Upgrading Educational Models made Obsolete by AI

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Conventional university education is obsolete. The typical student earning a bachelor’s degree studies the equivalent of roughly forty textbooks over eight semesters. Today, however, any intelligent teenager with access to ChatGPT — trained on millions of books and articles — can surpass that graduate in a contest of factual knowledge. The model of education we follow was shaped by the needs of an earlier age; those needs have now changed. We need to rethink education from the ground up.

The two world wars reshaped modern society in profound ways. Science and technology proved decisive in their outcomes, and technical expertise therefore moved to the center of education in the postwar era. As Harvard educator Julie Reuben shows in The Making of the Modern University, universities rapidly shifted away from the older goal of forming character and judgment, and toward the newer goal of producing specialized knowledge. This transformation made sense in a world where knowledge was scarce, expertise was difficult to access, and modern states and economies urgently needed trained professionals. The system was built for the needs of its time.

The hidden logic of this system was to treat students as containers for the contents of books. Its ideal product was the idiot-savant: rich in specialized information, but poor in judgment, perspective, and practical wisdom. The teacher transmitted knowledge, the student stored it, and the examination verified the transfer. This model served the needs of its age so successfully that it helped create the scientific and technological world which has now culminated in AI. It has, in effect, made itself obsolete.

The wartime and postwar university sought to produce highly specialized experts — the human equivalent of the “mentats” in Dune — because modern states and economies needed people who could command technical knowledge at high levels. That model served its purpose brilliantly. But once machines can outperform human beings in storing, retrieving, and reorganizing information, we are free to recover an older and deeper understanding of education: not the production of human resources, but the formation of human beings capable of judgment, purpose, and meaningful lives.

For much of the modern period, universities increasingly came to see students as future inputs into the labor market — units of skill, productivity, and specialized function. The language of education shifted accordingly: from the formation of persons to the production of “human resources.” But now that machines can shoulder many of the technical and informational burdens that wartime and postwar societies once placed on human beings, education is free to recover its older and deeper vocation: to help us confront the most important questions we face as human beings — how to live well, and how to build a good society.

These questions sound abstract, but their practical consequences are everywhere. The capacities most needed in professional and social life — building trust, working in teams, handling disagreement, resolving conflicts, exercising leadership, and communicating with clarity and sensitivity — are largely absent from formal education. We send students through years of schooling without teaching them how to collaborate, how to listen, how to manage tensions, or how to contribute to healthy institutions. Later, when these absences begin to damage workplaces and organizations, we try to repair them through executive seminars, leadership workshops, and corporate training programs. What education neglects in youth, employers are forced to patch up in adulthood.

Modern education resembles a driving school that teaches students everything about the mechanics of a car — the engine, the transmission, the chemistry of fuel — but never actually teaches them how to drive. Students learn theories about the world while their own lives are pushed to the margins. Yet the most important questions we face are not merely technical ones about how the world works, but practical ones about how to navigate it: how to make choices, how to bear responsibility, how to act well under pressure, and how to live with others. Just as driving requires judgment, attention, and practice rather than abstract knowledge alone, education must once again take seriously the cultivation of the capacities required to live a human life.

This transformation of purpose also changes the meaning of learning. When a student can ask ChatGPT to produce a polished essay on climate change, economic policy, or Shakespeare in seconds, the old educational model breaks down at yet another level. A student can now submit work that looks sophisticated while learning almost nothing. This does not mean that AI should be banned from education. It means that we can no longer mistake polished output for genuine understanding. The central question is no longer whether a student can produce an answer, but whether they have developed any real ownership of the ideas, arguments, and judgments that the answer contains.

Artificial intelligence is a golden opportunity to rethink education from the ground up. By relieving human beings of the burden of storing and processing vast quantities of technical information, it frees education to return to the largest questions now confronting our species: how to build a just society, how to create peace in a fractured world, and how to avert environmental catastrophe. These are not problems that can be solved by technical specialists working in isolation. They require judgment, cooperation, moral imagination, political wisdom, and the capacity to think across disciplines and across divisions. The task of education in the age of AI is to cultivate the human beings capable of using this new power to reshape our world. How this can be done will be the topic of our next article.

