Problem Narrative is Problematic

I

In a world increasingly obsessed with diagnosis, the proliferation of problems has become its own self-sustaining industry, a vast machinery of concern that thrives not on the resolution of ailments, but on their perpetual redefinition and reproduction. Every domain of modern discourse, from activist circles to academic departments, from NGO funding proposals to political manifestos, from mental health apps to global development goals, functions by constantly generating new categories of disorder, disadvantage, and dysfunction. We are no longer allowed to simply be; we must now be diagnosed. One must have a trauma, a disorder, an oppression, a crisis of identity to be taken seriously. Entire vocabularies, terms like microaggressions, toxic masculinity, eco-anxiety, internalized patriarchy, gaslighting, racial trauma, neurodivergence, have emerged not as clarifying lenses, but as new moral currencies. One is not heard unless one suffers, and one cannot suffer unless one has a problem that fits the new codes. The academy trains students not in wisdom but in the mining of grievances; NGOs survive not by healing, but by proving that wounds are widespread and growing. Even the therapist, the life coach, the activist, and the social scientist are now members of a professional class of problem-curators, agents who cannot afford to let problems end, for that would render their relevance, their funding, and their identity obsolete. And thus, the world becomes a theatre of perpetual crisis, where man is no longer treated as a soul journeying toward truth, but as a bundle of traumas, triggers, and needs to be managed, named, and endlessly narrated. The problem has become the premise, and the premise has disappeared.

Modern discourse today is overwhelmingly occupied with the articulation, enumeration, and repetition of problems. It collects symptoms, compiles statistics, formulates terminologies, and builds vocabularies around what is felt, perceived, or suffered. Activists rally around structural injustices; therapists explore trauma and emotional injury; academics produce papers on inequality, alienation, or oppression; international organizations publish indices on mental health, poverty, and discrimination. Conferences are held to share experiences of struggle; social media feeds are filled with diagnostic language; entire curricula are built around identifying sites of harm. The work of naming, documenting, and narrativizing affliction has become both a scholarly method and a cultural performance. Pain is parsed into categories; emotions are given clinical terms; societal frictions are labeled with ideological tags. Across platforms and professions, the central task has become the articulation of grievance, making the “unseen” visible, the “unheard” audible, the “unspoken” speakable. This activity is considered virtuous, progressive, and necessary, and it dominates contemporary institutions of knowledge, advocacy, and governance. Whether in classrooms, courtrooms, newsrooms, or boardrooms, the primary labor is the surfacing and repetition of what is wrong.

This culture of surfacing has produced a new genre of public speech, where the emphasis lies in simply stating that one is unwell, aggrieved, or oppressed. A student speaks of exam stress, and it becomes anxiety. A worker feels exhausted, and it is termed burnout. A disagreement is labeled trauma; discomfort becomes marginalization. Institutions respond by offering support groups, safe spaces, helplines, and workshops, mechanisms to manage, not to understand. The vocabulary itself expands with alarming speed: emotional labor, microaggressions, body dysmorphia, climate grief, generational trauma — each term entering the bloodstream of culture with diagnostic authority, even when lacking ontological clarity. It is akin to a doctor walking into a room and announcing, “The patient is sneezing, coughing, and shivering,” then calling a press conference to raise awareness about these symptoms, while never identifying the infection that binds them. The fever becomes the story; the infection remains unnamed. The medical charts are full, the language technical, the urgency palpable, but the diagnosis absent. In such a world, symptoms become not a path to truth, but a destination in themselves. We learn to live with them, speak them, fund them, and sometimes even find identity in them, while the illness remains untouched, even unseen.

This relentless framing of life as a series of problems cultivates a cruelty beneath the surface. As emotional distress is publicly declared and categorized, it becomes both spectacle and validation: a cultural ritual where suffering is not only acknowledged but subtly celebrated. Psychological studies show that when others are perceived in pain, some individuals experience a grim satisfaction, everyday sadism, deriving a distorted pleasure from the misfortune of others. Discussing problems gives a sense of satisfaction to the sadists. Similarly, pathologizing commonplace emotions like stress or disappointment turns every minor discomfort into a spectacle, amplifying negativity and feeding collective misery. This turns society into a mirror of discontent where negativity is reinforced, praised even.

