Daniyal Khan

All that is good in my work has come to me from my teachers and is dedicated to the memory of my late brother. All that is flawed belongs to me.

Upon publishing my last post on the death of the corporate university, I realized that it was a much more polished sequel to the quite raw “The Crumbling Court“. The former, though not very widely read, was well received by friends and teachers and prompted some feedback and comments, and I had thought to discuss and respond to them in this present post, hopefully with some structure and coherence. But it has turned into something else entirely, a more personal and more meandering reflection about my own intellectual evolution and experience, and as such may not be as interesting to the reader as it is to me as a means of gaining clarity about where I stand and where I wish to go. In any case I think there is value in committing these words to the page.¹

The first issue is of whether it is possible to change the university from within, to contribute to the creation of a new way of structuring higher education which is continuous with the existing university. I do not think this is possible, simply because it cannot be done by people who are still formally associated with universities and – most crucially – employed by them. People who are materially dependent upon universities in the sense of depending on them for their livelihood as well as social standing, cultural capital and political access are and will remain too preoccupied with a professional environment which discourages any meaningful and consequential deviation from the norms of university life, organization, and habit.

The personal consequences of this for me are, I think, dire. The tenure clock is running down fast, and either I will commit myself to getting tenure or to shifting to a different line of work of which I’m not as to what it could be.² My technical expertise, really, is in the meaning of the written word as seen in the field of economics, itself a science of persuasion and rhetoric. To put it more simply, I know little else besides reading, writing and speaking in the English language. In a way I’m betting that while English remains a globally significant language, my skills might just become more relevant as skill with the English language declines due to AI use. I’m really betting that becoming a “dinosaur” will let me continue making a livelihood in a unique way.³

The second broader issue is regarding the solidarity, which as one friend said, we do not practice. This is of course entirely the intended result of both state repression and austerity: to create conditions in which the exercise and practice of solidarity is paid for with poverty, as paths to collective wellbeing have actively been policed and blocked, and the only paths to material prosperity are individualistic. My current inclination is to use anarchist practices to build back towards sociality. I have just finished reading Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and will be revisiting it soon after some other work, and will continue to explore anarchism, my interest in which was initially piqued by the podcast episode on Swedish sufi-painter-anarchist Ivan Agueli (Shaykh Abdul Hadi Aqili) in the Paradigms of Leadership podcast by the Cambridge Muslim College.⁴

The third question is to what extent our virtues and strengths have been shaped by the corporate university itself. I really do not think that the corporate – and secular – university is at all possible of transmitting virtue. Whatever virtue has been transmitted and learnt and acquired is through whatever mystical, spiritual and religious quality remains in the modern university, which is not be design. It is not entirely by chance either, as I imagine it has something to do with individuals who have retained (and deepened) their personal commitments to a religious vision of the world. An old world sensibility if you will which has a longer memory than modernity, of something far older than capitalist society. Thus I have increasingly found myself going back to the roots which have provided me spiritual nourishment: family, the study of Islamic philosophy, theology and mysticism during my undergraduate studies especially with Prof. Ejaz Akram, Prof. Basit Koshul and Prof. Aurangzeb Haneef, and then what I think was a reasonably attentive and reflective engagement with life which kept me sensitive enough to the call of spirituality. It is as if I had read a lot about the mystical quality of the world and forgotten it, but that knowledge sat with me and offered guidance through various life experiences. But my roots are also in Lahore, the city of Data Sahab Hazrat Ali Hujviri. The pull of the old, traditional world along with its languid character can still be felt here. Despite the speeding modernity, this is still a place where the mystical world is taken seriously (and not just as subject of anthropological or sociological study), and the games of the world taken lightly by many.⁵

So I don’t think that a new, meaningful form of higher education will come from a corporate, capitalist spirit, if there is such a thing. It is more likely instead to come from a Naqshbandi kind of spirit of service in which education as seen as part of the essential “infrastructure” which the human being uses to navigate life and the world. It will come from selflessness, generosity, softness, kindness, forgiveness, cooperation, and humility.

I also want to describe here a meeting with an elderly man many years ago at a wedding when I was still an undergraduate student. My father introduced me to him and told him that I wanted to pursue a PhD degree. He looked at me and said “You want to become a scholar do you? You do know that the real scholars are all either languishing in jails or are unknown to the world, living in seclusion in small rooms surrounded by books, right?”. I nodded along, and though I knew at intellectual level even then what he meant, I didn’t feel it in my bones. I do feel it in my bones now.

What then can be done? As suggested by a friend and a teacher: to write things that offend and are disliked, not for the sake of offending or being disliked, but as a side-effect of telling the truth. For better or for worse, and I don’t know which one it is, my writing has not really offended because it has not been widely read, but I do hope there is some truth in it.

I also want to recount here a significant resolution in my personal studies and intellectual journey, if I may call it that. When I was an undergraduate student, I was primarily interested in two areas of study and two respective issues. The two issues had, unknown to me at the time, a common resolution. The first area of study was economics, and the issue that I was grappling with was that of how economics was to be learnt and done. This preoccupation was primarily the outcome of my discontent with economic orthodoxy and led to my study of and “conversion” to heterodox economics. (That is a story in itself, but the highlights are Prof. Ejaz Akram suggesting that I read Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers, Prof. Khalid Mir’s willingness to speak to me about economics frankly and openly, and Prof. Basit Koshul’s encouragement to pursue the study of heterodox economics.) The other area of interest was philosophy and religion, and the question preoccupying me there was about how a spiritually engaged and fulfilling life was possible.