Postscript: For a guide to my posts and articles on education, see: From the Mirage of Western Education to the Wellspring of Eternal Revelation, and also Education, Pedagogy, and Decolonizing the Mind

This is an expanded version of article in DAWN: Education in Age of AI (https://www.dawn.com/news/amp/1983268)

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The Veil of Money

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This may be surprising to non-Economists, but mainstream economic theories describe a world where money plays a marginal and unimportant role. This is called the doctrine of neutrality of money. My writings on money — see GUIDE: The Veiled Power of Money — are organized into a sequence of seven hubs. This post is the first HUB which provides a guide to my posts and writings discussing this issue, and the reasons why money is marginalized in economic theories. For a related post, explaining that the key difference between mainstream and heterodox economic theory lies in the role assigned to money, see: Economics As If Money Mattered.

1. The Astonishing Claim

“In this model, the effects of monetary policy are so insignificant that postal economics is more central to understanding the economy than monetary economics.”
— Edward Prescott (see: Romer’s Trouble With Macro)

Prescott was referring to Real Business Cycle (RBC) models — a highly influential strand of modern macroeconomics in which output, employment, and growth are determined by technology and preferences. In these models, money may affect prices, but it does not determine real economic outcomes.

And yet modern economies run on money.

Banks create it.
Governments depend on it.
Asset markets move with it.
Financial crises erupt when it contracts.

Ordinary people assume economics is about money. But much of modern macroeconomic theory is built on a sharp distinction between “real” and “nominal” variables — a framework in which production and employment are governed by real forces, while money is treated as a secondary layer over an underlying exchange economy. For more details, see Nominal Versus Real Models.

The result is striking: the central institution of modern capitalism is largely absent from its core models.

As the heterodox economist Steve Keen has put it (see: Quotes Critical of Economics):

“How anybody can think they can analyze capital while leaving out Banks, Debt, and Money is a bit to me like an ornithologist trying to work out how a bird flies whilst ignoring that the bird has wings.”

Between Prescott’s formal neutrality and Keen’s metaphor lies a puzzle.
How did economics come to analyze modern capitalism as if money were incidental?

To answer that question, we must begin with an old and powerful idea: that money is merely a veil.

2. The Veil Doctrine

The idea that money is secondary to “real” economic activity has deep roots. Classical economists described money as a veil: behind it lies the real economy — production, labor, technology, exchange. Money merely facilitates trade; it does not determine outcomes. For more details, see: Looking Through the Veil of Money.

This intuition became formalized as the classical dichotomy: a separation between real variables (output, employment, productivity) and nominal variables (prices, wages, money). In this framework, money affects prices but not the real structure of the economy.

The Keynesian Revolution challenged this separation. Keynes argued that excessive money leads to inflation, while insufficient demand — and insufficient monetary expansion — leads to unemployment. This gave governments a central role in stabilizing economic activity. In the decades following World War II, Keynesian policies, combined with strong financial regulation, coincided with sustained growth, high employment, and rising income shares for the bottom 90 percent in Western economies.

Financial regulation after the Great Depression had already constrained speculative banking. When combined with demand management policies, the result was a prolonged period in which the power of the financial sector was limited relative to labor and industry.

The monetarist counter-revolution, associated most prominently with Milton Friedman, rejected Keynesian demand management and restored the classical emphasis on monetary neutrality. The Quantity Theory of Money gave this view its most famous expression: “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” In this framework, money determines prices; real output is governed elsewhere. For a detailed discussion, see The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter-Revolution.

As Keynesian policies were dismantled in the Reagan–Thatcher era, financial deregulation accelerated. The repeal of Glass–Steagall (1999) and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (2000) expanded the scope of financial activity and contributed to the rise of shadow banking and shadow money. Over the same period, labor’s share of income declined while the share accruing to the top percentile rose. For a visual demonstration and discussion, see The Power of Economic Theory: Graphically Illustrated.

