Our Culture – Part 2 – Forces of Displacement

In Part I, we unraveled culture as the unseen loom silently weaving our identities, judgments, and reflexes. We observed how seemingly personal convictions, like a café owner’s choice to retain or abandon nun-chai, the transformation of Friday bazaars into selfie-spots, or even how we interpret friendship through digital responsiveness, are not independent acts of rational reasoning. Instead, these convictions spring from cognitive templates quietly installed by culture. This cultural loom predetermines not only what we notice and value but also how we interpret the very meaning of words such as “presence,” “honour,” and “woman.” We discovered that identity is not static; rather, it is dynamically constructed through a braided relationship among shared cognitive categories, norms, and the material tools and rituals that enforce them. Yet, as subtle as it is profound, this process remains mostly invisible, overshadowed by our illusion of individual choice and rational autonomy. Having now illuminated culture’s hidden script, we now take the next critical step. We shall explore the implications of this unseen weaving on our perceptions of traditional culture.

This brings us to the pressing question that shadows many young Muslim minds today: Why do so many norms of our traditional culture, once embraced as natural, dignified, even sacred – now feel obsolete, archaic, or in need of “updating”? Why does modesty now register as repression, gender roles as injustice, communal authority as authoritarianism, and reverence as irrationality? These are not minor shifts in taste or style; they are seismic reorientations in the way we process meaning itself. What has changed is not just what we do, but the inner logic, the silent grammar, through which we interpret what ought to be done. To truly understand this rupture, we must examine not the surface-level objections to tradition, but the deeper transformation of the very cognitive structures by which those traditions are now judged.

To see what has shifted, we must first recall what once stood in place. The narrative of displacement feels incomplete unless we can glimpse the soil that was displaced. Before Bacon, Comte, Macaulay, and streaming algorithms could re-inscribe the Muslim mind, the phenomenon we will talk about later, that mind already inhabited a coherent, cosmically-anchored order. In the classical Islamic paradigm tawḥīd framed reality: one Creator, one ontological source, one ultimate telos. Knowledge (ʿilm) therefore formed a vertical hierarchy, beginning with revelation, descending through the rational sciences (ʿaql in kalām, logic, mathematics), and branching into the empirical crafts (ṣināʿāt). The cosmology was not a flat arena of atoms but a graded cosmos where each level, angelic, psychic, vegetal, mineral, participated in divine wisdom. In that weave, ethics was not a human invention but the alignment of soul (nafs), intellect (ʿaql), and body with the grain of creation; justice meant everything in its proper place, mercy meant each part serving the whole. Knowledge itself was purpose driven, in the service of Dayyan, for the protection of Deen, in the process of creating Medeena.

Pedagogically, the madrasa and the kuttāb inculcated this vertical grammar. Students began with Qurʾān, memorising not only verses but the cadence that ties heart to speech; they learned Arabic morphology because language mirrored cosmic order; they studied logic to discipline thought so that it could receive revelation without distortion; and they absorbed astronomy, medicine, and algebra as proofs of divine regularity, not rivals to it. Customs of nature were seen pointing towards a creator above them and not as laws binding him and making him irrelevant. If Maths, not God, decided the planetary motion, why need God at all? Adab, the art of comportment, interlaced every lesson: how to sit, dispute, break bread, and greet elders. The curriculum therefore trained perception itself: to see in a star the ayah of a Sustainer, in an elder the barakah of continuity, in surplus wealth the right of the poor. One might call this worldview sacramental humanism: man dignified precisely because he knits heaven and earth by recognising both.

Education in that classical setting was never a private scramble for credentials; it was an initiation into a shared public life whose rules were set by revelation. A student who mastered Qurʾān, logic, and adab was not simply “qualified” in the modern sense; he was rendered fit to take his place in the mosque‐court, the marketplace, or the caravan, spaces where speech had to be truthful, contracts just, and dissent respectful. The madrasa calibrated conscience to the rhythm of communal reality: knowledge culminated in service, authority entailed accountability, privilege implied protection of the weak. In short, the school reproduced the civic architecture that Islam envisaged, a polis oriented toward God, policed by self‐governed hearts long before magistrates intervened.

In that older vision, excellence in any craft was inseparable from excellence of soul; the lower good derived its very luminosity from a higher good to which it was ordered. A musician was not judged first by mastery of maqāmāt or subtle modulations of breath, but by the quality of his inner state. If his heart was heedless, his melody, however intricate, could not be called “beautiful,” because beauty was understood as a radiation of harmony with the divine. A qawwāl who spent his nights in prayer and his days in service might render a single na‘t that stirred tears precisely because the notes were carriers of sincerity; the same composition, voiced by a negligent tongue, would be deemed hollow or even corruptive. Education in the arts therefore began with tazkiyah (purification), then grammar, then technique, so that form would be guided by purpose and purpose by worship.

The same hierarchy shaped every public accolade. To label someone a “good cricketer” would have implied more than a high batting average; it would have suggested restraint of ego, fairness in wagers, modest conduct off the pitch. To answer a question on who was great cricketed, one wouldn’t just look at his averages. One’s skill was trusted only if the self had already submitted to a moral order; ubūdiyyah (servitude to God) was the axis on which all other competencies rotated. Ethics and aesthetics, commerce and conviviality, found their proportional places because education hammered home the axiom that truth descends from the Real and goodness is participation in that descent.

We will see later that this metaphysical chain snapped under modern secular tutelage, this vertical grammar collapsed. Technical brilliance floated free of character: a batsman may now be celebrated while staggering drunk from nightclub to press conference, a vocalist idolised though he trades girlfriends like disposable props. Judgment migrated from ontological alignment to market metrics, views, endorsements, gate receipts. Lyrics once prized for praising the Prophet ﷺ, extolling divine mercy, or awakening awe before mountains are now rated by beat-per-minute virality. A composition by Honey Singh that glamorises hedonism or by Sidhu Moosewala that revels in vendetta can trend as “great music,” because greatness has been flattened to sonic novelty plus streaming numbers. The criterion has shifted from “Does this song deepen ubūdiyyah?” to “Does it liberate me, entertain me, or earn me more?”

Thus the very word “good” has been rewritten: no longer that which integrates the self into a hierarchised cosmos, but that which maximises sensation, autonomy, or revenue. The educational rupture we we will trace later did not merely lower the ceiling of knowledge; it prised virtue away from craft, leaving skill to chase applause untethered from metaphysical north. This moral decoupling prepares the ground for the post-colonial inversion we will soon examine, in which Islam is demoted to private sentiment and public life is engineered by a calculus that has forgotten heaven, and the purposes of public life were redefined around nation‐state power and market throughput. Once those ends shifted, schooling too was re-tooled to serve them, and the old curriculum, designed to weave revelation into the fabric of streets and souks, was dismissed as anachronism. But before tracing that rupture, it is crucial to appreciate how seamlessly the pre-modern syllabus once married learning to the civic, moral, and metaphysical order that Muslims understood as their collective vocation.

Socially, the joint family, the souk, the mosque courtyard, and the guild were not sentimental relics but institutional extensions of this metaphysic. Authority flowed downward as care, not domination; reciprocity flowed upward as gratitude, not rebellion. Public space was graded by honour and modesty so that the fitrah’s polarity, attraction toward God, away from heedlessness, could act without friction. Even disagreement, fiqh versus fiqh, remained intra-covenantal; jurists differed, but all presupposed that revelation trumped utility and that truth was objective, pursued in deference to earlier masters and ultimate accountability.

When we now chart the curricular and cultural “shift,” we must picture these roots: a cosmos thick with presence, a syllabus designed to tune the soul, a marketplace that echoed the mosque, a family that rehearsed mercy’s hierarchy. Only against that can we measure how far the drawers have been relabelled, and why modern critiques sound like cognitive dissonance rather than genuine reform. This shall also explain to us why the modern unease with traditional norms and artifacts. This section contends that the answer is not found in the decay of the norms themselves, but in the remapping of the cognitive terrain that once gave those norms their meaning. It contends, our discomfort with tradition is not proof of its irrelevance, but the symptom of a deeper transformation: our mental drawers, the very structures through which we interpret, feel, and judge, have been subtly, and systematically, reconfigured. And unless we name and trace that reconfiguration, we will mistake cultural sabotage for civilizational progress. The loom has changed. Now we must ask: Who rewove it, how, and to what end?

This silent cognitive rewiring now manifests itself in our everyday discomforts, discomforts that are misread as the moral evolution of society, when they are in fact the symptoms of a deeper epistemic dislocation. Consider how traditional weddings, once brimming with symbolic continuity, public rituals, collective meals, gendered modesty, and community vows, are now seen as financially burdensome, emotionally performative, or even ethically outdated. The language of critique cloaks itself in virtue: “Why should me and my family feed the whole village?” or “Why can’t the wedding be private?” But beneath these questions lies a new cognitive drawer – one that interprets divine plenty as extravagance and duty as coercion.

Family structures, too, have shifted from being seen as sanctuaries of moral formation to oppressive hierarchies. The grandmother once revered as the moral compass is now described as “interfering.” The joint family, once a structure of responsibility and shared barakah, is recast as a prison of surveillance and dependency. And what was once called “respect” for elders is now interpreted as infantilizing compliance. One hears, “I have a right to make my own choices,” as if tradition were an enemy of agency rather than its divine mold.

Modest dress codes, grounded in centuries of religious and civilizational dignity, are now filtered through a lens that sees them as tools of control. Hijab becomes a “choice” only if it can be removed without consequence; otherwise, it is oppression. Gender roles, those sacred task-divisions that aligned with both biology and revelation, are now the target of sarcasm and suspicion. The protective guardianship of a father is renamed patriarchy; the financial responsibility of a husband is tagged as inequality; the domestic excellence of a mother becomes unpaid labour.

