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LESSING, EDUCATION AND THE ISLAMIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
Mukhtorova Maftuna Ilkhom kizi
Doctoral Student of Bukhara State University
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13745043
Abstract:
This article intended to look at Lessing’s thoughts on education,
literature, racism, and women’s rights and locate possible commonalities
between them and certain facets of Islamic thought. As she is considered a
humanist, a secular writer of great stature, the “grande dame” of British writing
of her time, and handles explicit sexual relationships, a sense of remoteness and
incomprehension is perhaps palpable in any attempt to discover an “Islamic
Doris Lessing.”
Key words:
Lessing, Education, the Islamization of Knowledge, thoughts
on education, literature, racism, and women’s rights, Islamic perspectives.
Аннотация.
В этой статье мы хотели рассмотреть мысли Лессинг об
образовании, литературе, расизме и правах женщин и найти возможные
общие черты между ними и определенными аспектами исламской мысли.
Поскольку ее считают гуманистом, светским писателем большого
масштаба, «гранд-дамой» британской литературы своего времени и она
затрагивает откровенные сексуальные отношения, чувство отдаленности
и непонимания, возможно, ощутимо в любой попытке обнаружить
«исламскую Дорис Лессинг».
Ключевые слова:
Лессинг, образование, исламизация знаний, мысли
об образовании, литературе, расизме и правах женщин, исламские
перспективы.
Introduction
Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize-winning British author, explored a wide
range of themes in her work, including gender, politics, and social issues. While
she did not focus exclusively on Islamic thought, her writings often touched on
themes related to Islam and the experiences of Muslim characters. However,
given that she is known for her courage and outspokenness, as well as for
making unconventional moves and iconoclastic statements sometimes at the
expense of her literary reputation, it will be interesting to see her ideas from
Islamic perspectives. Born in the Kermanshah Province of Iran, brought up in
Rhodesia.
In her novel "The Golden Notebook," Lessing delves into various cultural
identities, including those of Muslim characters. She examines the complexities
of identity and the impact of cultural backgrounds on individuals. Lessing's
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works often critique patriarchal structures, including those found in some
interpretations of Islam. She addresses the challenges faced by women in
various cultures, including Islamic societies, highlighting both oppression and
resilience. Lessing was interested in the intersections between different
religions and philosophies. She often advocated for understanding and dialogue
among diverse belief systems, which can include Islamic perspectives. Lessing's
background in colonial Africa influenced her views on power dynamics,
colonialism, and the struggles for independence, which can intersect with
Islamic contexts, particularly in post-colonial literature. In her later works,
Lessing explored themes of spirituality and mysticism, which can resonate with
Islamic thought, especially in relation to Sufism and the search for deeper
meaning.
One of the most prominent features of Lessing’s life is that she is perhaps
the only Nobel laureate in literature who is a high school dropout by choice.
More remarkably, she is possibly one of the few individuals who have no regret
for not receiving a university-level formal education. She “remained immensely
pleased with her lack of education” [The Telegraph, 2013] and considered her
premature withdrawal from formal schooling at age 14 “a lucky escape”
[Lessing, 2007: 17]. This does not necessarily prove her disregard for formal
knowledge and training; rather, it exhibits her dissatisfaction with the
inadequacy of the mainstream institutional education system and of the
prevailing pedagogical practices that have largely failed to develop a person’s
abilities and learning potentials fully or to harness their “available faculties”
[Galin, 1997: 222] more extensively. She believes that a harmonious, balanced
development of the population’s abilities can help the
world “evade catastrophe” and that conventional education is not very helpful in
this regard. Lessing’s view of the modern education system shows her
frustration with the content and methods of the prevalent knowledge tradition.
Harvard professor Harry Lewis’ downbeat observation on the moral decrepitude
of conventional education and of many of the educated elite vindicate her
reservations and frustrations. He says: “Society is going to hell in a handbasket,
and the great universities are going to get there first” [Lewis, 2006: 108]. What
is obvious about both of their views is that universities are not producing
morally responsible and ethically grounded graduates – a crisis that is
compounded by the proliferation of Western materialistic cultural influences as
well as relativistic and positivistic views through education in non-Western
Muslim societies.