The historical record shows that economic doctrines do not ascend by argument alone. They are cultivated, funded, institutionalized, and strategically disseminated — often with support from those whose material interests they reinforce. For a discussion of how organized intellectual strategy shapes economic paradigms, see Romer’s Trouble with Macro.

The methodological debate within Economics focuses on the normative positive distinction, and typically asserts that Economics is positive – that is it describes the world around us. It is not normative – it does not describe what should be, or the ideal state Both of the labels miss the boat. Economics is actually performative: It shapes economic policies and institutions, and the economic realities of our lives.

Treating economics as an objective description of reality, and veiling the role of money, makes financial power structurally invisible, and is greatly beneficial to those who wield that power.

3. Two Logics of Economic Life

The neutrality of money persists because modern economics makes a prior modeling choice — rarely acknowledged.

As Marx observed, there are two fundamentally different logics of economic life.

The first is the logic of exchange:

Commodity → Money → Commodity (C–M–C′)

Goods are produced to obtain other goods. Money is a convenience — a bridge between commodities. Once exchange is complete, money drops out. Welfare is measured in consumption. In such a world, money does not drive the system; it merely lubricates it.

This is the architecture of most modern economic models. Arrow–Debreu general equilibrium theory is, in essence, a refined barter system. Utility maximization assumes that agents ultimately seek goods. Even profit maximization is translated into real magnitudes. Money sits on top of the “real” economy as a layer — not as a foundation.

But modern capitalism does not operate this way.

Its logic is different:

Money → Commodity → More Money (M–C–M′)

Money is not a bridge. It is the objective. Corporations invest to expand capital. Banks create credit to earn returns. Financial institutions measure success in monetary terms. Production becomes a vehicle for accumulation. Balance sheets, leverage, and liquidity are not side details — they are structural.

In an M–C–M′ system, money cannot be neutral. It organizes production, employment, and survival.

If we analyze an M–C–M′ economy using C–M–C′ assumptions, money will appear secondary by construction. The model has already decided that consumption is the goal and accumulation is incidental. (For a deeper discussion, see The Great Transformation of Economic Theory.)

Modern economics continues to describe capitalism as if it were an exchange system. It is not. It is a monetary production system.

Once that is recognized, the central questions change: Who creates money? Who directs credit? Who absorbs losses? Who decides which sectors expand and which collapse?

Those are the questions we turn to next.

4. Crisis, Debt, and Power

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 did not begin with a productivity shock. It began with a collapse of mortgage credit and shadow banking. When credit stopped expanding, spending collapsed. Unemployment followed.

The economics profession was blindsided. The dominant models contained no meaningful role for banks, household balance sheets, or financial fragility. Financial intermediation was treated as a friction; debt was largely absent. As John Cassidy documented in “After the Blowup” , even as markets imploded, leading defenders of efficient markets struggled to fit events into their existing frameworks.

This was not a minor forecasting error. It was a structural blind spot.

The work of Atif Mian and Amir Sufi in House of Debt showed that regions with higher household leverage experienced deeper collapses. Consumption fell where debt burdens were greatest. The crisis was transmitted through household balance sheets — variables largely invisible in mainstream macroeconomic models. (For discussion, see: Why Does Aggregate Demand Collapse?)

But there is a deeper layer. As David Graeber argues in Debt: The First 5000 Years, debt is not merely a financial contract; it is a moral and political relationship. A debt-driven growth model shifts risk onto households while concentrating control over credit in financial institutions. High household indebtedness is not only macroeconomic fragility; it is an index of financial power. Indebted populations are economically disciplined populations.

If money were neutral, banking crises would not destroy employment. If debt were incidental, household leverage would not determine the depth of recessions. The GFC demonstrated that money and credit are not side details of capitalism — they are structural.

Once this is recognized, neutrality is no longer an innocent abstraction. It obscures the central mechanism through which modern economies expand, contract, and distribute power.