Communal prayers, once the heartbeat of neighbourhoods, are now judged against secular timetables and wellness metrics. People ask, “Why should I pray five times when God knows my heart?” – a question that only makes sense within a cognitive drawer where ritual is deemed extraneous to sincerity. Traditional bazaars, where buying was once intertwined with blessing, where the volume of the adhaan hushed transactions and turned the souk into a sacred pause, are now crowded with gig workers, neon lights, and Instagram reels. Reverence has been displaced by relevance. Stillness by spectacle.

In short, the modern mind often approaches tradition not with inherited awe but with managerial suspicion. “Is it efficient?” “Is it equitable?” “Is it therapeutic?” Traditions are no longer felt as the continuation of a sacred trust, but as a backlog of outdated settings awaiting reform. The questions themselves reveal the shift in the loom: they assume that the highest goods are autonomy, pleasure, equality, and productivity. And in that framework, traditional norms cannot help but appear grotesque. But these judgments are not neutral verdicts, they are the pre-decided sentences issued by a new grammar, a new way of seeing, installed beneath awareness. To see clearly, then, we must interrogate that grammar: where did it come from? Who programmed it into our minds? And more importantly, can it be unlearned, or must we simply surrender?

These critiques do not emerge in a vacuum. What was once filed under “honour” is now reclassified under “control.” What was once a community obligation, like hosting guests, answering the mosque’s call, or tending to ageing parents, is now recast as emotional labour or societal pressure. The very act of caretaking is reinterpreted as self-neglect; the moral vocabulary has shifted from “duty” to “boundaries.” Where reverence once stood, reverence for age, for silence, for sanctified time, we now find suspicion, impatience, or pragmatism. “Why should I listen just because he’s older?” “Why must I observe a ritual if I don’t feel it?” “Why should I be quiet if I have something to say?” These are not the products of individual arrogance, but of a larger civilizational realignment, where the axis of moral judgment tilts away from transcendence and toward utility.

The shift is clearest in our new model of presence. Where presence once meant full bodily and spiritual attentiveness—your eyes, ears, and ruh attuned to the moment—today it means “instant availability.” We measure connection through blue ticks and response times. A friend is “present” if they reply fast, not if they understand deeply. In this drawer, silence becomes betrayal, solitude becomes negligence, and prayer becomes a task to be fit between notifications. The category itself has changed; and so, all the practices rooted in the old definition begin to feel like strange artefacts from another world. Thus, our unease with traditional norms is not born of rational analysis but of cognitive misalignment. We inherited categories shaped by revelation, but now interpret them through drawers carved by postmodernism, therapy culture, and algorithmic life. What feels like moral growth may, in fact, be a sign that we have been moved, imperceptibly but decisively, into a different frame of judgment altogether.

What has happened? Once the drawer called honour,ʿiffah, was the lens through which modesty was seen; veil, gendered space and lowered gaze expressed a whole metaphysics of human dignity before God. When the drawer was quietly relabeled autonomy, the same cloth that once proclaimed sacred worth was re-interpreted as a gag on self-expression. The hijab did not move an inch; the gaze that fell upon it was reprogrammed. And because the logic embedded in the new drawer grants moral primacy to the sovereign self, modesty now arrives in consciousness already tagged “oppression,” long before any argument is tested.

A parallel switch occurred inside the family. Traditional hierarchy was never conceived as a contest of power; it was mercy distributed in different forms—material responsibility for the father, moral centrality for the mother, deferential space for the elder. That coherence depended on a drawer labeled hierarchy-as-care. Replace it with the analytics of power and patriarchy, absorbed through school textbooks and binge-watched dramas, and the entire architecture flips. Guardianship morphs into domination, filial piety into infantilisation, the paternal vow of provision into evidence of structural inequality. The family did not suddenly become abusive; the interpretive grid now insists on reading it that way.

Even the layout of our homes is recoded. A joint household once embodied communal intimacy, many generations under one roof so that trust, resources and laughter circulated freely. The cognitive label was belonging; the norm was open doors; the material form was the shared courtyard. Inside the new drawer marked personal space and boundaries, the same courtyard becomes an instrument of surveillance, and a cousin’s teasing is reclassified as emotional trespass. Privacy, once the exception, becomes the baseline virtue, so the extended family looks not quaint but pathological. I call this drift “epistemic alienation” – a state in which the inherited world of meaning still surrounds us physically, yet our minds, retrofitted with foreign drawers, no longer “click” into its grooves. We feel estranged from practices our grandparents found life-giving, not because those practices lost coherence, but because the silent grammar that once made them self-evident has been overwritten.

“Epistemic alienation” is the estrangement that occurs when a community’s inherited ways of knowing are displaced by an external epistemology without the community’s conscious consent. The alienation is two-fold: first, the cognitive apparatus, the categories and criteria by which truth and value are recognised, is imported from a foreign intellectual tradition; second, the subject who now thinks with these categories experiences her own heritage as unintelligible or inferior. The result is not mere cultural mimicry but a severance at the level of epistēmē – the very grounds on which something counts as knowledge. Practices once perceived through an indigenous matrix of revelation, hierarchy, and communal duty now appear through the analytic of autonomy, efficiency, and therapeutic utility, generating a dissonance that feels like moral progress but is, in fact, the loss of interpretive self-sovereignty.

If such a sweeping remapping of our mental drawers has taken place, it cannot be blamed on the mere passage of time or the inevitable march of “progress.” Alien categories do not drift into a civilisation by osmosis; they arrive along identifiable conduits, settle in predictable rooms of the mind, and then quietly reroute the circuitry of judgment. To understand why honour became control, or why communal belonging morphed into invasive oversight, we must look upstream, back to the institutions, forces, and drip-feed influences that first pried open our cognitive cabinets and slid new labels onto their shelves. Only by tracing those supply lines can we see how an entire people came to view its own legacy through borrowed lenses, mistaking imported suspicion for native insight and confusing desacralised data for ḥikmah.

Among the many tributaries feeding this cognitive flood, none is more decisive than the modern education system. By “education” we do not mean the bureaucratic apparatus of schools and examination boards alone, but the deeper cultural mechanism by which a civilisation inducts its young into a particular view of reality – what exists, what counts as knowledge, what is worthy of love or suspicion. In every age, classrooms function less as neutral dispensers of facts and more as furnaces where metaphysical and moral horizons are forged. Our own era’s curriculum has become the primary medium for detaching the Muslim imagination from revelation-anchored wisdom and docking it instead to a secular cosmology of empirical proof, individual autonomy, and historical skepticism. Before global markets, streaming platforms, or influencer culture can reshape desire, the syllabus has already re-educated the soul in what it is allowed to call truth.

At the surface, schooling presents itself as an orderly relay of useful facts and practical skills. We master the alphabet so we can decode a newspaper, memorise multiplication tables so we can balance a ledger, recite Newton’s laws to understand why bridges hold, and learn the Pythagorean theorem or the mechanism of photosynthesis to pass examinations that promise entry into professional life. Civics lessons supply the rudiments of citizenship; language classes polish communication; laboratory periods cultivate the habits of observation and experiment. In short, the overt charter of modern education is to equip bodies for the marketplace and certify minds for the bureaucracy, to ensure that each graduate can read, compute, code, and comply well enough to keep the machinery of society humming.

To understand the kind of schooling we now hand to our children, we must retrace the moment when Europe first re-negotiated what would count as knowledge. That turning begins with Francis Bacon and his 1620 manifesto, Novum Organum. Bacon charged that the learned world had for centuries been imprisoned by “idols” – received authorities, inherited syllogisms, and metaphysical abstractions – leaving the mind “like a distempered mirror” that distorts reality. His remedy was a radical inversion of method: abandon deduction from first principles and proceed instead by painstaking induction; collect observations, stage controlled experiments, tabulate results, and climb, step by empirical step, toward provisional generalisations. Nature, he insisted, must be “put to the question” and forced to yield her secrets under repeatable trials. In Bacon’s scheme, truth was no longer what cohered with a sacred cosmology but what survived the tribunal of experience. This redefinition did more than redirect natural philosophy; it quietly reset the educational horizon. If knowledge is secured by experiment rather than by contemplative synthesis, then the ideal learner is not the contemplative sage but the empirical technician, trained to manipulate instruments, record data, and doubt inherited claims. Bacon thus planted the epistemic seed from which the modern curriculum would eventually sprout: facts first, reverence last, if at all.

The Baconian impulse did not remain an author’s proposal; within a generation it was given brick-and-mortar form in the Royal Society of London, chartered in 1660. Here Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and their peers turned Bacon’s inductive rhetoric into an organised practice of “visible college.” Weekly meetings replaced scholastic disputation with public experiments: air-pumps hissed, mercury rose and fell, and every observation was minuted, witnessed, and later printed in the Philosophical Transactions – the first periodical devoted solely to experimental results. The Society’s motto, nullius in verba (“on the word of no one”), crystallised a new civic creed: authority now lay in replicable demonstration, not in the glosses of Aristotle or the commentaries of theologians. Knowledge became a collaborative, cumulative enterprise, advancing by small, verifiable increments rather than by grand metaphysical syntheses. In educational terms, this institutional shift quietly downgraded the classical trivium and quadrivium, designed to form rhetoricians, logicians, and theologians, and elevated instead the crafts of instrumentation, measurement, and technical description. A generation of students began to aspire less to the wisdom of sages than to the precision of laboratory men, marking the first major realignment in the West’s pedagogical horizon after Bacon.

While this epistemic revolution gathered force in lecture halls and laboratories, the political and social landscape of seventeenth-century England was itself being re-stitched by upheaval. The Civil War had shattered the sacral aura of monarchy; Cromwell’s Interregnum and, later, the Restoration of 1660 accustomed the public to question ancient authority and to imagine legitimacy as something that could be renegotiated. Overseas, mercantilist expansion and the first great joint-stock companies were converting knowledge into navigational charts, mining manuals, and gunnery tables, proof that empiricism paid dividends. At home, a rising merchant class, enriched by Atlantic trade, began to purchase both land and learning, crowding universities and coffee-houses where news sheets and pamphlets circulated the latest experiments alongside market prices. The same coffee-house that hosted political debate at noon might sponsor an anatomical demonstration at dusk, fusing the ideals of civic participation and experimental witness into a single public ethos. In short, Baconian method aligned perfectly with a society tilting toward commercial calculation, Protestant industriousness, and scepticism of inherited privilege. The authority of throne and altar was visibly waning; the authority of observable fact, repeatable technique, and useful knowledge was on the rise.