Compounding this is our psychological tendency toward negativity bias. The brain’s hardwired focus on the negative means bleak narratives capture attention, linger in memory, and drown out nuance. When public discourse equates problem-discussion with problem-solving, the discussion becomes the solution, and the act of naming suffering substitutes for real healing. We mistake narrative for remedy, becoming sadistically attached to seeing everything through a lens of dysfunction. In so doing, the very act of speaking the problem becomes the performance and the payoff, without ever challenging the deeper illness.

Moreover, every time we say “there is a problem,” we are saying, whether we admit it or not, that something has deviated from how it ought to be. The word “problem” is not neutral; it is comparative. It implies a structure, a norm, a correct state from which the present condition has fallen. Yet the modern project, built on the sand of relativism, has no stable conception of such a norm. What is the baseline from which we deviate? Is it emotional well-being? Is it equal representation? Is it freedom from all restraint? The secular order cannot say, because it denies any metaphysical ground. Neither can those who participate in these conversations with no seriousness, no insight, and no sense of intellectual responsibility. For many, the invocation of problems is not an act of inquiry but a performance, a habitual gesture of participation in the moral economy of the day. They have not thought through what they are saying, nor do they intend to. Some lack the tools, they have no conceptual training, no intellectual discipline, no grounding in logic, grammar, metaphysics, or history. Others are simply surfing the currents of relevance, using problem-speech to remain visible in a crowded social media ecosystem, to project virtue, or to insert themselves into conversations that earn social capital. For some, the act of discussing problems has become a form of mimicry, repeating phrases and postures absorbed unconsciously from digital culture and institutional jargon. And for many more, as discussed earlier, there is a kind of sadistic gratification in the repetition of negativity, a catharsis found not in healing but in the spotlight of affliction. In all these cases, the invocation of “problems” is emptied of seriousness; it is no longer a call to meaning but a ritual of belonging, a way to prove that one is alert, engaged, and on the “right side” of discourse, even as the truth remains untouched, and the disease undiagnosed.

And without such a ground, the entire architecture of the problem narrative collapses into subjectivity. Problems then become not deviations from a known truth, but deviations from desire. “This feels bad to me” becomes “This is a problem in the society.” The aberration is no longer from divine order but from personal discomfort, collective sentiment, or shifting consensus. What is left is a civilization pathologizing the normal, elevating the temporary, and moralizing every discomfort. And the greatest tragedy is this: when you no longer know what health looks like, every condition becomes a crisis, and every crisis becomes an identity. The “problem” then becomes an emotive construct, often inflated to justify the existence of ideologies, bureaucracies, and professions. Problems are manufactured so that problem-solvers and their ideologies can remain relevant.

II

To truly diagnose, one must first know what health looks like. A doctor does not begin with symptoms; he begins with an image of the healthy body, the proper function, the correct state. It is against this that all dysfunction is measured, and only then can symptoms take on meaning. Diagnosis, in its deepest sense, is not the naming of appearances but the unveiling of causes, it is the movement from what is seen to what sustains. Likewise, to understand the crisis of our age, its confusions, its pathologies, its incessant grievances, we must begin by naming what is right, what is true, what is whole. Without this, we are condemned to remain problem-oriented: circling endlessly around what is wrong, unable to move toward what is good. The mind trained only in detection becomes a servant of decay. It is only the one who sees the correct form who can recognize its deviation, and who, by knowing the telos, can work toward rectification. Thus the first task of revival, before critique or protest, is affirmation, the rearticulation of the correct state of being. Without it, we are not diagnosing, we are simply reacting.