Which brings us to the unavoidable question: Who creates money?

5. Rebuilding Economics: An Invitation to a New Generation

The Global Financial Crisis did not simply expose a policy failure. It exposed a theoretical failure. Adding “financial frictions” to existing models does not solve the problem if the core architecture still treats money as secondary.

If capitalism is a monetary production economy, then macroeconomics must begin with money, credit, balance sheets, and institutional structure — not with representative agents maximizing utility in an abstract exchange world.

This is not a minor adjustment. It is a research frontier.

For students choosing MPhil or Ph.D. topics, the open questions are vast and urgent:

  • How does bank credit shape sectoral development?
  • How do household balance sheets transmit shocks?
  • What determines the allocation of liquidity across classes and regions?
  • How does monetary hierarchy shape global inequality?
  • How does rising household debt alter labor markets and political agency?
  • What institutional designs reduce financial fragility without suppressing productive investment?

These are not ideological questions. They are analytically demanding, empirically rich, and largely underdeveloped within mainstream frameworks.

A monetary economy requires a different methodology. Accounting identities are not bookkeeping constraints added at the end; they are the starting point. Balance sheets are not side details; they are the structure of the system. Institutions are not frictions; they are the architecture.

Paradigm shifts do not occur because established scholars are persuaded. They occur because new researchers choose different starting points.

You do not need to defeat the old framework. You can build the next one.

A monetary production economy requires a monetary economics. The task is not to repair the old structure. It is to construct what comes after it.

The Gold Dinar (Part 1): The Questions We Are Not Asking

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The gold dinar is more than a monetary proposal.

For many Muslims, it is a moral intuition: that money should be honest, disciplined, and protected from arbitrary power. It represents stability in a world of inflation scares, debt-driven fragility, and a dollar-centered order that feels structurally unfair. Even those who do not follow the technical debates often feel the appeal immediately—because the promise sounds so simple: tie money to something real.

That instinct deserves respect. It is responding to real harms.

But it is precisely because the instinct is powerful that we should be careful about what we mean when we invoke “gold” as a solution. After studying monetary history, Islamic monetary practice, and modern financial systems, I have come to think that the gold dinar debate often stays heated and inconclusive for a quiet reason:

Multiple Gold Standards

In the public imagination, the gold standard sounds like one clean regime. Historically it never was. The same slogan covered sharply different architectures—and the difference that mattered most was who actually got access to gold.

Interwar Britain “returned to gold” in 1925, but not as gold coins in everyday life. Convertibility was structured as bullion convertibility, with a very large minimum (400 troy ounces)—so gold access was effectively reserved for large actors, not ordinary households.

Keynes’ India shows another model: daily money was the rupee, external settlement ran through sterling, and sterling linked to gold—an institutional chain (rupee ↔ sterling ↔ gold) in which most people never touched gold at all.

And Bretton Woods placed gold at the apex: currencies fixed to the dollar, the dollar linked to gold, but convertibility functioned as a politically managed promise, not a public retail right.

Once you see this, “gold dinar” also stops being one proposal. Mahathir’s version was primarily an international settlement idea among states, while the Kelantan initiative pushed toward domestic circulation as an alternative to the ringgit—immediately colliding with the logic of central-bank monetary sovereignty.

These architectures don’t just differ; they can conflict. If gold must defend external settlement commitments under stress, systems conserve it—access narrows, redemption tightens, and gold is pulled upward into the apex. The same gold cannot simultaneously serve as a freely circulating domestic medium and as the scarce reserve asset for external defense.

Fiqh Confusions and Monetary Regimes

Another reason the discussion loops is that it often treats a fiqh question as if it settles an institutional design problem.