The intellectual centre of gravity now shifted from collective tinkering to systematic philosophy. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) supplied the first comprehensive psychology for the new order: the mind, he argued, begins as a tabula rasa, furnished only by sensation and the mind’s reflection upon it. Innate ideas were dismissed as superstition; every truth, moral, mathematical, theological, would henceforth need to pass through the sieve of experience. In the same generation, Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687) demonstrated that the cosmos itself could be captured in a handful of mathematical formulas derived from observation and experiment. Together Locke and Newton provided both epistemology and exemplar: knowledge originates in sensory data and culminates in empirically verified law. University syllabi across Europe quietly re-balanced their timetables, less metaphysics, more natural philosophy; less disputation on “final causes,” more demonstrations of prisms, pendulums, and planetary tables. A new pedagogical ideal took shape: the educated person was one who could marshal empirical evidence and submit even the heavens to numerical description. Philosophically, the notion that truth might transcend sense was losing credit; pedagogically, any subject that could not be weighed, measured, or diagrammed began its slow slide toward the curricular margins.

The confidence inspired by Newton’s celestial equations soon encouraged thinkers to seek similarly exact laws for human affairs. No one pursued this ambition more vigorously than the French philosopher Auguste Comte. Beginning in the 1830s, Comte argued that humanity advances through three irreversible stages, theological, metaphysical, and finally positive, each defined by the kind of explanation it deems legitimate. In the positive stage, which he claimed was dawning, all questions were to be answered by the methods already triumphant in astronomy and chemistry: careful observation, comparison, classification, and the search for invariant regularities. Comte even drafted a hierarchy of disciplines, placing mathematics at the base, ascending through physics, chemistry, and biology, and culminating in a new “social physics” later christened sociology. On his scheme, any inquiry that still trafficked in first causes or moral ends belonged to an earlier, less mature epoch of the mind. Within a generation university reformers took Positivism as a blueprint. They began renaming chairs, political philosophy became political science, moral philosophy fragmented into sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and the old umbrella of natural philosophy contracted to simply science. To secure their place in Comte’s hierarchy, each field hastened to display data, graphs, and predictive laws, relegating normative and metaphysical questions to the seminar margins. In classrooms, this re-labelling quietly taught students that only what could be measured or statistically modelled deserved to be called knowledge; everything else was sentiment, speculation, or faith.

Comte’s re-imagining of knowledge did not unfold in an intellectual vacuum; it both fed and was fed by the convulsions of nineteenth-century society. The Industrial Revolution was turning villages into smokestack cities, demanding engineers, statisticians, and managers who could predict output as reliably as an astronomer plots an eclipse. Nascent nation-states, facing crowded tenements and labour unrest, craved an empirical grasp of “the social question.” Hence the first modern censuses, the proliferation of blue-books and factory reports, and the rise of civil-service exams that rewarded measurable expertise over inherited rank. Across the Channel, Napoleon’s administrative machine had already shown how chemistry-like precision in taxation, conscription, and road-building could amplify state power; Britain, Prussia, and the United States hurried to emulate the model. Universities, dependent on government patronage and industrial philanthropy, adapted their course calendars to this new managerial imagination, promising to supply “social engineers” as indispensable as mechanical ones. In such a climate, Comte’s call for a science of society sounded less utopian and more like an intellectual charter for the age: if steam engines could be tamed by thermodynamics, surely cities and parliaments could be governed by sociology and political science. The classroom, therefore, became an extension of the counting-house and the ministry bureau, training minds to see people, morals, and even faith communities as variables in need of statistical control.

Across the Muslim world the same centuries chart an inverse trajectory. While Baconian empiricism matured into industrial and administrative power, the great madrasa networks that had once integrated Qurʾānic revelation with logic, astronomy, and medicine were shrinking under fiscal stress and courtly neglect. In the Ottoman heartland, the palace-sponsored endowments that had sustained centres like Süleymaniye were diverted to military emergencies, leaving curricula frozen in commentaries upon commentaries. In Mughal India, internal rebellions and the slow crumbling of imperial patronage drove scholars to regional courts where they maintained textual mastery but lost the momentum of systematic inquiry. The safavid-Qajar transition in Persia saw philosophy retreat into esoteric circles even as European artillery and trade missions knocked at the Gulf. Socially, artisan guilds and caravan networks, once conduits of technical and commercial innovation, were disrupted by cheaper machine goods ferried in by East-India and Levant companies. Politically, capitulation treaties and debt concessions entangled Muslim polities in European legal and financial regimes, eroding sovereign confidence. Pedagogically, therefore, new scientific instruments arrived without the epistemic framework to integrate them; telescopes were admired, not replicated. When colonial administrators and missionary educators finally imposed European-style schools in Cairo, Algiers, Lucknow, and Jakarta, local elites, conscious of civilisational slippage and desperate for technical parity, embraced the imported curriculum as a lifeline. The groundwork was thus laid for a wholesale adoption of positivist learning under the shadow of imperial rule—a transfer made plausible by Europe’s ascendancy and the Muslim world’s fragmented descent.

During the very decades in which Bacon’s experimental ethos ripened into Royal Society practice and, later, Comte’s positivism reorganised European learning, the Muslim world was weathering a slow contraction of its own intellectual, pedagogical, social, and political vitality. The once-expansive curriculum of the great madrasas, from Qarawiyyīn and al-Azhar westward to Mustanṣiriyya and the Ottoman dârülfünûn, had narrowed to a protective guardianship of inherited commentaries, prized more for preserving juristic precedent than for probing new questions of natural philosophy or statecraft. Pedagogically, ijāzah chains still certified formidable textual mastery, yet the rhythm of study rewarded mnemonic fidelity over experimental curiosity; logic (manṭiq) survived, but as an exegetical tool rather than a springboard for empirical investigation. Socially, urban craft guilds and trans-Saharan or Silk-Road caravan routes, long engines of technical exchange, were losing ground to European shipping lanes and factory wares, unsettling the economic foundation that had funded scholarly patronage. Politically, the Ottomans battled fiscal crises and provincial revolts, the Safavids fractured into competing khanates, and the late Mughals ceded revenue districts to regional warlords; each court diverted endowment revenues from learning to military stipends, leaving libraries under-catalogued and observatories unsupervised. In short, while Europe was aligning its universities, laboratories, and coffers into a single escalator of epistemic and material ascent, Muslim polities were preoccupied with territorial defence and revenue shortfalls, their centres of learning increasingly inward-looking and under-resourced.

By the early twentieth century Europe’s faith in the scientific method was recast once more, this time with mathematical austerity, by the Vienna Circle, a group of logicians and physicists who gathered around Moritz Schlick in the 1920s. Drawing on Einstein’s relativity, Hilbert’s formalism, and Comte’s earlier hierarchy, they formulated the verification principle: a sentence is meaningful only if it can, in principle, be confirmed by sense-experience or proved by pure logic. Metaphysics, theology, and even large swathes of ethics were dismissed as “pseudo-statements,” grammatically well-formed yet cognitively void. Rudolf Carnap urged that philosophy should henceforth become the clarification of scientific language; Otto Neurath dreamed of a unified encyclopaedia in which every discipline, from particle physics to psychology, would be expressed in a single, observation-based idiom. Although the Circle itself dissolved with the rise of fascism, its criterion radiated outward through university departments, teacher-training colleges, and new research foundations. Curricula everywhere began to mirror the verificationist creed: laboratory sciences multiplied lecture hours, while courses whose claims could not be operationalised, metaphysics, classical rhetoric, even much of history, were pared back or repackaged as “soft” and “elective.” In textbooks the word science ceased to denote a disposition toward truth and became almost synonymous with quantification, prediction, and technological payoff; pupils were silently trained to treat any assertion that exceeded measurable evidence as, at best, private opinion.

While logical positivism was purging Europe’s lecture halls of unverifiable claims, the continent’s factories, stock exchanges, and general staffs were pursuing an equally hard-edged calculus beyond the campus walls. The second industrial revolution had woven steel rails from Manchester to Mumbai and strung submarine telegraph cables under every ocean, giving imperial capitals real-time oversight of raw-material frontiers. London’s City and Paris’s Bourse floated bonds to finance not only railways in Egypt and tramlines in Istanbul, but also the gunboats that enforced repayment schedules. The same confidence that turned philosophy into a language of verification emboldened statesmen to treat entire societies as variables in a global cost-benefit analysis. The “Scramble for Africa” (1880s-1914) and the earlier annexations of India and the Malay archipelago converted overseas provinces into laboratory extensions of European industry: plantations became experiments in agronomic chemistry; colonial schools, experiments in social engineering. Inside Europe, mass conscription and census statistics forged disciplined nation-states, culminating in the mechanised slaughter of the Great War (1914-18). The war’s settlement shattered the last medieval polity of the Muslim world, the Ottoman Empire; with the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres its Arab heartlands were carved into French and British mandates, and in 1924 the Turkish Grand National Assembly formally abolished the Caliphate, an institution that, for fourteen centuries, had symbolised a trans-tribal Islamic moral order. From Morocco to Mosul, Muslim societies now lived under direct colonial administration or economic tutelage, their customs offices patrolled, their currencies pegged, their school syllabi rewritten by advisors trained in the very verificationist outlook that dismissed revelation as non-sense. Thus the epistemic revolution that began with Bacon had, by the 1920s, achieved not only curricular hegemony in Europe but territorial dominion over much of the Muslim world, binding intellectual authority, industrial capital, and imperial power into a single, self-reinforcing system.

