This article should have been written 2 weeks ago but I couldn’t muster much inspiration to compose something worthy of a blog entry. Hence you see me tossing random thoughts on the new NOTA KAKI column instead. I also managed to find some interesting clips of the late brother Muhammad while going through my collection of his lectures. You can view them on my YouTube channel here.

This one is especially pertinent to what I want to discuss today:

If you bothered to take the time going through that 10 minute clip, you will notice that his perspective is clearly symbolic-interactionist which I guess comes from his training in operant psychology (3 Ph. Ds on it, and almost a fourth one). Bear in mind that there is much more to it than the 10 minutes that YouTube permits.

Thoroughly in tandem with classical conclusions, he is also heavily grounded onn empiricism rather than Cartesian rationalism/inneism. Human behavior is depicted as being the necessary outcome of one’s Total Past Learning History: this is the term he uses for the sum conditioned behavior that one learns since conceived at birth.

Building on this, since all human behavior are conditioned from one’s inner speech and outside social and physical influences, he constructs a radically bottom-up solution to social immorality as well as intellectual, economic and political lethargy. To him, we must holistically understand the cosmology of Islam; as well as the psychological laws by which we develop our behavior so that we can objectively shape our society to realize our lofty ideals.

This is a unique perspective on the human condition that you seldom hear from neither academics nor preachers. His thoughts are an invaluable body of knowledge to complement normative discourses on structures and functions of society.

Now, let us go back to the shortcomings that I hinted at in my earlier post. In reference to liberty, bro Muhammad is very adamant that it is not a solution to social problems. The reason given is that in Islam there are set principles by which human life should be moulded around.

It is true that people should be given liberty to explore their dogmas as can be exemplified by al-Ghazali in his autobiography, Deliverance From Error. Yet it still entails that social institutions sanction and shape society into the normative classical ideals of moral order. Bro Muhammad made this clear when explaining behavioral drift and drawing its analogy with entropy - that human behavior will be blown by the wind and drift towards the lowest common denominator if no effort is put in to shape it.

I hope you managed to make sense of this. I am aware of my stinginess in elaborating things. The end.