A separate confusion keeps the conversation stuck: people mix up a fiqh classification debate with a permissibility debate. Jurists may disagree about what qualifies as money proper for rules like ribā (rules on interest/usury), ṣarf (currency exchange rules), and zakāh (alms base)—whether that category is limited to gold and silver, extends to copper fulūs, or tracks whatever society widely uses. But that is not the same as saying people may not use tokens or fiat to buy and sell. In practice, ordinary exchange has always relied on subsidiary media, and modern “gold dinar” proposals themselves assume token layers for day-to-day trade. Once that is acknowledged, the real question is no longer “Are tokens allowed?” but how the token layer is governed and linked to any anchor—who issues, who can redeem, on what terms, and what happens under stress.

And the practical constraint is decisive. Modern exchange cannot run on full-bodied gold and silver coin alone. Daily transactions require low denominations, high velocity instruments, and increasingly, account-based and digital settlement. Monetary history reinforces this: commodity systems repeatedly struggled to supply “small change,” and functioning economies repeatedly developed subsidiary or token layers to make everyday trade possible.

Monetary Architecture

Once we accept that modern economies inevitably run on layered money, the debate cannot stop at the slogan “gold-backed.” The reason is simple: “a link to gold” is not one link. It can be built in several distinct ways, and those design choices generate different monetary systems with different economic properties—especially when the system is under stress.

We have already seen this in the history of “gold standards.” Some architectures make gold active in domestic money; others restrict gold to international settlement; others place gold behind an intermediate layer (a key currency) so it sits at the apex rather than in people’s hands; and still others treat the gold link as notional and politically managed. These are not minor variations. They differ on the very mechanisms that determine outcomes: how adjustment happens, how liquidity is supplied in crises, who bears the burden when reserves are strained, and whether convertibility is broad, restricted, or suspended.

This is why claims about what “the gold dinar” will deliver—stability, justice, discipline, crisis-proofing—remain floating until we specify the architecture. Without that specification, we cannot even tell which system is being proposed, let alone evaluate its promised properties. So these issues are not technicalities. They are the regime.

Why Gold Remains Morally Persuasive

If the practical question is architecture, why does debate remain so emotionally centered on gold itself?

Because gold carries moral symbolism that is difficult to overstate. It feels incorruptible. It cannot be created by decree. It appears to place an external restraint on rulers and financiers. When monetary disorder is experienced as abuse—devaluation, inflation, or seemingly costless money creation by the powerful—gold becomes a public shorthand for restraint, honesty, and justice.

But moral symbolism can also create a kind of architecture-blindness. When gold is treated as a moral guarantee, we may assume that any “link to gold” is essentially the same link, and that institutional details are secondary. Monetary history suggests the opposite. Gold-linked regimes repeatedly depended on governance choices at precisely the points people speak about least: conversion rules, access privileges, reserve defense, and crisis procedures.

Even where gold served as an anchor, societies still produced substitutes—notes, deposits, and other near-monies—because trade and finance demand instruments more flexible and convenient than the anchor itself. Under pressure, states and central banks frequently pulled gold “upstairs,” concentrating it for defense of external commitments, while narrowing domestic access. Later, these episodes are remembered as “departure from purity,” and reform movements call again for “return.” The cycle is structural, not merely moral.

The implication is not that gold is useless, but that gold cannot substitute for governance.

A More Productive Discipline

Instead of asking, “Are you for gold or against gold?” a more productive discipline is to work in the opposite order:

  1. Goal: What are we trying to achieve—escaping dollar dependence, preventing inflation, stabilizing purchasing power, aligning monetary practice with Sharīʿah objectives, or reducing financial fragility?
  2. Architecture: What architecture is being proposed to achieve that goal—domestic convertibility, international settlement arrangements, a gold‑exchange mediation layer, a notional apex link, or a narrower role for gold as savings and reserves?
  3. Trade-offs: What trade-offs follow—external constraints, crisis liquidity limitations, adjustment burdens, distributional consequences, and the governance institutions required to enforce restraint?

Gold may be useful in some designs, for some aims. But gold is not a program. It is a tool, and tools only work within systems.