Even as the Muslim heartlands struggled beneath mandates and client regimes, Europe and North America pressed further along the Baconian trajectory, now applying scientific method not only to matter and society but to the classroom itself. In the United States, John Dewey’s pragmatism recast education as a continuous experiment in problem-solving, where the worth of any idea lay in its practical consequences rather than its correspondence to eternal truths. “Truth happens to an idea,” became slogan of the era, echoing the verificationists’ suspicion of metaphysics but translating it into pedagogical technique: lesson plans should be laboratories, teachers facilitators, and knowledge a flexible tool for social adjustment. Dewey’s disciples in the Progressive Education Association adopted factory-floor efficiency studies to redesign timetables, group projects, and aptitude tests, while behaviourists such as Edward Thorndike reduced learning to quantifiable stimulus-response chains. By mid-century Ralph Tyler’s “basic principles” and Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy carved curricula into measurable objectives, cognitive, affective, psychomotor, so that educational success could be graphed like crop yields or factory output. In this environment any content that resisted operational definition, scriptural exegesis, moral virtue, metaphysical contemplation, was either elective or eliminated. Thus, while the Muslim world’s intellectual institutions languished under censorship, budgetary starvation, or self-imposed quietism, the West perfected an education model that merged Bacon’s empirical scepticism with Dewey’s utilitarian pragmatism, producing graduates trained to doubt transcendent claims and to value above all what could be tested, tabulated, and monetised.

Yet while Dewey’s laboratories and Bloom’s charts were standardising the Western classroom, the Muslim world was preoccupied with sheer survival under colonial rule. The Ottoman break-up left Anatolia blockaded and the Arab hinterland parcelled into mandates; Egypt laboured under British advisers, Algeria under settler administration, India under the Raj, and Indonesia under the Dutch Ethical Policy. Revenue, printing presses, even the calendar were now managed from European chancelleries, and the ulema who once advised sultans found themselves petitioning district commissioners for stipend renewals. In this landscape of dismembered sovereignties the question of curricular philosophy scarcely arose. What mattered was access to the railway board, the telegraph office, the medical college, gateways that lay behind examinations drafted in London or Paris. “Beggars cannot be choosers,” must have been remarked by some Cairo notable in 1909 when asked why his sons were at the French lycée instead of al-Azhar, “there is no career in the old books”, he must have said. Thus, the very asymmetry that militarised the frontier also academised it, European schooling appeared not as a worldview to be debated but as an instrument demonstrably tied to guns, quinine, and salaries.

Decades of such tutelage produced more than economic dependency; they effected a colonisation of the imagination. Administrative elites schooled in mission colleges or colonial lycées returned to govern with minds formatted by the verificationist ideal. Traditional pedagogy, once faulted only for outdated taxonomies, was now condemned as inherently irrational. Nowhere was this internal verdict rendered more dramatically than in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey. Within ten years of abolishing the Caliphate, his government closed the Sufi lodges, replaced the Arabic script with Latin characters, merged Qurʾānic schools into a secular Ministry of Education, and imported French positivist textbooks for teacher-training institutes. Physics laboratories sprouted in former madrasas, while theology was relegated to a single faculty charged with producing “modern imams” fluent in Comte and Durkheim. The message was unmistakable: a civilisation could be reborn only by disowning its inherited epistemology.

British India supplied an earlier template. Lord Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (1835) famously dismissed Indian, Arabic and Persian learning as “a single shelf of a good European library,” allocating state funds instead to English-medium schools that would create a cadre “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste.” By 1857 the Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras universities were examining students on Bacon, Locke, and Newton while Persian fell from the courts and Arabic from the marketplace. The same pattern unfolded in Algeria, where the Jules Ferry laws extended French secular schooling, and in Egypt, where Lord Cromer’s reforms tied teacher salaries to British inspection reports. Across these territories colonial ordinances siphoned endowment revenues away from waqf schools into government “model institutions,” often compelling madrasas to register, standardise, or close. The consequence was not merely the erosion of an institutional network but the slow internalisation of a verdict: that serious knowledge is empirical, utilitarian, and secular; everything else is heritage, fit for folklore festivals but not for state building.

By the time formal independence arrived after 1945, the ground was already prepared. Cabinets from Ankara to Karachi to Jakarta staffed their planning commissions with graduates of École Normale Supérieure, Oxbridge, or Leiden, and drafted national curricula that extended, rather than questioned, the colonial taxonomy of disciplines. With coffers empty and borders fragile, few leaders dared experiment with alternative epistemologies; Western schooling had proven its linkage to engineering projects, loan approvals, and diplomatic stature. Thus the intellectual momentum set in motion by Bacon, hardened by Comte, and systematised by Dewey entered Muslim societies not through scholarly disputation but through the very mechanics of colonial administration, leaving a vacuum into which Western categories flowed as the uncontested default.

The newly minted Muslim nation-states approached schooling much as they approached railways, dams, or five-year plans: as an urgent tool of “development” whose blueprint already existed in Western hands. From Cairo to Karachi, cabinet ministers flew to Washington and Paris clutching World Bank white papers that linked GDP growth to years of secular schooling; UNESCO consultants wrote syllabi that mirrored the French lycée or the American high school, save for a token course in “moral and religious instruction.” The Cold War amplified this pattern. Eager for allies, both superpowers offered scholarships, teacher-training missions, and curriculum kits. Baghdad Pact states received USAID science labs; Nasser’s Egypt imported Soviet polytechnic institutes; Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology modelled itself on MIT. Within a decade, the very timetables that had once served colonial governors were rechristened as national education—with chemistry at 8 a.m., civics at noon, and Qurʾān relegated to the optional hour after lunch.

Meanwhile, in the West, universities were undergoing their own metamorphosis. The G.I. Bill had flooded American campuses with veterans; the Sputnik shock (1957) poured federal billions into physics, engineering, and behavioural science. By the late 1960s the “multiversity” had emerged: a research conglomerate fused to the military-industrial complex, measuring success in patents, peer-reviewed articles, and federal contracts. Educational psychology followed suit, turning classrooms into sites of controlled experimentation; Skinner’s behaviourism, Bloom’s taxonomies, and later cognitive-science models promised real-time metrics on everything from attention span to moral reasoning. These techniques travelled outward through Fulbright fellowships and English-medium textbooks, reinforcing the conviction among post-colonial planners that true modernity meant replicating the Western pedagogical machine.

The 1970s oil boom briefly seemed to offer Muslim societies the resources to chart a different course, yet the petrodollars themselves flowed back into Western consultancies and university franchises. Riyadh and Doha built branch campuses of Harvard and Cornell; Malaysian technocrats benchmarked their math scores against OECD averages; Pakistan’s Engineering University retained British accreditation to guarantee overseas employment for its graduates. Even regimes that preached Islamisation, Zia’s Pakistan, Khomeini’s Iran, left the positivist spine of the curriculum intact: Qurʾānic verses framed the classroom, but the content marched on in the language of laboratory fact and developmental economics.

The 1980s and 1990s locked the model in place. Under structural-adjustment programmes, the IMF and World Bank conditioned loans on “efficiency” reforms: larger class sizes, outcome-based assessment, English as the medium of instruction, and an emphatic tilt toward STEM. Simultaneously, satellite television and later the internet piped Western popular culture, sitcoms, TED talks, lifestyle ads, into every living-room from Rabat to Rawalpindi. Minuscule injections of autonomy, consumerism, and therapeutic individualism now bypassed ministries altogether, rewiring imaginations at the level of slang, fashion, and aspiration.

By the turn of the millennium, the convergence was nearly complete. In the West, ed-tech firms and data-analytics consortia were converting classrooms into dashboards of “learning outcomes”; in the Muslim world, ministries signed partnership contracts to adopt the same learning-management systems. International rankings such as PISA and QS became the new Mecca of policy pilgrimage; success was measured by how closely a nation’s scores approximated those of Finland or Singapore. Generations raised under this regime learned to regard metaphysical questions as extracurricular, to equate progress with Silicon-Valley innovation cycles, and to treat any epistemic claim lacking metrics as at best folklore, at worst fanaticism.

Thus, across the post-colonial century, Western education did not merely survive decolonisation; it thrived as the unquestioned template for prosperity, security, and global respectability. Socially, it promised upward mobility; economically, it unlocked aid and investment; politically, it signalled “moderation” to foreign patrons. Intellectually it entrenched the Bacon-Comte-Dewey lineage as the very definition of rational inquiry, leaving traditional Islamic pedagogies to appear, even in Muslim eyes, as picturesque relics unsuited to the demands of an algorithmic age.

In the classroom today, then, the overt syllabus appears impeccably neutral and functional. From the age of five a child is marched through a ladder of discrete “subjects,” each framed as a self-contained body of facts. In mathematics she memorises algorithms with little sense of the philosophical claim that quantity is the deepest structure of reality; in biology she learns that life is a biochemical cascade, full stop. History arrives trimmed of metaphysical drama: eras are explained by material resources, military hardware, or demographic graphs; prophecy, saint-craft, or moral purpose are politely omitted. English or French literature is analysed chiefly for technique and social context, rarely for transcendence. Religious studies, where they exist, are quarantined into elective hours, treated not as a source of knowledge but as a comparative survey of cultural artefacts. Throughout, assessment revolves around the ability to reproduce information under timed conditions or to apply protocols to novel but predictable problems. Success is quantified in grades, aptitude scores, and employability indices that rank the child against an imagined global cohort.