But even the clearest image of health is meaningless without the tools to detect its absence. A patient cannot diagnose himself simply because he feels unwell. Nor can a layman look at a scan and determine the nature of a tumor. The physician must be trained, must have studied anatomy, pathology, pharmacology; must have passed through rigorous discipline, the long years of MBBS and MD, the dissecting of form, the interpreting of signs. Diagnosis is not just intuition, it is an art built upon science, judgment refined by method. And if this holds for the body, how much more so for the soul, for society, for the structure of human being itself? We cannot speak of what has gone wrong until we know what is, what ought to be, and what tools allow us to measure the distance between them. In our age, every man with a grievance becomes a theorist, and every discontent becomes diagnosis. But without the grammar of tradition, the logic of revelation, the scaffolding of metaphysics, the rigour of usūl, there can be no truthful identification of ailment – only noise. The Muslim tradition, unlike modern academic disciplines, did not separate ethics from epistemology. It gave us the tools – naḥw (grammar), manṭiq (logic), maʿānī (semantics), uṣūl al-fiqh (legal theory), and ʿilm al-nafs (science of the soul) – not merely to speak, but to see, not only to observe pain but to recognize its root. Without these, we are not diagnosing, we are hallucinating.

This is why so much of today’s social commentary feels hollow, theatrical, or emotionally charged without weight, because it is carried out by those who have never studied the liberal arts. Everyone plays the faqīh, the ethicist, the social critic, yet few have trained in the intellectual instruments that make such commentary valid. Opinions are launched without naḥw, arguments are made without manṭiq, judgments are passed without balāgha (rhetoric), the very pillars that once defined Islamic and classical inquiry alike. In the tradition, before one could speak on moral or legal matters, one had to first be shaped by the trivium, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and then matured through the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. This was not ornamental; it was essential. These disciplines refined the soul, disciplined the tongue, and ordered the mind. A man who had not mastered how to think could not be trusted to say what to think. The ancients understood that knowledge is not information but form — it is the ability to see relations, identify principles, and articulate order. This is why Ibn Khaldūn, Al-Fārābī, and even Imam al-Ghazālī before authoring their major works, passed through rigorous study of logic and metaphysics. Without these foundations, thought becomes reaction, and commentary becomes performance. Today, in contrast, the one with the most followers becomes the voice of truth, and the microphone replaces the ijazah. But the soul cannot be healed by noise. It requires the return of discipline and the revival of the arts that make both vision and speech meaningful.

Much of today’s commentary is uttered by individuals created by a failed educational system — a system Peter Drucker and James Mursell would lament. As Mursell put it in his prescient essay The Defeat of the Schools, our institutions are performing a “spectacular and most disconcerting defeat”, “the schools go through an elaborate, costly, and exasperating set of motions … yet what is contained in textbooks … refuses to transfer itself to the minds” of learners. Students memorize facts without acquiring the intellectual discipline to think; they complete formulas without understanding their purpose. And so today, en masse, we have men and women parading as moral diagnosticians, pundits, and social critics, yet they are, in Mursell’s words, “routine rather than thinking.” They lack the depth to question structure, ask why, or perceive cause. For all practical purposes they are all fifth graders, sophomores at best.

India’s most recent ASER data lay bare the consequence. Despite near-universal enrollment, more than half of fifth-grade children in rural India cannot read a second-grade text or perform basic arithmetic operations. These are not minor gaps, they are foundational failures. And yet, these same classrooms produce “experts” who claim authority on identity, policy, oppression, religion, family. Illiterate in logic, grammar, critical thinking, they diagnose society’s ailments without any real grasp of causality. They have no conceptual toolkit, no grounding in metaphysics, no discipline of language, no mastery of the sciences of soul or society, but they speak with certainty. We thereby birth a mass of uneducated yet credentialed commentators, who cannot diagnose illness because they did not train to understand health, who cannot identify pathology because they lack training in structure. And thus the problem-narrative metastasizes, carried forward by those who, by education’s own failure, are unfit even to observe. [Listen to “Sull Kaak’s Podcast Season 03 – Schools Have Failed” for more on this]

And yet, despite all the confusion, all the noise, all the untrained voices, people still feel that something is wrong. This in itself is proof of something deeper. They may not know how to name it, they may mislabel it, or be misled into false causes, but the feeling itself is real. It is not a social construct. It is not a product of ideology. It is a metaphysical intuition. It is fitrah – the primordial structure of the human soul, which even when clouded by error, still registers disorder. Fitrah does not speak in academic terms, nor does it need theory to detect misalignment. It is the compass given to every soul, by which truth is tasted, beauty is felt, and injustice becomes unbearable. It is why even a child feels shame when lying, or why a heart aches in the presence of cruelty, or why despair feels unnatural. This is why fitrah must be our grounding, the point from which all diagnosis must proceed. It is what remains when ideologies collapse and institutions lie. It is what tells man, even in the midst of madness, that he was not made for confusion, for atomization, for spiritual loneliness. When our tools are broken and our systems corrupted, fitrah becomes the final litmus. And unless diagnosis roots itself in this Divine mold, it will remain a performance and never a cure.