In the next parts of this series, I will explore two questions that deserve calmer, deeper attention than they usually receive: first, what early Islamic monetary practice actually looked like (and what it does—and does not—imply for modern reform); and second, what a serious “post-slogan” Islamic monetary framework might require once we stop treating gold as a shortcut.

Rejecting gold as a shortcut does not mean accepting the status quo. It means raising the level of the conversation—from slogans to architecture—so that the moral energy driving these debates can be directed toward solutions that are institutionally real.

For a more detailed discussion, see my academic paper: The Gold Dinar Debate Reframed: Moving Beyond Slogans to Monetary Architecture. This series of posts will provide a broader discussion suited for general audience. The next post in this sequence is: Part 2: What Early Islamic Practice Really Teaches About Money.

Does Might Make Right? Power and Justice Across Civilizations

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Alasdair MacIntyre’s Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is an ambitious attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: how can rival and deeply opposed moral traditions argue with one another rationally, rather than merely assert power, preference, or authority? MacIntyre’s answer unfolds historically. Instead of beginning with abstract theory, he traces how different civilizations and traditions have understood justice, reason, and moral disagreement—and how those understandings emerged from concrete social crises.

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The Islamic Firm: Restoring Human Dignity in a World Where Everything Is for Sale

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This post provides the video, and an AI-generated outline of my talk on “Islamic Theory of the Firm: From Profits to Service” via ZOOM, 10-12pm PK time. Access SLIDES. Related Lecture: Islamic Methods of Management (English writeup/Urdu Video)

OUTLINE OF TALK on

0:00 – 2:00 — See also: About Me

  • Host introduces you (bio, institutions, broad arc of your work).
  • Brief mention of topic: how “profit” becomes “service” in an Islamic theory of the firm.
  • Technical setup & screen sharing. Islamic Firm
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Still Ruled by the Raj: How Colonial Governance Shapes Pakistan Today

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Why does Pakistan struggle with governance, despite waves of reforms, new policies, and countless “visions” and “roadmaps”?
A recent talk between civil servant and scholar Tariq Awan and Nadeem ul Haque (see Haque Economics Podcast: Why Bureaucracy Refuses to Reform & Modernize?) adds fresh clarity to this question — and aligns in striking ways with arguments I made in an earlier piece, Impact of Colonial Heritage on Economic Policy in Pakistan
Together, the two perspectives paint a coherent story of why we are stuck and what it will take to get unstuck.

This post provides an efficient summary of both analyses. If you want the full details, you’ll find links at the end.

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A Third Generation Curriculum for Islamic Economics

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1          Introduction

{bit.ly/3GIEC} During my recent visit to Indonesia, hosted by APSEII – an organization of state universities offering Islamic Economics Bachelor’s degrees – I  was greatly encouraged by the rapid development of Islamic Economics education taking place across the country. At the APSEII Curriculum Review, over forty-five universities expressed their joint commitment to adopting a Third Generation curriculum. This collective step underscores Indonesia’s leading role in shaping the future of Islamic Economics.

APSEII Islamic Economics Curriculum Review Meeting in Bandung, 13th Nov 2025

The Third Generation framework, described in the book Islamic Economics: The Polar Opposite of Capitalist Economics (Indonesian translation: Ekonomi Islam: Antitesis Ekonomi Kapitalis), has already gained wide recognition in Indonesia, where the book has achieved exceptionally strong sales—a level of engagement not seen elsewhere.

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Bridging the Divide: Teaching Islamically in a Secular World | The Muslim Teacher’s Amanah

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I. The Reality: The Hidden Crisis in Muslim Classrooms

Every sincere Muslim teacher who steps into a modern university classroom feels a quiet tension in the heart. You open the textbook, deliver the syllabus, mark the exams — and yet, a voice within asks: What am I really teaching?

For many, the answer is uncomfortable. Beneath the neutral tone of our lectures lies an unspoken message: that the secular worldview embedded in modern education is the only legitimate way to understand the world. We do not intend to teach this — but we do.