By the time this pupil reaches university, the pattern has hardened. Engineering, medicine, accounting, and computer science dominate enrolments; the humanities survive chiefly as service courses, purged of teleological debate and re-badged as critical-thinking drills. Social sciences promise “evidence-based policy,” translating moral questions into regressions and confidence intervals. Even professional ethics modules concede value only when it can be cashed out in risk management or stakeholder satisfaction. The hidden curriculum beneath these overt lessons is unambiguous: reliable truth is sensory, mathematical, or statistical; the good is whatever maximises efficiency, comfort, and individual preference; community, revelation, or metaphysical finality may be respected as identity markers, but they possess no epistemic clout. Not even the spiritual religion escapes the material teeth of this modern industry called education, in whose auspices religion is studied, examined to be understood, to be experimented with, there lies its naked virgin body as an exhibit on the table, to be dissected, in the labs of sociology and anthropology. And any explanation that nullifies the need for a supernatural explanation is to be hailed as a discovery for having raised us above the medieval vulgarity of submission to the supernatural. It is to be hailed for it liberates us from immaterial.

What, then, emerges at graduation? Drunken with this material conception of life, fed to him goblet after goblet, from kindergarten to his doctorate, in a life span of more than two decades, he arrives home via Twitter, Facebook, NGOs, and what not to protect his newfound love. A technically competent specialist fluent in the spreadsheets of global commerce, trained to doubt first principles yet seldom invited to examine the first principles of doubt itself. He is agile with code, conversant with wellness jargon, wary of grand narratives, and largely tone-deaf to the older languages of adab, barakah, or tawḥīd. She is employable, mobile, and perpetually apprenticed to the next skills-upgrade, but unsure why a life must be good beyond being productive and self-expressive. Both are citizens of a cognitive commonwealth whose constitution they never voted on: empirical verification is supreme law, utility is the established church, and inherited metaphysics survive only as private sentiment. In choosing this curriculum, often out of economic fear, sometimes out of genuine fascination, we have consciously opted to trade wisdom rooted in revelation for expertise guaranteed by metrics, producing a generation exquisitely prepared for the marketplace and profoundly unprepared for the metaphysical burdens of being human.

To this pedagogical architecture we must add the deeper bias Edward Said diagnosed in Orientalism. It is not only that the classroom techniques are Western; the very content and the interpretive frameworks by which that content is read emerge from minds that once subjugated the Muslim world by force and now define it by scholarship. The nineteenth-century philologists, ethnographers, and colonial administrators who mapped “Islamic civilisation” for Europe did so through a hermeneutic of otherness: the Muslim was picturesque but static, emotional rather than rational, bound to fatalism while Europe marched toward progress. Their lexicons, grammars, and histories were institutionalised in imperial universities and then exported wholesale to colonial teacher-training colleges. Long after the gunboats departed, those syllabi remained, continuing to describe the East as anachronism and the West as culmination.

When a modern Muslim student opens a standard world-history text or an “objective” anthropology reader, he therefore encounters more than neutral information; he confronts himself refracted through what Said called “the Orientalist lens,” a gaze that assumes his tradition to be a relic awaiting rehabilitation by secular modernity. Literary canons celebrate Flaubert’s exotic courtesan but rarely Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysical subtlety; political-science glossaries define “caliphate” chiefly as despotism, never as an imagined community of moral law. Even when the facts are accurate, the organising storyline installs Europe as subject and Islam as object, Europe as dynamism and Islam as inertia. Thus the learner absorbs, alongside equations and lab skills, a subterranean verdict on his own civilisational worth, delivered in the cool diction of scholarship yet descended from the same epistemic power that once enslaved his body. In this sense the classroom perpetuates an internal colonisation: the coloniser withdraws, but his categories remain, and the graduate who masters them often does so at the cost of regarding his inherited truths as intellectually suspect or hopelessly quaint.

This, then, is the overt landscape of our schooling. Every timetable, textbook, and testing rubric is anchored in a positivist, empiricist vision of reality; every discipline, from physics to political “science”, tells the pupil that genuine knowledge is what can be measured, modelled, or monetised. Within that horizon the student learns not only techniques but teleology: the highest end is material mastery, personal fulfilment, and societal efficiency; the approved means are experiment, calculation, and administrative control. Even when the syllabus turns to “Islamic studies,” it approaches the subject through categories first devised to catalogue the exotic East, gently steering the learner toward the same utilitarian goals. Thus the curriculum furnishes both a map of the world and a compass of desire, instructing the graduate where to aim and which tools to trust along the way. Yet all of this is only the visible scaffolding. Beneath it, at the level of instinct and imagination, another education unfolds, quiet, pervasive, and far more difficult to detect. It is to that covert schooling that we must now turn to.

Beneath the visible syllabus a subtler curriculum is always at work, smuggled in through the very grammar of teaching. Metaphysically, the student is habituated to view reality as a closed, self-sufficient system of matter and force. Every laboratory demonstration, every evolutionary timeline hung on the classroom wall, whispers that existence needs no transcendent fountainhead; contingency is explained by chance and law, not by will or wisdom. The sacred is tolerated as a psychological category, not an ontological one. Over twelve or fifteen years this vision settles into the bones: the cosmos is an accident patiently decoded by physics, and whatever cannot be placed under the microscope is relegated to “belief,” a private after-thought rather than the ground of being.

Flowing from this is an epistemology that crowns sense-experience and mathematical abstraction as the only legitimate roads to certainty. The learner rehearses it daily: hypotheses are valuable only when falsifiable; statements are meaningful only when measurable or reducible to analytic tautology. Revelation, intuition, and inherited wisdom become epistemic second-class citizens, perhaps consoling, never compelling. Even the humanities, repackaged as “critical theory,” instruct him to distrust grand narratives unless supported by empirical data. By graduation, he not only doubts prophetic knowledge; he doubts that such a category could ever count as knowledge in the first place.

From that metaphysical-epistemic pairing a distinct ethic follows. If reality is material and truth is empirical, the good reduces to optimising outcomes within the material field: maximise pleasure, minimise pain, extend lifespan, enlarge GDP, reduce carbon, protect choice. Moral dilemmas become engineering problems solvable by cost-benefit analysis, and virtue is reconceived as “values”, fluid preferences negotiated among stakeholders. Altruism survives where it can be graphed in social-impact reports; chastity or worship, lacking data, recede into private eccentricities.

Personal ethics inevitably ripple outward into public ethics i.e. politics. The citizen schooled in utilitarian individualism votes and legislates accordingly. Policy debates pivot on metrics: employment figures, test scores, infection curves. A law is “good” if it delivers aggregate welfare; the state is “just” if it secures maximal autonomy with minimal coercion. Shared metaphysical horizons, divine purpose, sacred history, eschatological accountability, are ruled inadmissible in parliamentary argument. Political legitimacy is recalibrated to procedural neutrality, not moral teleology.

Finally, this complex issues in a ready-made social critique. Equipped with positivist lenses, the graduate scans tradition, wedding customs, family hierarchy, gender modesty, as residues awaiting rationalisation. Cultural forms that cannot furnish empirical justifications are labelled oppressive or superstitious. Conversely, technological disruption is praised as progress because it increases choice and efficiency, even when it corrodes community. Thus the covert schooling supplies not only a worldview but the very criteria by which alternative worldviews will be dismissed. In sum, the formal curriculum gives facts and credentials; the hidden curriculum bequeaths a cosmology without transcendence, an epistemology of doubt, an ethic of utility, a politics of proceduralism, and a critique that spares no practice grounded in revelation. Unless we name, and then consciously counter, this subterranean education, our classrooms will continue to mint specialists for the market and strangers to their own metaphysical roots.

The mass-production model of education has also hollowed out intellectual rigour itself. Plato restricted the Academy to those who could endure the abstraction of geometry; medieval madrasas demanded mastery of logic before authorising a fatwā. By contrast, the modern university—tethered to mass democracies and market economies—must certify millions each year to feed bureaucracies and industries that measure success in head-count and “human-capital” indices. Entrance bars fall, syllabi are simplified, and lectures morph into slide decks digestible at speed. The student who once wrestled with Euclid or Ibn Sīnā now completes “critical-thinking modules” assessed by multiple-choice quizzes. Scholarship turns managerial: publish quickly, cite prolifically, avoid the slow labour of foundational questions. In such an environment the likelihood of forming another of their own fathers like Bacon, Descartes, or even Carnap is vanishingly small; the machinery produces technicians of method, not architects of thought.

Credential inflation worsens the problem. A bachelor’s degree that once marked serious study is now the new high-school leaving certificate; Master’s programmes mushroom overnight to preserve the scarcity premium; doctoral cohorts swell far beyond the academy’s capacity to cultivate genuine, original inquiry. Libraries report soaring downloads of secondary summaries, while primary texts, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, al-Ghazālī’s Maqāṣid, gather digital dust. The graduate emerges with PowerPoint fluency and algorithmic literacy but without the stamina to parse a dense argument or the humility to recognise its absence. He is literate enough to quote Popper’s falsifiability yet cannot reconstruct the syllogism underneath; she can generate regression plots yet balks at defining causality.

Into this intellectual shallowness the new categories of thought, autonomy, efficiency, therapeutic self-care, are poured without resistance. Decades of textbooks portraying tradition as a museum of errors prime the graduate to view inherited norms as the obvious culprit for every present frustration: unemployment? blame nepotistic family networks; gender violence? blame “patriarchal modesty codes”; corruption? blame pre-modern notions of honour. Lacking historical depth or metaphysical alternatives, the critique fixes on the most visible target, religious symbols, parental authority, communal rituals, while leaving the utilitarian premises of the system unquestioned. The result is a class of eloquent yet intellectually malnourished militants: quick to deconstruct but unable to construct, certain that demolition equals progress.

And because the market rewards this volatility, advertising thrives on outrage, social media amplifies instant moral verdicts, these half-schooled critics are soon armed with platforms far larger than their reading lists. They circulate memes that parody hijab, tweets that mock joint families, reels that depict prayer as time-wasting, all under the banner of “critical thinking” they were assured their degree had bestowed. Thus the very educational regime that promised enlightenment not only fails to produce the calibre of minds that once advanced human knowledge; it also weaponises thin knowledge against the thick wisdom of tradition, accelerating cultural erosion while remaining blind to the metaphysical vacuum it deepens.