At the time, I saw the two pursuits to be in direct conflict with one another. To pursue a formal study of either economics or of religion was to prioritize one or the other. In terms of my formal studies, I pursued economics because I was persuaded by Prof. Koshul that “another way of doing economics was possible” and hence to not pursue the professional study of religion. From 2013 to 2023, I have primarily been preoccupied by the economics question. Now the philosophical and religious question has begun to reassert itself very forcefully in my life.

What I have learnt over the past two decades is that the two questions actually have a related if not the same answer: an economy based on principles of miserliness, greed and exploitation can only ever lead us where it already has – to warmongering and climate breakdown. The implication is that economics is to be done in a way which recognizes this simple fact, and rather than functioning as the ideology of capitalism serves to undermine it, helps us see past it, and helps to build an alternative. ⁶ The fundamental choice that might lead to a spiritually engaged and fulfilling life is the same: generosity over miserliness, selflessness over greed, care over exploitation (and kindness over cruelty).

As it happens I think that people who have tried to reconcile Islam and capitalism/economics by focusing on the legal formalities of Islamic banking/finance and riba/interest have overlooked what is possibly a more fundamental irreconcilable tension between Islam and capitalism/economics: the exclusionary and violent character of private property as an institutional foundation of capitalism which colors the whole capitalist system in such a way that even the system’s “successes” must also be considered successes of greed, miserliness, exploitation and cruelty. That such a system is fundamentally, directly and almost inevitably in conflict with a religion emphasizing selflessness, generosity, care and kindness seems so simple as to seem trivial. But I do not think it is trivial. It is a world of difference, and I think the chasm is too great to bridge.

This answer, I think, is at the core of my intellectual and spiritual pursuits, which I see as being completely and necessarily entangled:

The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material, the secular. All that is secular is, therefore, sacred in the roots of its being. The greatest service that modern thought has rendered to Islam, and as a matter of fact to all religion, consists in its criticism of what we call material or natural—a criticism which discloses that the merely material has no substance until we discover it rooted in the spiritual. There is no such thing as a profane world. All this immensity of matter constitutes a scope for the self-realization of spirit. All is holy ground. – Allama Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Material concerns must at some point give way to concerns of the spirit, especially if material concerns have pressed their case too far too long.

What this all means for the next phase of my intellectual and spiritual education and work is the necessity of refining my existing outward discipline and the further cultivation of my inward sensibility. My research or intellectual program also needs revision in a way that is a logical step forward without abandoning the lessons of the past two decades. The three components of the spiritual program: the outward shell of Islam, service in the tradition of the Naqshbandiyya, the pursuit of excellence in the arts and scholarship in the tradition of the Shadhiliyya. And a program for the hands? Tabla in the tradition of the Punjab gharana.

Money has restructured the US academy in its own image, and money is a blunt instrument. Until World War II, almost all higher educational institutions were founded in the name of religion. When some god was the name of the ultimate framework for the academy, the sky was the limit for the sorts of work that could happen in the academy, because all gods are beyond definition. I don’t mean to ignore the fact that religion has often hobbled and even shackled free inquiry in the past. But when the dollar becomes the ultimate term, the sky closes in. – Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise, p. 10-11

Postscript 1: This current period of re-orientation and spiritual crisis was initially precipitated by the ordeal of losing my brother, which among other lessons drove home the imminence of God and of death quite forcefully. Then came three more important experiences: (1) the mirror and spiritual vehicle and opportunities offered by marriage, (2) the reminders of the hollow character of the modern university and secularism as evidenced in the response to the events in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and (3) a return to LUMS which has led to a reunion with old teachers and friends.

Postscript 2: One of my most cherished childhood memories is that of my nana taking me for a short walk to the small neighborhood shop that is still there. “Let me take you to Sufi’s shop.” Sufi being the shopkeeper. And he did look like a sufi. A simple man with a beard, a skull-cap, and a pleasant smile. A walk to that shop is still a comfort for me. But Sufi left long ago, and now I often walk past it as I head to the graveyard to visit my brother.

1. I have left out the names of my friends and teachers as most if not all feedback was shared in private; people who reached out to me with their thoughts will still be able to recognize that I am responding to them and their queries. ↩︎
2. Tenure in Pakistan is in any case a shell of its US counterpart which itself is under attack, as there are no tenure laws here and, as a tenured colleague recently conceded to me, we can all be let go at fairly short notice despite being “tenured”. ↩︎
3. But I am far more concerned with the ticking of the other clock, the countdown to the age of 40, considered by al-Ghazali (in Ayyuha `l-Walad, Letter to a Disciple) to be the crucial age by which to address the weaknesses of ones soul. ↩︎
4. My suspicion of state power has been reinforced further during the Pakistani-India military conflict over the past week, during which I was reading Graber’s Fragments. That also creates problems for me, especially in light of Graeber’s tiny manifesto “against policy” (Fragments, pg. 9). Is there such a thing as monetary anti-policy? ↩︎
5. I have, as it happens, started smoking once a week in my nana’s lawn, almost as a contemplative exercise. ↩︎
6. On economics as the ideology of capitalism, see the work of Robert Heilbroner. ↩︎