Fitrah is the norm — not a preference, not a consensus, not a cultural product — but the original, Divinely-inscribed order of being. Just as health is not defined by what the majority feels but by how the body was created to function, so too the soul has its health: its natural state, its right orientation. Diseases are not new truths — they are aberrations from fitrah. They are disturbances in a system that was meant to operate with harmony, submission, modesty, gratitude, and recognition of the Divine. If we are to truly speak of problems, then every such discussion must begin not with grievance but with fitrah — with the rediscovery of what man was made for. And this question, “what is the content of fitrah?”, can only be answered by another, deeper question: what is the purpose of life? For telos determines structure. The design of anything, its lines, limits, and logic, only makes sense once its end is known. A knife is judged not by its shape but by its ability to cut; a human being is understood not by feelings but by purpose. This is why in classical metaphysics, and especially in Aristotle’s framework, a complete explanation of anything required the four causes: the material, formal, efficient, and final cause. And the most important was the final cause, the telos, without which no proper understanding could emerge.

For the final cause is not merely one among many; it governs the others. The efficient cause, the agent who brings something into being, acts only because of the telos he envisions. The carpenter chisels the wood (material cause) according to a particular design (formal cause) only because he intends to create a chair, for sitting. The purpose of sitting is what gives meaning to his action, what directs the form he chooses, and what determines which materials are suitable. Without the final cause, the other causes are mute, they have no orientation, no cohesion, no intelligibility. The chisel would move, but without aim; the form would appear, but without justification; the material would exist, but without fulfillment. Telos is the architectonic cause, it integrates the rest into a meaningful whole. And so too with man: his physiology, his psychology, and his context and actions can only be properly understood when his purpose is known. And it is here that modern discourse fails most profoundly, it removes telos from man and then wonders why nothing fits. Modernity speaks endlessly of causes but denies purpose. In doing so, it blinds itself to fitrah. But Islam does not. Islam begins with telos: wa mā khalaqtu al-jinna wa al-insa illā liyaʿbudūn, “I did not create jinn and mankind except to worship Me” (Qur’an 51:56). And in this telos, fitrah is not just known, it is illuminated.

III

I believe that the contents of fitrah are best outlined, and fully expressed, within the edifice of Islam. Not as a cultural artifact, nor merely a moral framework, but as a revealed architecture of being that names what man is, what he is for, and how he must live. For those who share this conviction, another principle must follow: that the classical understanding of philosophy as the handmaiden of theology is not a historical curiosity but an imperative. All inquiry, all disciplines, from metaphysics to logic to ethics, must ultimately be harnessed in defense of the Islamic conception of reality. Philosophy does not replace revelation; it clarifies, supports, and defends it. It is light reflected, not light self-generated. But this defense cannot be waged with borrowed slogans or shallow polemics. It requires a deep revival of the religious sciences, not just their preservation, but their intelligent reactivation. This revival has two essential tasks. First, to cultivate genuine acumen, to train minds in the rigorous grammar, logic, and semantics of traditional Islamic knowledge, so that they may speak with authority and clarity. Second, to direct that training in service of Islam, to guard the integrity of fitrah, to shield the soul from confusion, and to articulate the Islamic state of being in a world drowning in deviation. Without these twin efforts, depth and direction, the diagnosis remains blind, and the discourse becomes either apologetic or incoherent. But with them, the Muslim mind becomes once again a source of healing, of order, of ḥaqq.