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In fact, a similar perception led some scholars to undertake the intellectual
venture of the Islamization of Knowledge (IoK) during the 1970s. This
movement represents a quest for educational and intellectual reform from an
Islamic perspective in the context of decadence in the contemporary knowledge
system. It emphasises that the ongoing epistemological crisis of knowledge is the
main cause of the moral and intellectual depravity that pervades all spheres of
human life, and hence seeks to reform education in the light of Islamic thought
and moral values.
Commonalities between Lessing and the proponents of IoK include their shared
concern for the holistic development of the human personality and potential.
According to the University of Chicago professor of Islamic thought Fazlur
Rahman [Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988], the deficiency of the modern education
system is largely due to the “discrepancy between the power of knowledge
which man has, and his failure to live up to the moral responsibility arising from
that knowledge” [1988: 4]. In other words, every knowledgeable person bears
ethical and moral responsibilities to them and to society, and failure to render
these makes their institutional learning less meaningful. Qur’an 80:23 attests to
this: “No! Man has not yet accomplished what He [God] commanded him.” The
Qur’an acknowledges and celebrates each person’s immense potential and
emphasises the correct and productive use of them, for this is where a person’s
success in both this life and the life hereafter lies. The crux of the problem is that
while human beings have accomplished near miracles in science and technology
and their material life, their moral and ethical foundation is perhaps at an all-
time low. This is because “while the presence of the desire for novelty and
discovery of something new is ever present, the urge to solve problems ethically
does not keep pace” [Rahman, 1988: 4]. Ultimately, what is needed to address
the contemporary world’s educational decadence is to employ “time, energy and
money in the creation of … minds” and of “thinkers, those who have the capacity
to think constructively and positively” [Rahman, 1988: 11]. As is the case with
the IoK undertaking, the main thrust of Lessing’s critique of conventional
education also points out its inadequacy and inability to create such enlightened
individuals and thinking creatures. Thus, the ideas of both Lessing and the IoK
scholars have converged in their concern for the current faulty knowledge
system and in their urge to rectify it.
The Islamic Conception of Literature and Lessing’s Idea of
‘Committedness’
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Perhaps the greatest convergence between specific Islamic concepts and
Lessing’s ideas lies in the notion of literature. Away from the “art for art’s sake”
dictum, Islam maintains a utilitarian view of literature by promoting ISLAMIC
PERSPECTIVES ON TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE ‘ilm nāfi’
(useful and beneficial knowledge). This concept is foregrounded in the following
well-known hadith of Prophet Muhammad: “O Allah! I seek refuge in You from
the inability (to do good), indolence, cowardice, miserliness, decrepitude and
torment of the grave. … O Allah! I seek refuge in You from knowledge which is
not beneficial, and from a heart which does not fear (You)…”. Since literature is a
branch of knowledge, its usefulness must be analysed from an Islamic
perspective.
Another prophetic tradition states: “There is magic in eloquence, ignorance in
knowledge, wisdom in poetry (literature), and heaviness in speech” [Mishkat al-
Maṣābīḥ, 2004: 34-35].
As these hadiths suggest, Islam may not regard a well-structured academic
discipline with scholarly credentials and pedagogical roots and embellishment
as true knowledge if it does not benefit human beings. In today’s world, various
branches of knowledge and their practitioners are perhaps well-equipped with
information about their respective fields, but “most of them do not seem to have
developed an internally set moral compass that could function as their guide and
help them distinguish what is right and what is wrong and act accordingly”
[Hasan, 2014: 6]. Due to the knowledge system’s weak ethical foundation,
possessors of conventional
education may not have a greater claim on “moral and ethical armour capable of
withstanding the blandishments of greed” [Meisel, 2005: 9]. Knowledge and
scholarship devoid of practical, ethical benefits for its practitioners and for the
wider society may be regarded as a futile exercise. As Qur’an 18:103-04 states:
“Say: Shall We inform you of the greatest losers in (their) deeds? (These are)
they whose labour is misdirected and lost in worldly life, even though they think
that they are doing well in work.” Impressive intellectual efforts and excellence
may not be worthwhile if their practitioners are not ethically sound and if it
benefits no one, not even its possessors. Based on this fundamental premise, it
can be inferred that in Islam the
usefulness of literary practices in a broad and generic sense is what counts and
is an essential criterion to differentiate between good and bad literature.
