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 Another Inconvenient Truth >> Aki Nawaz “Go Join Hezbollah!" >> Amina Nawaz So, You Wanna Change the World? >> Sarah Waseem 10 Books To Read Before Going To University >> Mujadad Zaman Still Learning to Tread on Hallowed Ground >> Omar Fraser A Prophet for All >> Abdul-Rehman Malik Emerging from the Rubble: A Letter from New York City >> Zeeshan Suhail and Muntasir Sattar Istanbul’s Illuminated Ramadan Nights >> Abdal Hakim Murad The Pain of Panjshir >> Chris Sands A People Coming Apart at the Seams >> David Lepeska A Cynical Plan to Rebuild Islam >> Louay Safi Suffer The Little Children >> Tasneem Osgood Dangerous Denial on Darfur >> Muhammed Abdelmoteleb Is the Glass Half Full of Hope or Despair? >> Fozia Bora The Mother of All Muslim Organisations >> Mullah Charles Bala Subramaniam Narasimha Rao A Pious Mole >> Mudasser Ali Living on the Edge >> Tauhid Pasha The Silly Season >> Dal Nun Strong Walk in the Old Paths >> Daoud Rosser-Owen A Modern-Day Ibn Battuta - A tribute to Thomas Omar Abercrombie (1930-2006) >> Shiraz Sheikh “How can you hear a million words from a million mouths at the same time?” >> Shan Khan A Triumph of Myth >> Abdul-Rehman Malik The Timbuktu Charter: “We will be like ferocious lions” >> Muammar al-Gaddafi Updike’s Terrorist: An(other) American Folly >> Raneem Azzam A Crooked Commission >> Sunny Hundal Aural Remembrance Whitewashing White Terror Veil-Gate - The End of Tolerance? Organic Iftars, Unholy Garbage iPod vs iMuslim Formula One Fatwas Vox Populi |
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10 Books To
Read Before Going To University Page 36 As hundreds of thousands of students
make their way back to their dorm rooms and ivory towers, the purpose
of a university education has never been more contested. To most, it’s
now little more than advanced vocational training, preparing a new
generation of Britons to serve their economic utility to society. Mujadad Zaman has had enough. He
humbly suggests 10 tomes to get the process of real education started.
No classroom required. When we think of universities today what comes to mind? Tuition fees, qualification inflation, UCAS points, the market led drive for graduates. The student often feels less indebted to the experience of the university, then the Students Loans Company. This pecuniary instability leads so many to wince at the Arts and Humanities because if they do not already see their relevance as incomprehensible, they certainly assume its study to lead to economic insolvency. “What job are you going to get by studying ancient literature?” is the plebeian cry. We should reply in chorus “I may not get rich reading them but I’ll be a wealthier person for having studied them.” Yet, in a world where classical idioms of learning are beguiled to the back pages of history and the Grand Tour replaced by BBC4, it is in university that we still seek intellectual solace. However, many find themselves a purneva in this potential hotbed of intellectual activity. That’s because students lack a culturing into the true ethos of the university. The modern university sees it forefathers in the sacred parthenon of Greek antiquity, medieval scholasticism, classical Islam, the renaissance and enlightenment. What then of the poor student who is dwarfed by these ideas? Introductory textbooks may help, but we may alternatively realise that there are certain works, “Great Books”, that form so much of today’s ideas. The book list below is then, a collection whose intent is to help students to chew manageable morsels and digest enough to know what a good liberal education (of the expedient variety) might look like. It’s merely one version of a list that other, more worthy, will conceive differently. 1. Islam and The Destiny of Man, Shaykh Hasan Le Gai Eaton Ovid wrote that “here I am considered a barbarian because I am not understood". The Destiny of Man’s gift is a book that maligns the misconceptions of Islam and allows the ‘barbarian’ to speak on his own terms. Shaykh Hasan Gai Eaton, a Cambridge trained Englishman who converted to Islam, writes a beautifully written and diligently researched book that covers the ideals of Islam, its historical developments, confrontations of East-West and Islamic art amongst other topics. The first chapter “Islam and Europe” is 25-page symphony condensing 1400 years of history, without zealousness or melodrama and as such should be made compulsory reading for all. It is a brilliant book to introduce non-Muslims to Islam as well as