This is the hidden curriculum — the silent transmission of values and assumptions that shape how our students see reality. Even when we teach “objective” subjects like economics or sociology, we are also, often unknowingly, teaching a philosophy: that religion belongs to the private sphere, that success means material gain, and that moral or spiritual purpose is irrelevant to knowledge.

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Evolving Responses, Eternal Principles: The Historical Logic of Islamic Economics

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The Social Problem Behind Every Theory

Every social theory is born as a response to a problem. To understand a theory, we must first understand the crisis that called it into being. When we read The Wealth of Nations or The Communist Manifesto today, it is easy to forget that these were not abstract reflections about “the economy” — they were practical responses to urgent social dilemmas.

In Europe, modern economic theory arose in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, when new machines flooded markets with goods faster than they could be sold. The problem was not scarcity but overproduction — a surplus of goods that threatened to collapse prices, profits, and livelihoods. As Karl Polanyi explained in The Great Transformation in European Thought, economists sought ways to manage the chaos unleashed by self-regulating markets. Their theories helped justify the new capitalist order — one that expanded through exploitation of labor, concentration of wealth, and the global colonization that carried European power across the world.

Over time, this history was forgotten. European thinkers began to present their experience as universal, claiming that the “laws” they discovered in London or Manchester applied to all societies across all times. As I argued in The Puzzle of Western Social Science, this illusion of universality hides the deeply local, historical origins of modern thought. Theories designed to protect and perpetuate capitalist power were later exported to the world as neutral scientific truths.

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From the Mirage of Western Education to the Eternal Wellspring of Revelation

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{bit.ly/AZ4MGE} There is near-consensus that education is essential to improving the future of Islamic societies. Yet, despite decades of reform, our systems continue to fail — not for lack of effort, but for lack of direction. Education in much of the Muslim world remains disconnected from its roots, its purpose, and its people. Students spend years memorizing content, chasing grades, and preparing for markets that often fail to recognize their humanity or honor their potential.

The problem is deeper than policy or pedagogy. Both what we teach and how we teach it are shaped by frameworks alien to our tradition. Rather than healing our wounds, spreading more Western education often deepens them — a mirage that promises progress but leads to greater disorientation.

This post is a curated journey through my reflections on education — drawn from a series of essays that explore a single, urgent question: What would it mean to rebuild education not on borrowed ideas, but on the eternal wellspring of revelation — the source that once nourished an entire civilization?

The Problem: Western Education as a Tool of Colonization

Modern education is often assumed to be neutral — a universally valid system of knowledge transmission. But as explored in Decolonization of Education: An Islamic Perspective, this model was developed not to nourish minds or cultivate virtue, but to serve the administrative and ideological needs of empire. Its foundations in secularism, capitalism, and materialism shape not only what we teach, but how we think — and who we become.

In How Education Shapes Our Thoughts, we see how Western education instills a worldview rooted in power, profit, and consumption — often absorbed unconsciously. And in Marginalization of Morality in Modern Education, the historical roots of this transformation are laid bare: morality was not lost by accident; it was deliberately stripped away.

The result is a deep epistemic displacement. In Learn Who You Are, we discuss how modern education encourages students to abandon higher visions and life goals, training them instead to become human resources for sale on the labor market. To break free, we must first understand how three mega-events have shaped our thoughts, and then strive to recover the infinite potential we were created with.

All this is impossible if The Dazzle of Western Knowledge blinds our eyes to the wisdom of our own tradition. Too often, the Ummah continues to chase the mirage of the West — dazzled by its glitter, but left thirsty in the desert, never reaching the true wellsprings of knowledge that lie within our own heritage.

The Misdiagnosis: Why Reform Has Failed

Recognizing the problems, many educators have tried to reform education by adding Islamic content or adopting dual curricula. But as argued in The Deep and Difficult Dilemma of Islamic Education, these efforts often reproduce the same epistemological crisis — elevating Western knowledge as “practical” and relegating Islamic knowledge to ritual or personal ethics.

Improving Our Educational Systems (Part 1 & Part 2) critiques the secular foundations of the social sciences, showing how even seemingly objective fields like economics are steeped in Eurocentric, anti-spiritual assumptions.