The genealogy of modern schooling we have traced is not an academic sideshow; it is the very engine that spins the cultural loom described at the start of Part II. For three centuries the West has refined an educational apparatus that packages a Baconian-positivist metaphysics, an empiricist epistemology, and a utilitarian ethic into the neutral guise of “general knowledge.” When that apparatus is exported, or eagerly imported, into Muslim societies, it plants its categories deep inside the pupil’s mind long before he is conscious of possessing categories at all. The child who learns the periodic table as the final grammar of matter, Bloom’s taxonomy as the final grammar of learning, and GDP curves as the final grammar of progress will regard any metaphysical, liturgical, or genealogical alternative as, at best, folklore that failed to keep pace.

Consequently, the culture this schooling now produces is one of methodological doubt and consumer certainty: sceptical of inherited meanings, confident only in purchasable or programmable outcomes. Its public holidays are sales seasons, its sacred hours the time-slots of streaming releases, its moral vocabulary a rotating set of hashtags. It lauds the café district’s bottled snow-melt as entrepreneurial genius while pitying the mountain hamlet that still treats the same water as barakah. It praises flexibility, disrupts lineage, and measures intimacy by response latency. In such a milieu, the joint family, the veil, the waqf bakery, the Friday hush at khutbah, everything rooted in pre-positivist logic, becomes a candidate for “reform.”

This same apparatus turns its critique reflexively upon the civilisation that hosts it. Because revelation, metaphysical purpose, and communal obligation fall outside the epistemic charter of positivism, the culture shaped by positivist schooling cannot read them except as sources of unreason or, at best, identity folklore. Traditional Muslim norms, being saturated with theocentric meaning, therefore appear oppressive, irrational, or wastefully inefficient, precisely the judgments we catalogued earlier as the modern mind’s instinctive verdict on modesty, hierarchy, and communal ritual.

Out of this crucible emerges the modern Muslim man. He is bi-cultural not by choice but by curricular design. At home he quotes Ṣūrah Yā-Sīn because his grandmother taught him the melody; online he retweets neuroscience threads claiming consciousness is a cortical illusion. He ties a turban at his nikāḥ and a Windsor knot for the office selfie. His prayer app shares the same screen as his calorie tracker; both send notifications, yet the latter carries empirical authority. He uses “in shāʾAllāh” in conversation but defaults to probability tables when making real decisions. Caught between residual fitrah and freshly installed drawers, he oscillates: defensive toward Western caricatures of Islam, yet instinctively contemptuous of Islamic forms that resist Western metrics.

When such a man, or woman, turns to social critique, the target is almost always the legacy that seems to hinder the algorithmic future: quartiers governed by elder councils, marriage contracts that assume lifelong gender complementarity, curricula that begin with al-ʿAqīdah al-Ṭaḥāwiyyah rather than STEM. He is earnest, often sincere, but his conceptual toolkit, acquired gratis from the colonial, then globalised classroom, permits him only to renovate tradition into utilities or discard it as rubble. Thus the educational story loops back to the cultural story: a curriculum that dethroned metaphysics has generated a culture that de-sutures revelation from everyday life and a modern Muslim subject who experiences that de-suture as the very definition of progress.

But to what purpose does the modern student now bend his sharpened categories? We have traced the instruments of thought he acquires, empiricism, quantification, procedural doubt, but every instrument presupposes a project. A scalpel, after all, is useless without a body to cut and a goal for the surgery. The telos that silently guides contemporary schooling is not supplied by revelation or communal destiny; it is the human-centred horizon first raised five centuries ago when Europe’s intellectual compass pivoted from heaven to man.

That pivot began in the Italian studia humanitatis, where Petrarch urged scholars to seek eloquence in Cicero rather than in patristic glosses, and where Pico della Mirandola celebrated man as “the interim creature” free to fashion himself upward into angel or downward into beast. Erasmus refined the theme, proposing philology and moral sentiment in place of monastic disputation as the surest road to virtue. In these classrooms the purpose of learning was recast: no longer to contemplate the divine order, but to perfect the capacities of the earthly self. By the time Bacon proposed experiment as the “new organon,” Europe was already primed to believe that human ingenuity, armed with the right method, could unlock all remaining secrets and bend nature to the will of its steward.

That humanist telos flowed unbroken into the Enlightenment and thence into the nineteenth-century positivist university. Kant’s call to “dare to know,” Jefferson’s self-evident rights, Bentham’s calculus of pleasure, all presumed man as both measure and end. Modern schooling simply operationalises this creed. Every timetable organised around “learning outcomes,” every career fair promising “personal fulfilment,” every counsellor urging students to “follow your passion” is a lineal descendant of Pico’s oration. The laboratory and spreadsheet, inherited from Bacon and Comte, supply the tools; the goal is the Renaissance promise of autonomous self-fashioning, now updated for the age of venture capital and wellness apps.

Thus the graduate’s intellectual apparatus serves a purpose fixed long before he entered kindergarten: maximise human power, comfort, and expressive range within an immanent frame. Once that purpose is internalised, inherited categories whose telos is transcendence, barakah, khidmah, ʿubūdiyyah, appear, at best, ornamental. The student’s newly minted scepticism does not float aimlessly; it orbits the sun of secular humanism, interrogating every tradition for its utility to the sovereign self. In this way the renaissance turn to man supplies the missing key: it explains not only how modern education thinks, but why it thinks at all, and why its graduates instinctively wield their empirical categories to remodel a world that, in their view, must ultimately serve man, never man the world.

Consider a first-year economics student in Kashmir University who has imbibed the curriculum we have sketched. His classes in “Scientific Socialism” present history as a data-series of production relations, exploitation coefficients, and Gini curves; human flourishing is defined in purely material terms, adequate calories, housing density, life-expectancy. Because his telos has already been set by secular humanism, man’s earthly well-being as the highest good, and because his epistemic reflex is positivist, only what is measurable is real, the Qurʾānic insistence that wealth is a trust and that ultimate account lies beyond the grave sounds, to him, like poetic overlay. When Marx condemns religion as the “opiate” that dulls class consciousness, the student nods: if the purpose of life is material emancipation, and if truth is verified in factory output and income graphs, then a metaphysics that postpones justice to the Hereafter looks like complicity with oppression. Thus a Muslim tongue can recite the basmalah yet champion an ideology that denies the very axis of that invocation, because the inherited invocation now occupies a drawer labelled “identity ritual,” while economic data occupy the drawer labelled “reality.”

A similar dynamic unfolds in the gender debate. A Muslim sociology major in Islamic Univeristy of Science and Technology or Jamia Milia Islamia studies surveys showing unequal labour-force participation and wage gaps. Her statistics courses teach that significance lies in standard deviations; her psychology electives explain fulfilment in terms of self-actualisation; her ethics seminar frames autonomy as the non-negotiable moral baseline. Asked about the Kashmiri household, she employs the categories at hand: is it economically symmetric, does it maximise choice, can it be replicated in a regression? Failing those tests, she deems it culturally specific and morally obsolete. When a ḥadīth extols the mother’s threefold precedence over the father, she reads it as sentimental rhetoric, empirically ungrounded, therefore inadmissible in policy. Her critique is not spiteful; it is methodologically compelled. The telos bequeathed by her schooling, individual self-realisation, and the tools she has been given, quantitative verification, permit her only one conclusion: full interchangeability of roles. Revelation, failing to conform, must yield.

In each case the positivist toolkit does precisely what it was designed to do: strip questions down to measurable variables, rank outcomes by material benefit, and discard premises that exceed the sensory ledger. The modern Muslim who wields that kit therefore arrives at judgments that feel self-evident even when they contradict the very faith he professes. His commitments are not the betrayal of education, they are its intended harvest, and a reflection of the new cognitive categories he houses.

Formal schooling, together with its contents, is only the first conveyor belt by which new categories enter the Muslim mind. Long after the classroom bell rings, another machinery hums in markets, air-routes, fibre-optic cables, and streaming platforms, extending the Bacon-Pico worldview into every living-room and bazaar. If education supplies the blueprint for a human-centred, empiricist telos, globalisation supplies the ambient soundtrack and ready-made furnishings, branding desire, standardising etiquette, and synchronising aspirations across continents. To see how our cognitive drawers are reinforced and multiplied outside the school gates, we must now follow the goods, images, and idioms that pour through satellite dishes and cargo ports, re-inscribing the same secular metrics of value even in households that never open a textbook.

Globalisation, in its plainest sense, is the accelerating interweave of places, peoples, and production systems into a single, near-instantaneous circuit. It began in earnest when post-war Bretton-Woods institutions stabilised currencies, container ships standardised cargo, and jet travel collapsed distances; it quickened after 1971 when deregulated finance could chase profit across time-zones by wire; and it became ubiquitous once fibre-optic cables and, later, the internet allowed data, images, and credit to move at the speed of light. What this integration brings to the table is formidable: supply chains that deliver Kenyan roses to Dubai before dawn, capital markets that fund a garment factory in Dhaka by lunchtime, video streams that première the same drama in Casablanca and California at dusk. It packages technologies, management templates, and legal norms alongside the phones and sneakers, ISO standards for quality, IFRS rules for accounting, and increasingly uniform codes for workplace conduct. It multiplies consumer choice, rewards efficiency of scale, and promises any participant, state or individual, access to a planetary bazaar of goods, jobs, information, and even identities. In neutral economic language, globalisation is an infrastructure of compression: it shrinks space, abbreviates time, and lowers the transaction costs of moving money, merchandise, and meaning across the earth.

Globalisation meets the modern Muslim graduate at the precise points where school has already thinned his ontological skin. Having been taught that truth is empirical and the good is material optimisation, he confronts a planetary market that promises both in dazzling abundance. The first effect is cognitive affirmation: container ports, real-time currency tickers, and Silicon-Valley gadgets appear as living proof that the positivist toolkit “works.” Every smartphone unboxed is a tactile lesson that the humanist–empiricist project delivers tangible power, while his grandfather’s rosary, by contrast, delivers only private comfort. Without a metaphysical counter-argument, the mind registers success where it can count it—in megapixels, megawatts, and market capitalisation—and silently upgrades its confidence in the very categories that produced those numbers.

