Mohammad Gill August 18, 2003

Tags: philosophy

href="/tag/Islam">Islam with a title of “Islam in Crisis” and I think I too had written some comments on it. So I opened up his personal profile box on Chowk and was intrigued to read:

Rasheed Talib qualified as a Barrister from Lincoln’s Inn, UK, in June 1958. After practicing for 2 years at the Bombay High Court, he joined Lever Brothers’ Bombay Head Office as legal counsel. Didn’t much like the commercial life; so left this MNC to become a journalist in New Delhi, where he worked for more than 18 years as Senior Assistant Editor/Political Editorial Executive Editor/National Columnist at India Today newsmagazine….

It appears that Mr. Talib spent more time in professional journalism than in his original legal field. How many others have switched boats in their lifetime, I wonder. I am happy for Mr. Talib for his switchover, particularly if he felt more at home doing journalistic work than the legal work for which he was eminently qualified. His profile didn’t show if he had received any professional education or apprenticeship for the work that he later chose to do for his gainful employment, interest and satisfaction. Self-education is the best form of education but one has to work really hard at it.

It is heartening to know that at the age of 74, he is still active and plans to publish a book on Islam. Many people, even some of the ambitious ones, hesitate to undertake such a project for fear that they may not be considered fully qualified to write a book on Islam, a religion which is not easy to tackle particularly if one doesn’t have some formal educational grounding in it for self confidence and to show and evince the people of his appropriate credentials. Such a hesitation has left Islam completely in the lap of the ulema and mullahs who usually produce routinely tame and stereotypical works which are devoid of elements of originality and critical analysis. The Orientalists’ contributions are not considered trustworthy by majority of the Muslim readership because they believe that the authors are fundamentally inimical toward Islam.

There are many instances of other persons who had initially started a certain professional field for some personal and extraneous reasons but later on moved on to newer and greener pastures. Some of them made historical contributions to their fields of subsequent choice. One of such historical personalities was P.A.M. Dirac. His first university degree was in electrical engineering but then he went on to do his Ph.D. in mathematics. He made revolutionary contributions to quantum physics later on. He predicted the existence of antimatter on the basis of his theoretical work. Incidentally, he was one of Professor Salam’s teachers also at Cambridge University. Salam had said about Dirac that in a way he was a greater scientist than Einstein because Einstein was helped by other professional mathematicians in his work while Dirac produced his own mathematics, which he needed in his researches in theoretical physics.

Another person that readily comes to mind is Paul Feyerabend who eventually ended up in philosophy. He was one of the three luminaries of the twentieth century philosophy of science; the other two being Professor Karl Popper and Professor Thomas Kuhn. He had a false start in physics, astronomy, and mathematics during his growing up years. He also attended music classes assiduously and at an early stage he wanted to be a singer. Even in later years when he was firmly established as a professor of philosophy at University of California, Berkeley, he yearned to be known as a singer rather than a philosopher.

In his school days he was reputed to know more physics and mathematics than his teachers. He wrote in his autobiography, “I was interested in both the technical and the more general aspects of physics and astronomy but I drew no distinction between them. For me, Eddington, Mach (his Mechanics and Theory of Heat) and Hugo Dingler (Foundations of Geometry) were scientists who moved freely from one end of their subject to the other.” At another place in his autobiography, he wrote, “The course of my life was clear, theoretical astronomy during the day, preferably in the domain of perturbation theory, the (drama) rehearsal, coaching, vocal exercises, opera in the evening….; and astronomical observations at night.”

According to http://plato stanford edu/entries/feyerabend/112, “At the university of Vienna, although he had originally planned to submit a thesis on physics, Feyerabend swapped to philosophy when he got nowhere with the electrodynamics problem he was calculating (the philosopher of science as failed scientist?).” He completed his doctoral thesis on ‘basic sentences’ or ‘protocol sentences’, i.e., the kind of sentences that, the Logical Positivists had theorized, comprise the foundations of scientific knowledge.

He was kind of an intellectual rebel. He started as an assistant to Professor Karl Popper at the London School of Economics and later left him due to disagreement with Popper’s philosophy, in particular his theory of falsification. His rebellious attitude is manifested in his writings in which he criticized physical science, including physics, and the scientists. This criticism is included in his book, which he called “Against Method.”

Thomas Kuhn who is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the twentieth century also started with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. His major was solid-state physics. However, he started his career as an assistant professor of general education and history of science at Harvard. He later became M. Taylor Pyne Professor of Philosophy at Princeton. His book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is monumental and one of the most read books of the latter part of the twentieth century. He is known for introducing the nomenclature of ‘paradigm’ and ‘paradigm shift’ in specific philosophical perspective.

Although Kuhn did not do any fundamental work in physics in which he had a Ph.D., his background was amply suited for the kind of work, which he did in his professional life. So in this respect, he was not really a square peg; he indeed had a snug and comfortable fit in the round hole of philosophy that he had chosen to abide in.

Both Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s critical work provided ammunition to the postmodernists in their vendetta against physical science. According to the postmodernists, physical science including physics is culture-dependent like sociology. This controversial view, which is apocryphal in my opinion, led to the ‘science wars’, which raged furiously during the last decade of the twentieth century but the fires of their fury have still not extinguished.

Allama Iqbal was a born poet. However, he got sick of poetry during his stay in London, 1905- 08. Sheikh Abdul Qadir who was also in London at that time and used to socialize with Iqbal described Iqbal’s disaffection with poetry in his foreword of Bang-e-Dara. He wrote, “One day Sheikh Muhammad Iqbal said to me that he was determined to give up writing poetry and that he would take an oath not to write verses again. He would devote his time that he used for writing poetry, in some other useful engagement. I told him that his poetry was not of the genre that should be abandoned…” Finally, on Professor Arnold’s persuasion, Iqbal changed his mind and remained loyal to his natural talent.

I do not have any substantive evidence in support of my premise but I am inclined to believe that Iqbal’s indifference to poetry arose from his religious belief. The Quran does not extol poetry and poets but suggests that poetry should not be considered a desirable occupation. According to the Holy Quran: And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them. Do you not see that they wander about bewildered in every valley? And that they say that they do not do, (Quran, The Poets, Chapter 26, 224-26).

Whatever the reason, Iqbal seemed to dislike, if not despise, poetry, yet at the same time he owed his fame and popularity to this God-given natural gift. Had he forsaken poetry and practiced philosophy in which he had acquired a Ph.D., he would have been an ordinary philosopher. Because of his exquisite poetry, he was called the Poet of the East.

There are countless lesser lights that are either misfit in what they spend most of their time or their daily chores do not wedge with their professional education and learned skills. Human life is indeed a veritable conundrum.