However, with some courage and creativity, we can create change. In Educational Planning at Akhuwat University, I have discussed how we can redesign the economics curriculum towards an indigenous Islamic model. By shifting from rote imitation of Western models toward locally relevant, purpose-driven programs, Akhuwat demonstrates how institutions can begin to align education with Islamic principles, despite the challenges.

The Alternative: Prophetic, Purpose-Driven Pedagogy

If Western models have left us chasing mirages, what would it mean to drink again from the true wellspring? The answer begins with a radically different understanding of the teacher and the student. Education, in the Islamic tradition, is not a transaction but a transformation. The Prophet ﷺ embodied the role of teacher not just by conveying information but by reaching hearts, shaping character, and guiding souls.

In Transformative Teaching: Changing the Lives of Our Students, we explore this prophetic model, where the teacher acts as a mentor, a moral compass, and a partner in the student’s journey of becoming. Education here is not measured in grades, but in growth — in the ability of students to live meaningful, purposeful lives.

This vision is developed further in Principles of Islamic Pedagogy, which emphasizes that all education must begin with a discussion of purpose: Why were we created? What is our role in this universe? What distinguishes useful knowledge from knowledge that distracts or harms? True teaching is not about forcing answers, but about awakening hearts to their fitrah, nurturing the seeds of excellence buried within every soul. In The Search for Knowledge, I explain how different conceptions of knowledge lead to vastly different methodologies for research.

Taken together, these principles point to an alternative pedagogy that is both timeless and adaptable — one that aligns knowledge with purpose, and instruction with the heart. It is this prophetic model that offers us a way out of the desert of imported systems and toward the living waters of our own tradition.

The Vision: The Ghazali Project

All these threads come together in Central Ideas of the Ghazali Project, which lays out a bold intellectual framework for renewal. Inspired by Imam Al-Ghazali and grounded in centuries of Islamic thought, the project calls not for minor adjustments, but for a complete reimagining of education — one that begins not with borrowed models, but with the Quranic vision of knowledge as a path to human flourishing and divine proximity.

It is not enough to sprinkle Islamic studies onto a secular curriculum, as if revelation were an afterthought. The Ghazali Project insists that we must re-anchor knowledge itself in revelation, ethics, and purpose. This means rebuilding the very foundations of our disciplines — from economics to psychology — so that they reflect a worldview in which the heart, the spirit, and the hereafter are as real as the body and the material world.

In this vision, education is no longer a mirage of progress offered by others, but a living fountain of guidance flowing from within our own tradition. The task before us is to cultivate a new generation of scholars, educators, and leaders who can think with both heart and intellect — and who will guide the Ummah toward justice, meaning, and truth. A detailed argument is offered in an English and Urdu (published) version of an essay on: The Central Importance of Education to Islamic Revival.

Conclusion: An Invitation to Reimagine

The crisis in education is not simply about outcomes — test scores, credentials, or job placements. It is about orientation. As these essays show, meaningful change begins by asking deeper questions:

  • What is knowledge?
  • What is the purpose of learning?
  • Who do we become through what we study?

For too long, we have pursued the mirage of Western education, dazzled by its glitter but left thirsty in the desert. The challenge before us is to turn back toward the eternal wellspring of revelation — the source that once nourished our civilization and can do so again. For another post which explores the challenges facing Muslim teachers in adopting these principles, see: The Hidden Curriculum: Are We Unknowingly Teaching A Secular Worldview?

I invite you to explore these linked reflections not only as critiques of what has gone wrong, but as steps toward a more humane, spiritually grounded, and intellectually courageous future for education in the Muslim world.

To go deeper into the vision behind this work, read The Ghazali Project: Revival of Deen, which traces the spiritual and intellectual lineage inspiring this movement — from Imam Al-Ghazali to the urgent needs of our own time.

👇 Which of these ideas resonated most with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts, reflections, or even your disagreements in the comments.