The Spiritual Cost of Modern Education and a Muslim Vision for Renewal
“The heart is never truly alive, except through knowledge.” - Ibn al-Qayyim
To speak meaningfully about knowledge in this particular age, is, for the Muslim student, a confrontation with the paradox that lies at the centre of modern learning. Never has there been a time where knowledge is more accessible and yet never have we, in the pursuit of this rich vastness of knowledge, been more impoverished. The tragedy of our time is not that students know or revise too little, but that the pursuit of knowledge has been stripped of its soul. As Ibn al-Qayyim said, when we garner knowledge that is when we should feel alive. And how alive do we actually feel when revising for our exams or handing in our research projects or powering through those essays? Very little, I’d imagine.
For Muslim students today, we have to navigate the stresses of exams, the pressures of academic expectations and the insidious clutch of performance culture. In the ostensible nourishment of the academic mind, we can't afford to subject our body or soul to starvation; if we isolate one facet of the human being, in the name of progress or success, we commit a great wrongdoing against the integrity of the whole self. This principle, common in literature across the Islamic tradition, stands in direct contradiction to the hyper-competitive culture of academia that seems to revere sleeplessness, academic asceticism and mechanistic memorisation. Fragmentation is antithetical to flourishing.
“Iqra”. The first word of revelation from Allah SWT was not a creedal value, it was not a prohibition but a simple command to read. "In the name of the Lord who created" (Qur’an 96:1), a reminder that the act of knowing was never severed from the One from whom all knowledge arises. This theological posture gives Muslim students the understanding that studying is not merely the acquisition of data, but a participation in something beyond. Surah Alaq highlights the divine significance placed on knowledge by our Creator.
What does knowledge mean to us as Muslims?
We must discuss a future where a more holistic education, suffused with the Islamic tradition is a lived reality, but we can’t start paving the path of the future without acknowledging a past teeming with a remarkable intellectual history, laid by scholars whose names now occupy the margins of contemporary scientific and philosophical history. Among them stands Ibn al-Haytham, whose pioneering work Kitab Al-Manazir, Book of Optics, did not simply accelerate the field of optometry but established an empirical methodology that prefigured the modern scientific method by several centuries. Who’s name feels more familiar to us, Francis Bacon or Ibn al-Haytham? Once again, we see the imperious, orientalist imprint on our modern understanding of the world. Ibn al-Haytham’s systematic approach, centered around observation, hypothesis and controlled experimentation seem to emerge not simply from his intellectual curiosity but perhaps an epistemic fealty, rooted in his Islam. Upon gaining an understanding of Ibn al-Haytham’s biography, we come to learn of the incessance with which he links his every finding and intention to discover with his faith and purpose.
Al-Ghazali, a titanic figure in our Islamic tradition of scholasticism, whose ‘chest of knowledge’ metaphor poignantly captures the idea of knowledge being both burdensome and evocatively prescriptive in its compulsion. His intellect and impact was such that he was known as Hujjat-ul-lslam (the proof of Islam). His own journey was so littered with doubts and crisis that Ghazali embodies the synthesis of intellect and perseverance and purpose. Knowledge seems to be, for Ghazali, a transformative experience because it reshapes his soul; its purpose is neither trophy nor self-advancement but the development of clarity and orientation.
I mention these figures not just for purposes of nostalgia but an affirmation that the Islamic intellectual tradition understands something the modern education system forgets: learning is not merely cognitive accumulation, it’s a deeply human and intrinsically spiritual process. The aforementioned figures ditched neither soul nor heart in the pursuit of knowledge.
The point I lead you to is that we must understand, as modern students, learning is weighty, education is burdensome but neither should come at the expense of the soul. Rather the education we can choose to imbue ourselves with should nourish us within, it should advance our true goals of Al-Jannah and simply make sufficient the needs of the dunya. Assuage the baggage of unnecessary knowledge, be selective and deliberate in what you choose to ingest and make those choices to foster impact and growth. I want us, myself foremost, to realise what we can do with the right knowledge. The doors that can open, the opportunities that can be unlocked with knowledge are infinite. We have reduced learning, due to the Western education system to an uninventive, secular and, for the most part, useless experience. We no longer see education as a tool to make change on multiple fronts, we don’t see university as a training ground for worldly and afterlife success. We have to start rewriting the script.
Why do I feel so empty as a Muslim student?
Today, we Muslim students often find ourselves suspended between two worlds. The demands of contemporary academia and the duty we have to our Creator. The result is a crisis of disconnection. Students may excel in their course or exams yet they feel fractured, mentally overstimulated but spiritually malnourished.
This fragmentation is evident of a fundamental misalignment with the holistic needs of our mind and body and soul. Earlier this year, I was reading Ibn Khaldun’s The Muqaddimah, where he warns against pedagogical methods that overwhelm the learner, he discusses that excessive pressure corrodes both comprehension and motivation. His cautions remain relevant in an age where our feeds are stacked with study hacks and productivity apps, revision timetables and routines that masquerade as pathways to success even whilst they ignore the lived human experience. Where are the spiritual inputs? Where are the divine insights that give buoyancy to our human attempts?
To reclaim what education means to us requires a shift in both technique and in worldview. It demands that we see studying not as an isolated set of actions but as a relational practice with our purpose and therefore with Allah. It is a return to the idea that learning requires presence, purpose and intentionality - qualities that modern academic culture has sacrificed at the altar of hollow efficiency.
An aggregate approach recognises that the body is not a subordinate engine to the mind but rather its inseparable companion. And the soul is not a decorative addendum but the centre point of our existence. In this model, nourishing the body, through sleep, movement, hydration, and wholesome food is not subsidiary but essential. Nourishing the soul through prayer, dua, dhikr and Quran ensconces all our learning with purpose. Nourishing the mind through reading, research, podcast and daily discussions transforms knowledge from brittle memorisation into a ductile superpower.
We must reinvent the education system.
As students, we must navigate this minefield of education in a new way. When we’re confronted with a choice: to succumb to a model of education that narrows and depletes or to return to a richer intellectual future that nourishes the mind without starving the body, and challenges the cognition without extinguishing the soul. The legacy of Islamic scholarship offers us a path forward, one that highlights their devotion, discipline and, ultimate, success. Thus, my call to my fellow Muslim students is not simply to study harder (although some of us need to do that), but to study in a way that cultivates a life of learning, that is rooted in purpose, enriched by our Islamic tradition and animated by goals that go beyond grades and certificates.
In an era consumed by expedience, the Muslim student has the rare opportunity to embody a countercultural identity, one that reclaims purpose as essential components to true learning. We must think beyond achieving first; what‘s our legacy going to be? What discoveries will we make? Whose lives are we going to change? The Muslim student is the mover and shaker. The Muslim student is the leader of tomorrow. And, so the question that remains is not whether we can achieve academic success through such an approach, but whether we can afford not to. For the acquisition of all this knowledge, devoid of any longevities or spiritual nourishment may earn us numbers on a page, but knowledge imbued with purpose grants us something far greater.
Faithfully, Issa.