The second effect is normative realignment. Global supply chains do not merely ferry goods; they ferry the standards by which goods are certified, ISO, HACCP, ESG. A halal abattoir in Karachi now posts its quarterly waste-water pH on a European compliance dashboard; a madrasa hoping for Gulf philanthropy must upload a strategic plan written in MBA English. These protocols re-define responsibility as adherence to quantifiable benchmarks, edging aside older norms of amānah (trust) or nīyyah (intention) that resist metric capture. Over time, moral imagination bends toward what can be audited, and reverence, which cannot be audited, recedes from institutional priority.

Material abundance triggers a third effect: fascination and mimicry. When Paris fashion week streams live to Casablanca phones, or when Seoul coffee-bars franchise into Kuala Lumpur malls, form precedes reflection. The graduate who enters a glass-walled co-working space in Lagos instantly knows how to behave: swipe card, log in, take oat-milk latte to a hot-desk. Behind that choreography lies a Western aesthetic genealogy, Bauhaus minimalism, Californian casualness, that smuggles its own anthropology: the individual as project, time as billable block, space as productivity enhancer. The user copies the form to signal global fluency; the form, repeated, seeds the underlying values. Successful artist is not one who writes “chaani bar tal raevem raecziy” but then one with most views on YouTube, biggest live shows and longest chain of sponsors.

This fascination scales because global culture privileges the exporter. Hollywood budgets dwarf local cinema; Netflix algorithms, trained on Anglo-phone viewing data, recommend English content to Urdu users; Spotify’s Ramadan playlist is curated in Los Angeles. The hegemon sets the tempo, the colonised dance to it, and the reward is belonging. A marketing intern in Cairo who cannot banter about Marvel plotlines feels excluded from office chatter; she binge-watches to stay socially viable. The cultural capital she acquires is denominated in Western narratives, displacing the memory of sīrah stories once told by her grandmother. Cognitive drawers labelled “hero,” “love,” “freedom” are repopulated with foreign exemplars.

Diaspora flows amplify the loop. A software engineer from Hyderabad lands in Seattle, absorbs DEI workshops and mindfulness apps, and remits both salary and lifestyle back home. Cousins admire his Tesla selfies, not his tahajjud schedule. Weddings in his ancestral village adopt destination-photography packages to match his Instagram grid. The normative shift travels faster than the body: even those who never emigrate internalise emigrant aesthetics and moral hierarchies, recalibrating their own aspirations accordingly.

All this imposes a price of admission: to interface smoothly with global circuits, local cultures must dilute anything too textured, too allusive, too anchored in sacred particularity. The sawtooth call of the aḏhān is softened to ambient “spiritual music” in airport lounges; khutbah quotations are trimmed to universalist aphorisms for TEDx stages. The dilution is asymmetric. Western culture loses little by exporting Starbucks; Yemeni coffeehouses lose their poetry recitals by importing it. In a global mall, sameness is convenience, and convenience is designed in Cupertino.

The role of the university graduate in this process is catalytic. Armed with English fluency and KPI logic, he becomes the local franchise manager, the compliance officer, the influencer who translates global norms into domestic micro-codes: dress codes at a co-ed gym, privacy clauses in a halal fintech app, sustainability targets in a waqf project. He does not intend betrayal; he is executing the playbook that both school and market have validated. Tradition, if it survives, must retrofit itself to his spreadsheets, zakat visualised in infographics, niqāb re-pitched as “privacy tech,” pilgrimage documented through GoPro vlogs. The grammar of sacrality is replaced by the grammar of branding, with revelation relegated to background colour.

As globalisation deepens, even resistance is preformatted by its idioms. A youth collective in Istanbul protests consumerism via an Instagram campaign, each story slide designed on Canva, each caption using hashtags that ride the algorithm they decry. Their critique is real, yet the medium corrals their message into attention metrics, teaching them to value success by follower counts, the very utilitarian measure they oppose. Thus global culture annexes dissent, making the resistant subject an unpaid curator of the hegemon’s platform. A whole bunch of young men is made to think that tweeting “I Protest” is not tweeting but protesting – the best example of how a category (protest) is filled by something alien (tweeting) than traditional (picketing/hitting the streets).

What is lost is not simply local flavour but an entire ontology of meaning. When water is priced in plastic bottles, too sacred to drink free and too cheap to spill, the metaphysical notion of water as divine gift evaporates. When time is sliced into subscription cycles, the liturgical hour that once punctuated the day becomes logistical inconvenience. When space is gridded into rentable square metres, the courtyard that fostered multigenerational intimacy shrinks to a liability on real-estate prospectuses. These material re-definitions feed back into cognition: reality itself feels secular because its most tangible coordinates, water, time, space, arrive pre-secularised.

Over generations, the cognitive drawers themselves migrate. Children who grow up on streaming cartoons learn to map good and evil onto Marvel tropes, not onto Qurʾānic paradigms; teenagers whose social life unfolds in WhatsApp groups intuit presence as immediate reply, not as bodily proximity; adults who navigate by GPS trust an algorithm over the elder’s directions. Each convenience becomes a catechism: trust data, mistrust memory; prioritise speed, downplay ritual; maximise choice, minimise commitment. The original drawers labeled “trust in providence,” “patience,” “silence,” fade from use and are eventually repurposed.

In this global milieu, Islamic tradition survives in curated fragments, calligraphy on a startup’s foyer wall, Sufi music in a fusion playlist, hijab styled after Paris fashion weeks, books inside Parsa’s restaurants. These fragments are meaningful, but their axial logic has shifted: they signify identity, not submission; aesthetic, not metaphysics. The graduates who broker this semiotics are hailed as modern, inclusive, globally competitive. They experience little friction because the algorithms reward the most translatable version of every symbol.

The cumulative outcome is a global monoculture with Western grammar and local accents. It sets the horizon of aspiration, career, romance, leisure, while permitting decorative differences that do not disrupt aggregate consumption. To fit in, the Muslim must adapt, and adaptation gradually feels like authenticity. Those who refuse, maintaining classical madrasas, insisting on gender-segregated weddings, keeping commercial ethics tied to fiqh, risk marginalisation as parochial or extremist. The very categories of public legitimacy have migrated, and so has the cost of dissent.

The cycle is self-tightening because the graduates of secularised curricula become the gatekeepers of global standards at home: they draft legislation, accredit universities, manage banks, and curate media. Each institutional decision embeds another layer of the same metaphysics, efficiency over barakah, autonomy over guardianship, data over wisdom, until the option set for the next generation narrows to a single plausible civilisational path: global, secular, ostensibly neutral, but in practice Western in origin and telos. The loom of culture, once varied in its warp and weft, now hums to a single imported pattern, and the thread that is Islamic in colour struggles to retain its native motif.

Two decades ago the idea that a young Muslim couple would meet on a public “dating” platform, negotiate marital terms in emojis, and announce their engagement with a kind of gender-reveal video edited to K-pop beats would have sounded outlandish in most of the Muslim world. Today it scarcely raises an eyebrow in Riyadh, Jakarta, Casablanca, Lahore or Srinagar. Globalisation has normalised each component of that scenario: Western social apps localised with a “halal” sticker, a visual language of hearts and fireworks learned from Netflix rom-com trailers, the consumer ritual of cake cutting and marriage videos borrowed from American suburbia, and a soundtrack chosen by YouTube’s algorithm according to worldwide trending charts. What once lay outside the moral imagination, not merely forbidden but literally unthinkable, now appears self-evidently modern, even modest, because every step in the chain feels familiar, convenient, and globally validated.

Yet even this tandem of formal curriculum and global circuitry does not saturate every mind to an equal depth. Families vary in piety, teachers in conviction, societies in regulatory zeal; cracks remain where inherited sensibilities might still breathe. It is precisely into those hairline spaces that the subtlest agent of cognitive re-engineering seeps, the slow drip of what we may call “minuscule injections”. These are not official lesson plans, nor headline imports, but micro-doses of imagery, humour, slang, consumer ritual, and moral framing that enter through advertising jingles, meme culture, influencer banter, children’s cartoons, even the default emojis on a phone. They bypass argument and deliberation, working instead by repetition and ambience, gently sanding down whatever resistance curriculum and globalisation have left intact.

Globalisation may drench a society in uniform products and spectacle, but it is the minuscule injection that inoculates each heart against its own inheritance. Where the cargo-ship is obvious, the meme is invisible; where the IMF loan is debated, the Netflix laugh-track is merely enjoyed. Begin with the meme. A two-second GIF normalises eye-rolling at parental authority far more efficiently than a political manifesto. The joke requires no translation; it slips across WhatsApp groups from Toronto to Tangier and installs itself as a reflex: mock the “Boomer,” trust the peer. Each repetition chisels a micro-doubt about the moral priority of elders that centuries of adab once insisted upon.

Media algorithms weaponise this subtlety. TikTok’s “For You” feed does not ask whether you sought a feminist manifesto; it infers your curiosity from two seconds of paused scrolling and supplies a hundred more clips in the same vein, pushing the edge of acceptability half a millimetre at a time. The user never notices the gradient. Yesterday, a hijabi lip-synced a K-pop lyric; today the same account lip-syncs a breakup rant whose chorus is “my body, my rules.” No curriculum committee approved this lesson, yet the drawer labelled “woman” is quietly rewritten.

Advertising adds another micro-dose. An ice-cream billboard in Karachi shows a giggling couple in Western prom attire with the tagline “You deserve it.” The prompt is not to buy a flavour but to swallow a proposition: indulgence is self-care. When the same slogan appears on a post-iftār dessert ad in Ramadan, the cognitive drawer once labelled nafs-restraint begins to rename itself treat-yourself. Subtle shifts in language follow. English terms such as “space,” “trigger,” and “boundary” migrate into Arabic, Urdu or Kashmiri tweets untranslated, because the local tongue lacks perfect equivalents. Once adopted, they smuggle the moral psychology of Western therapeutic culture. Saying “I need space” in Kashmiri feels modern, assertive, almost clinical; the traditional request, “leave me with my Lord for a while”, now sounds archaic, emotional, unspecific.

