Whether it be in our day-to-day dealings with our fellow human beings belonging to different religious and cultural traditions, or in other more refined and cultured contacts with them-for instance, in perusing books produced by the enlightened from among them-we often come across maxims that almost immediately catch our attention and receive our prompt approval.
This may well be due to the subtle principles underlying the tangible facts of life which cut across political and cultural boundaries and which such aphorisms are able to encapsulate in a manner that appeals well to both our feelings and imaginations.
Recently, while glancing at the STAR of February 13, an adage ingeniously interposed in an advertisement did exactly that. “Life is finite, while knowledge is infinite,” such read the piece of saw attributed to Zhuang Zi.
The statement, as well as the basic truth it expresses, is not at all new to me since I had come to know about it for the first time when I enrolled in a postgraduate class at the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC) sometime in 1992.
But that it is attributed to a Chinese sage is really something additional. Such appreciation regarding the common life-experience of human beings, which has been nurtured quite well at ISTAC during my postgraduate years, was reinforced a day later when I happened to cast a glance at a one-page advertisement in the same newspaper.
There, somewhere in the middle of the page, ran Luo Guan Zhong’s dictum, “Do not dwell in the past, do not stay in the present, change with the trends, change with the times.” This at once reminded me of Heraclitus’s fascinating remark, “You cannot step twice into the same river.” Hence, the rule, “change is the only constant in life,” a creed-like theme in today’s business and financial worlds.
The fact that, out of so many Chinese proverbs, those two above were chosen and quoted in product and business advertisements in a motto-like fashion somehow reflects the mind-set that is predominant in such worlds as well as in those sectors tuned to them.
The two are in fact not unrelated, especially if one is to take into account those changes which have taken place at breathtaking speed and which are spearheaded by the various inventions and innovations in science and technology, particularly in the ICT. “Information explosion,” being one of the indispensable outcomes of such changes, has fast become a cliché.
Susantha Goonatilake, ex-Senior Consultant on Science and Technology to the United Nations, once remarked, “Projects such as the Human Genome Project and Hubble Space Telescope are producing so much data that the metaphor used to describe this phenomenon is that of mere human mouths attempting to drink from a fire hose.”
Yet, at ISTAC then, as it is still vivid in my memory, appreciation as well as respect regarding the common life-experience of human beings is always coupled with recognition and acknowledgement of the different worldviews that underlie the various cultures and civilizations of the world. For, in line with the tawhid (uniting and intergrating) method of knowing and doing so characteristic of Islam, we were then taught that REALITY is both permanence and change, sameness and difference, objective and subjective.
So, while recognizing the shared dilemma-which both Muslims and non-Muslims have been facing-that our life in this physical world is finite whereas knowledge is infinite, Muslims must also be equally concerned with the solution to this plight. And it is in the solution to it that one may see the differences among the various cultures and civilizations. And insofar as Islam is concerned, the distinct solution it offers is made possible because of the worldview peculiar to it.
In Malaysia of late, so much has been said about the famous Islamic classification of knowledge into fard ain (religiously obligatory on an-individual-as-an-individual) and fard kifayah (religiously obligatory on an-individual-as-a-member-of-a-society). But few, as exemplified in the works of Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas and Wan Mohd Nor b. Wan Daud, have indeed approached and deliberated upon such a taxonomy in the context of the above dilemma.
This fard ain-fard kifayah categorization is in fact a prioritizing strategy that is offered to guide man in his pursuit of the limitless knowledge, so that what he may obtain will then be beneficial knowledge; that is, knowledge that suits his person not only for his joy in the limited life-span of the here-and-now but more importantly for his happiness in the there-and-after, knowledge that not only feeds for his bodily development but also nourishes for his spiritual uplift.
It is exactly this age-old categorization when reformulated within the purview of the aforementioned dilemma that may shed light on the dynamism inherent in the fard ain knowledge.
Unfortunately, rather than being understood as `ilm al-hal (knowledge which progresses according to one’s personal development) as the 12th century al-Ghazali and the 13th-century Zarnuji had explained, the fard ain knowledge has been wrongly regarded by Muslims of the later centuries as being static and very much confined to the primary and secondary schools.
Therefore, such a contemporary pronouncement as “the mastery of the natural science, despite being a fard kifayah knowledge to the Muslim community, is a fard ain knowledge to a Muslim scientist (viz., an individual Muslim specializing in science),” strange though it may sound to the ears of the present-day Muslims, is really in line with the original spirit of the above classification and truly reflects its vigor.
This is in fact a logical conclusion of its reformulation from its traditional root and context, as reasserted by Mohd Sani b. Badron in his paper presented during the recently held Seminar Penguasaan Sains sebagai Suatu Kefarduan: Ke Arah Penyuburan Budaya Ilmu yang Islami at IKIM.
As such, the Muslims’ mastery of the contemporary science and technology-in fact of the numerous valid branches of contemporary knowledge-can indeed be spearheaded by a proper reprioritizing and restructuring of their respective educational system and curricula along the lines logically suggested by the original formulation of the above classification.