Rumi, it is
the seeking itself that is evidence of the seeker’s quest for Love, the life-force we see
around us everyday. The “research objective” is not to prove or disprove propositions
but to unravel the mystery of life, what keeps it going; and our place in the larger
schema of Life’s majesty. Their relentless seeking is itself evidence of the Love that
unites them with the cosmic Self. As Rumi says:
In whatsoever state thou be, keep searching; O thou with dry lip, always be
seeking the water,
For that dry lip of thine gives evidence that at last it will reach the spring-head.
Dryness of lip is a message from the water (to say) that this agitation (anxious
search) will certainly bring thee to the water22, [III: 1439-1440]
This search is the key to the things sought by thee; this (search) is thy army and
the victory of thy banners.
This search is like chanticleer crowing and proclaiming that the dawn is at hand.
[III: 1443-1444]
22
“Or, ‘bring thee to us (to me).’” Nicholson’s footnote.
The Activist Scholar as Activist Teacher
Unlike the scholars whose role was to provide instruction on methods in scholarship,
the role of philosopher-poets was to 'show the way', to guide people from theory to
action, to help them move from intellect to intuition. In order to 'show the way' they
had to be engaged in the world around them, have a good command over prevalent
scholarship and be ontologically self-aware and existentially open. Rumi like other
philosopher-poets gave teachers a pre-eminent place in their lives and in their
teachings. Teachers are more important than scholars because teachers illuminate the
way and infuse life into prosaic scholarship. Real knowledge is contingent on finding
an enlightened teacher.
Choose a Pir, for without a Pir this journey is exceeding full of woe and affright
and danger.
Without an escort you are bewildered (even) on a road you have travelled many
times (before):
Do not, then, travel alone on a Way that you have not seen at all, do not turn your
head away from the Guide. [I: 2943-2945].
Modernist knowledge dismisses the central place of the teacher and the Teacher in
society and gives over that place to the scholar. The notion of 'adulthood' wherein after
a certain age an adult no longer needs a teacher forecloses the formation of a
community of seekers who can act as guides to one another and to people in their
everyday lives. Knowledge is disembodied and reduced to scholarship by default. The
Teacher as a living embodiment of knowledge is expunged from learning in modern
societies and teachers in everyday life are reduced to a paid providers of services for a
limited span of time in a person’s life. No doubt one must choose ones teachers
carefully. As Rumi says:
Look long on the face of every one, keep watch attentively: it may be that by
doing service (to Sufis) you will come to know the face (of the true saint).
Since there are many a devil who hath the face of Adam, it is not well to give
your hand to every hand,
Because the fowler produces a whistling sound in order to decoy the bird23,
(So that) the bird may hear the note of its congener and come down from the air
and find trap and knife-point. [I: 315-318]
Like other philosopher-poets Rumi insisted on being a teacher with a message. He
wrote the Mathnawi for that purpose alone. And, he chose his words, their structure
and syntax in a way that was effective in conveying his message. In Rumi’s words:
Does any painter paint a beautiful picture24 for the sake of the picture itself,
without hopes of conferring benefits?
Nay, (he paints it) for the sake of guests and young people who by diverting
themselves (with it) may be relieved from cares.
From his picture (arises) the joy of children and the remembering of departed
friends by their friends.
Does any potter make a pot in haste for the sake of the pot and not in hope of the
water?
Does any calligrapher write artistically for the sake of the writing itself and not
for the sake of the reading?
The external form is for the sake of the unseen form; and that took shape for the
sake of another unseen (form).
Count up these corollaries to the third, fourth, or tenth in proportion to (your)
insight.
As (for example) the moves in chess, O son: behold the results of each move in
the next one.
23
24
“Literally, ‘in order that the birdcatcher may decoy.’” Nicholson’s footnote.
“literally, ‘the beauty of the pictures’” Nicholson’s footnote.
They made this (move) for the sake of that concealed move, and that for the next,
and that (again) for such and such. [IV: 2881-2890]
The activist teacher foresees the outcomes concealed in what they write and speak,
they unify the message and the medium such that the seeds of freedom and the desire
for emancipation that the sow today is immanent in the actions of tomorrow that is yet
to come.
Shorn of the verbiage of activism and scholarship, of academic jargon, is it not true
that deep down the activist scholar longs to be an activist teacher? That the activist
scholar is an activist teacher in search of a message and a medium that is out of
bounds? That the activist scholar is a teacher imprisoned by the iron walls of
scholarship? How then shall we break out of the prison except by ‘just doing it’?25
D'Souza R. (2009). The Prison Houses of Knowledge: Activist Scholarship and
Revolution in the Era of ﾓglobalizationﾔ. McGill Journal of Education 44 (1):120.
Dharwadker V., ed. (1999). The Collected Essays of A.K Ramanujan.(New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Geertz C. (1993 [1973].). The Interpretations of Cultures: Selected
Essays.(Hammersmith, London, UK: Fontana Press).
Hakim D. K. A. (1965). The Metaphysics of Rumi: A Critical and Historical
Sketch.(Lahore: The Institute of Islamic Culture).
Iqbal A. (1983 [1956]). The Life & Works of Jalauddin Rumi.(London: The Octagon
Press).
Nicholson R. A. (1926). The Mathanawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi: Edited from the Oldest
Manuscripts Available: With Critical Notes, Translation, & Commentary. Vol.
II.(London, UK: Cambridge University Press).
Nicholson R. A. (1977[1930]). The Mathnawi of Jalalu'ddin Rumi. Vol. IV.(London,
UK: Cambridge University Press).
25
Ibid D’Souza (2009: p. 19).
Uberoi J. P. S. (2002). The European Modernity: Science, Truth and Method.(New Delhi:
Oxford University Press).