As [Meisel, 2005: 9] states: “For Muslims, a work of art should either
benefit
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them materially or spiritually…. If this is not the case, then artistic or literary
practices will be deemed a waste of God-given talents.” In order to describe
Islam’s approach to literature, the British writer and translator of the Qur’an
DISCOVERING DORIS LESSING: CONVERGENCES BETWEEN ISLAM 108 AND
HER THOUGHTS 109
Marmaduke Pickthall [1927: 2] states: “The whole of Islam’s great work in
science, art and literature is included under these two heads: aid and
refreshment. Some of it, such as the finest poetry and architecture, falls under
both.”
Like Islam, Lessing emphasises the usefulness and ethical considerations of
creative production. Being a great realist, Lessing believes that literature should
be “committed” and must have edifying and instructive functions. As she states:
“I see no reason why good writers should not, if they have a bent that way, write
angry protest novels about economic injustice. Many good writers have. Dickens,
for instance, was often inspired by poverty and injustice” [Lessing, 1974: 3].
According to her, writers have the potential to render a simple moral instruction
and exhortation “much more powerful” by using their creative talents. She
argues that “propagandist literature, religious or political, is as old as literature
itself.” However, she deplores the fact that “the idea of committedness is in
disrepute” in literary discussions mainly because of the poor quality or misuse
of such literary practices. She highly appreciates the nineteenth-century literary
tradition, which was marked by “a climate of ethical judgement” [Lessing, 1974:
4-5]. As opposed to that literature, Lessing laments, subsequent literary
practices have become divorced from moral judgement and the ultimate
concepts of good and evil, and are conspicuous by “a confusion of standards and
uncertainty of values” [Lessing, 1974: 5]. This resonates with what the literary
critic and educationalist Ali Ashraf [1978: 53] observes:
The difficulty that twentieth-century writers are faced with is the difficulty
brought about by the lack of faith in anything spiritual. Man stands
disintegrated; that is why some important writers have tried to re-integrate man
by reformulating his concepts and by establishing man's nature in a new context.
This is what Ezra Pound or Yeats or D. H. Lawrence have tried to do. But the
difficulty lies in the esotericism of these writers and their inability to see that
they are trying to create various kinds of disconnected concepts. Their partial
realisations are marred by their claim to have realized the whole. In manifest
opposition to the core thesis of “art for art’s sake,” Lessing proposes that a
writer be a “humanist” and “an architect of the soul” who has “a feeling of
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responsibility, as a human being, for the other human beings he influences … and
must feel himself as an instrument of change for good or for bad” [Lessing, 1974:
6-7]. She abhors the isolationist notion of literature that places a writer “in the
ivory tower” with no necessary effect in, or relation to, the practical world of
experience. Emphasising writers’ important task of guiding their fellow human
beings, she says that all of us are living a time which is so dangerous, violent,
explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people
left alive to write books or to read them. It is a question of life and death for all of
us; and we are haunted, all of us, by the threat that even if some madman does
not destroy us, our children may be born deformed or mad. [Lessing, 1974: 7]
Therefore, writers cannot turn their “backs on [their] chosen
responsibilities” of instructing and guiding people to find peace and meaning in
life and of “preventing an evil” and “strengthening a vision of a good which may
defeat the evil” [Lessing, 1974: 7]. If we compare her view of literature and
Islam’s view of knowledge in a generic sense, we find a strong commonality
between them, as both stress using knowledge (or, for that matter, literature)
for the good and progress of humanity. After touching on the harmony and
convergence between the Islamic concept of “beneficial knowledge” and
Lessing’s notion of “committedness,” in the following section, I will highlight
another striking point of confluence: Islam’s and Lessing’s outright rejection of
racism.
Conclusion
While Doris Lessing may not have explicitly focused on Islamic thought as a
central theme in her work, her exploration of cultural identity, gender issues,
and interfaith dialogue reflects a nuanced understanding of the complexities
surrounding Islam and its impact on individuals and societies. Her writings
encourage readers to consider diverse perspectives and foster empathy across
cultural divides.
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