Even architecture injects. The shopping-mall atrium, cloned from Dubai to Casablanca, trains bodies to equate leisure with temperature-controlled anonymity and consumer choice. A teenager raised in that climate-free cocoon associates crowded street bazaars with chaos, sweat, and danger. The old marketplace’s very sensory palette, spices, haggling, the adhān cutting through chatter, appears “stressful,” and “self-care” becomes a weekend in an air-conditioned chain café, headphones neutralising the call to prayer.

Humour is a potent solvent. Late-night hosts broadcast to global YouTube, ridiculing celibacy, veiling, or large families as punchlines. Laughter disarms critical faculties; once we laugh at something, we rarely venerate it again. Thus, a single viral sketch can undo months of khutbah admonition by converting modesty into a comic stereotype of social awkwardness.

Minuscule injections operate through mere-exposure effect: what we see often, we accept; what we accept, we eventually endorse. A toddler in Ankara who hears “Happy Holidays” on dubbed cartoons grows up puzzling over why classmates insist on “ʿEid Mubārak.” By adolescence, the universalist greeting feels more polite, more worldly, less parochial. Scriptural specificity is perceived as potential offense.

The injections are asynchronous: elders and children watch the same Turkish drama, but embedded product placements, smartphones, energy drinks, dating apps, speak far louder to the digital native. Grandfather admires the plot’s Ottoman nostalgia; grandson Googles the theme song, lands on Western playlists, and within three clicks is absorbing value systems neither the drama’s writers nor his parents can curate. There is also frequency illusion (Baader-Meinhof). Once a teen encounters a slogan like “My body, my choice,” algorithms flood her screens with matching content: workout vlogs, body-positivity quotes, reproductive-rights debates. She concludes the entire world shares this conviction; any local dissent feels alien, unjust. Community elders become statistical outliers in her imagined dataset.

Gamification intensifies adoption. Snapchat streaks reward continuous self-exposure; Instagram likes validate skin-centric selfies; PUBG and Fortnite sublimate military heroism into digital gun-play devoid of moral stakes. Day by day, valor, privacy, and real-world fraternity are recoded into abstractions that serve the dopamine loop of the app. Even supposedly neutral scientific infographics carry injections. A health diagram showing “sleep, nutrition, exercise, socialising” as equal wedges of a wellness pie relegates prayer to optional garnish. Science appears objective; yet the pie chart functions as moral ranking: if it’s not an evidence-based wedge, it is dispensable. Prayer becomes lifestyle add-on.

Over time, these picograms of influence cohere into a cognitive sediment. The Muslim graduate who never formally studied liberal theory now instinctively speaks its dialect: autonomy above obedience, consent the sole legitimiser, pleasure pathology-free unless it harms. He does not cite Locke or Mill; TikTok and Nike have already done the work, he says “just do it”. The cumulative impact is dialectical. Because minuscule injections rarely trigger direct resistance, they accumulate unchallenged. Once the sediment reaches critical depth, older moral intuitions experience hydraulic pressure: they either metamorphose into the new alignment, ḥayāʾ reframed as “personal vibe”, or fracture into irrelevance. At that point the society that still recites Qurʾān may interpret its verses through borrowed metaphors, concluding that paradise is “ultimate self-actualisation” and prophethood is “transformational leadership.”

Finally, the process is self-healing. If a local campaign briefly succeeds in reviving tradition, say a modest-fashion drive, it is quickly monetised by global brands. Hijab is refashioned into haute couture, shot by photographers who erase Qurʾānic modesty from the frame. The revival is absorbed as a fashion sub-genre, reconfirming the original hierarchy: consumption first, meaning later. Thus minuscule injections complete the work left undone by curriculum and globalisation. They colonise the crevices of daily affect, humour, habit, ambience, until the cognitive drawers themselves are relabelled. The mind still houses terms like honour, silence, servitude, but the definitions scroll in from servers thousands of miles away, softly overwriting every earlier citation.

The forces we have examined, formal schooling, global integration, and ceaseless minuscule injections, do not operate in isolation; they spiral through one another like strands of a single rope. The curriculum supplies the baseline metaphysics and epistemology, teaching children to privilege what is measurable and to pursue a human-centred telos. Globalisation then universalises those lessons, rewarding anyone who thinks and behaves according to that metric logic with jobs, status, and a sense of belonging in the “real” world economy. Whatever fragments of alternative vision survive are gradually eroded by a background mist of micro-messages—memes, jingles, branding cues—that make the positivist, consumerist outlook feel not only superior but inevitable. Together the three mechanisms form a continuous feedback loop in which classroom catechism, marketplace incentives, and ambient signals confirm and amplify each other day after day.

The cumulative result is a decisive shift in the Overton window – the range of ideas a society instinctively deems sensible, moral, and worth considering. Positions that once sat at the core of Muslim common sense, gender-differentiated duty, deference to elders, public priority for worship, slide toward the fringe, re-framed as quaint or oppressive. Conversely, notions previously unthinkable, premarital cohabitation, commodified piety, algorithms outranking scholarship, glide into the centre as self-evident modernity. Because the window moves slowly, almost no one feels the ground tilting; each generation simply inherits a “normal” that would have startled its grandparents. Policy follows perception: school syllabi shave away more sacred history to make room for coding, municipal by-laws mute the call to prayer in mixed zones, marriage statutes re-write guardianship as negotiable preference.

Out of this shifted frame a new culture coheres. Its cognitive drawers are labelled with imported fonts; its norms orbit autonomy, efficiency, and consumption; its material landscape, cafés, coworking lofts, influencer backdrops, teaches those values at every glance. Honour is redefined as brand reputation, silence as social anxiety, friendship as digital responsiveness. Revelation remains in public discourse, but largely as ethical garnish or identity badge, no longer the architectonic principle of life’s meanings. In this culture a Muslim can still fast, pray, and utter in shāʾAllāh, yet the coordinates by which he steers his decisions, judges success, and transmits memory are set not by Prophetic inheritance but by the entwined logic of curriculum, global market, and micro-media drip.

We can now locate the heat and noise of today’s cultural quarrels in their proper machinery. The objection that the joint-family is “oppressive,” that hijab is “mere cloth,” or that the Friday bazaar should yield to Friday brunch is seldom the fruit of solitary reflection. It is the reflex of a mind that has been tutored, first explicitly by a positivist curriculum, then reinforced by a global market that rewards its assumptions, and finally normalised by an ambient drizzle of memes, ads, and story-lines. When the modern Muslim deploys the vocabulary of efficiency, autonomy, or “scientific objectivity” against his own inheritance, he is not acting as an independent juror weighing evidence; he is pressing “play” on a cassette pre-recorded by three centuries of humanist pedagogy and Western cultural hegemony. The syllogism feels rational only because the premises were installed long before he knew there were alternatives.

Recognising this genesis robs the critique of its aura of inevitability. It reveals that many of the norms now dismissed as archaic were not weighed and found wanting; they were simply moved outside the shifting Overton window by an educational-economic apparatus that had no tools for measuring transcendence. In that light, the derision of tradition is exposed as a category error: asking pre-modern practices to justify themselves in post-positivist terms is like faulting poetry for not proving theorems. The act may be clever, but it is not intellectually serious.

Understanding the provenance of these borrowed quarrels also clarifies why their tenor is so often destructive rather than reformative. A discourse trained to treat revelation as sentiment and virtue as utility can critique but cannot construct; it inherits demolition equipment without architectural plans. Hence the pattern we observe across the Muslim world: energetic campaigns to discard dowry, gender-segregation, or waqf markets, anti-syed campaigns, biddah-shirk campaigns, followed by a vacuum filled inevitably by global consumer norms, weddings become Instagram sets, modesty a fashion sub-genre, charity a corporate CSR line-item. The old structure is toppled; the promised rational replacement never materialises, because the toolkit was designed for market integration, not metaphysical renovation.

This is not an argument for nostalgic paralysis. It is, rather, a call to intellectual sobriety. Before we applaud each new “rational” assault on inherited culture, we must ask: whose logic, which ends, and formed by what schooling? If the answers trace back to the human-centred, market-driven telos we have charted, then the critique is not an act of liberation but of deeper compliance, obedience to a master narrative masquerading as independent thought. True renewal would require a mind that can toggle between the data-rich instruments of modernity and the metaphysical horizons of revelation, judging each by its proper standards and ends. We conclude, then, where Part I began: culture is the unseen loom, cognition its weave, identity the cloth. Our age has imported a foreign loom, dressed it with Western threads, and wonders why the resulting tapestry no longer resembles the pattern bequeathed by our ancestors. The task ahead is not merely to argue for traditional practices, nor to demonise every global influence, but to repossess the loom itself, to re-align education with ḥikmah, to filter global flows through a conscious telos, and to expose each minuscule injection before it hardens into reflex. Only then can critique regain meaning and reform proceed with sight instead of sleep-walking to the tune of a borrowed cassette. Truth be told, when the cognitive structures are restored to their Qurʾānic and prophetic settings, no traditional practice appears out of place, anachronistic, or irrational. At least in my own study and experience, I have yet to encounter a single criticism that withstands that re-alignment; the inherited forms regain their inner logic the moment the mind’s compass is recalibrated.

Link to Our Culture – Part 1 – What is Culture?

Link to Our Culture – Part 2 – Forces of Displacement

Link to Our Culture – Part 3 – End of Religion

Link to Our Culture – Part 4 – Towards a Reform Movement

Link to Our Culture – Part 5 – A Reform that Works

Link to Our Culture – Part 6 – The Road to Medina