In essence, what we urgently need today is not more pamphleteers but faqīhs, jurists in the broadest, deepest sense of the word. The Arabic faqīh (from the root fa‑qā‑ha, “to understand”) is not merely an expert in legal rulings; the classical usage describes one who deeply grasps the nature of things. He is not only learned, he is a dervāsh, a man shaped by knowledge and soft on the world, stern in principle. Tradition even likens him to someone who, in a pen full of sheep, discerns the one that is pregnant: he recognizes the hidden. Thus the faqīh is not only versed in fiqh but in the heart. He is one whose character (akhlaq) has been formed by his learning; he is buzurg, morally elevated, and muḥsin, full of excellence. A true faqīh diagnoses society’s illness not by loud proclamation, but by the quiet depth of his insight. He knows the tools, grammar, logic, rhetoric, usūl, tafsīr, Tasawwuf, and more than that, he embodies their spirit: integrity, humility, refinement. In him, the mind and character are one; his speech heals, his witness moors the soul to dignity. He is not merely an expert in law, he is an expert of the heart.

But such individuals, these faqīhs of mind and heart, cannot be produced in a vacuum, nor in sterile institutions divorced from tarbiyah. They must emerge from a culture whose inner structures are already shaped to hold the water that is Islam. You cannot pour revelation into a cracked vessel. The form must precede the filling. This is why classical Islamic cultures, traditions like that of Kashmir, matter. Such traditions were not incidental to Islam; they were its body, its aesthetic, its adab. The inner world of a Kashmiri villager who had memorized the shrukh of Sheikh-ul-ʿĀlam, walked barefoot to the khānqāh, and bowed his head before a buzurg, that world carried the conditions for sainthood. It created souls who could become like Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani or Mehboob-ul-ʿĀlam Sheikh Hamza Makhdoomi, not by miracle, but by cultivation. At the center of this cultivation lies adab, the moral and aesthetic order through which the soul is prepared to receive guidance. Adab is the soil in which taqwā is seeded, for the Qur’an declares that guidance is for the muttaqīn, and there is no taqwā without adab. It is culture that teaches a child to walk with humility, to speak with restraint, to sit in majlis with reverence, to listen before answering. Music is adab of sound; painting is color placed in adab; poetry is emotion in adab. When we say someone is “cultured,” we mean they possess adab, not merely etiquette, but an inner symmetry that reflects the sacred. This is the precondition of the faqīh, not just mastery of rulings, but being formed by a world where reverence is instinctive. And until such cultural ecosystems are revived, we will produce technicians, not sages.

At the heart of culture lies not only art or custom, but cognition, the very structures through which a person learns to see, interpret, and judge the world. Culture is not just what we wear or sing or eat; it is what we assume, what we intuit, what we recognize without needing to articulate. These are cognitive structures, inherited patterns of discernment, and they are formed over generations through rituals, language, stories, architecture, proverbs, even silence. A child raised in a society where elders are not interrupted, where metaphors are thick with Qur’anic reference, where daily life orbits around the adhan, where modesty is a natural reflex, that child absorbs a structure of perception. His intellect is not abstract but embedded; his thinking is guided by the rhythm of revelation. This is what we have lost. Today, we try to teach Islam in cognitive vacuums, stripped of cultural containers, detached from inherited rhythms, and we wonder why the student memorizes the ruling but misses the hikmah. You cannot produce a faqīh whose eyes have not been trained to see through sacred patterns. And those patterns are encoded in culture, in how we name, how we mourn, how we eat, how we speak. Without these cognitive structures, the sacred appears foreign, abstract, forced. But when culture carries cognition, Islam becomes second nature, not because it is reduced, but because it is rooted.

The crisis, then, is not merely that we speak too much of problems, it is that we have forgotten what a problem even means. We mistake symptoms for causes, visibility for truth, and narration for cure. We have built an entire culture of diagnosis without ever defining health, a theatre of crisis where no one remembers what the stage was built for. The problem-narrative has become a loop, feeding itself, manufacturing relevance, and distracting us from the one question that matters: What is man for? And unless we answer that, not abstractly, but metaphysically, culturally, and spiritually, we will only multiply symptoms while denying the disease. The answer lies in fitrah, and in Islam as its clearest expression. But this answer must be embodied: in institutions rooted in tarbiyah, in culture alive with adab, in intellects formed by the religious sciences, and in hearts shaped like the sages who once walked among us. We do not need more awareness campaigns. We need more faqīhs. Not just legal technicians, but those who see with the eye of the heart, the dervishes, the muhsins, the buzurgs. Only they can name the disease, and only through them can the soul of our civilization begin to heal.