helping Muslim communities relearn what is so often forgotten about their religion. This work sits on the same shelf as The Vision of Islam (William C. Chittick and Sachiko Murata) and Muhammad (Martin Lings) as it that will cause great relief in the collective mind of Muslims, knowing that they have an intellect, such as Mr Eaton amongst them. 2. An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Jonathan Wolff There are many great introductory books to political philosophy, yet I am still to encounter one that is as easygoing and yet comprehensive as Jonathan Wolff’s. Beginning with Plato and ending with Rawls, the entire spectrum of western political thought is made accessible, amusing and thus definitely readable. We discover that all the talk today about “democracy”, “liberty” and “freedom” often originates in the retrospective thoughts of philosophers who had seen too much of human nature. If man is truly a political animal then how best to wean out his bestial nature? By reading this book of course. 3. Selected Writings, John Ruskin Ruskin is among those lost figures, which the general public have yet to rediscover. Proust called him the “great master” and Gandhi said his work changed his life. In Ruskin we find a writer whose prose manses his contemporaries (Marx and Carlyle). Principally known as an art critic, his work stretches across a vast terrain and this Oxford edition brilliantly summates his best writing. Must read essays are the Nature of Gothic and his 1858 Lecture to the School Cambridge of Fine Art. The latter contains the classic lines that remind the student that having no knowledge is often better then to have enough to reveal one’s ignorance and impertinence. “Better, infinitely better”, says Ruskin, “that you should be wholly uninterested in pictures and uniformed respecting them, then that you should just know enough to detect blemishes in great works, to give a colour of reasonableness to presumption and an appearance of acuteness to misunderstanding". 4. A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking A science book may not be an obvious addition to our list, yet consider this analogy. An empty Olympic sized swimming pool is filled with grains of salt till its brim (approx. 100 million grains). Consider each grain is a star and you have the Milky Way. Now consider there are approximately 100 million galaxies in the universe, each with 100 million stars, it should be reason enough for people to acquaint themselves with their celestial neighbours. Hawking’s book has proven to be amongst the best introductions to cosmology, covering the issues of the beginning of the universe to its ultimate destruction in a lucid and non-mathematically verbose way. “The majority of mankind concerns itself with the most petty of affairs," said Einstein and this book will, if anything, aid in realising his sage words. 5. Runaway World, Anthony Giddens I have surprised myself with this selection. Not a very inspiring work nor academically solid but this former head of the LSE has produced a pithy booklet on the nature of modern society in five short chapters. Originally given as the Reith Lectures of 1999, Giddens provides informed statements about the ideal of ‘progress’ and its modern-day handmaid, ‘globalisation’ as well as their bastard child, ‘environmental devastation'. The reading list is also a brilliant springboard for personal research into the subjects discussed. 6. Walden, Henry David Thoreau “A life without love, and an activity without an aim” is how Thoreau described the lives of men. In 1845 a slim, young, Harvard educated man left his parents home in Concord, Massachusetts to live in a forest called Walden. Why? To help cure himself of commercialism, moral degradation and the general decadence of modern man. In his words: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived". Thoreau takes us by the hand and restores that which we all lose in due course: the subtleties and wonder found in the mundanity of life. 7. Clueless in Academe, Gerald Graff The university has come under much scrutiny of late and this book by Graff, strikes at the crux of the predicament by suggesting that the problem is not too little research funding or low achieving students, rather it is the surreptitious nature of the university itself. Chomsky says that higher mathematics is not necessarily difficult, but enough turgid terminology keeps most people out. Graff asks those questions that most students are charmed into thinking as natural, such as is there really a difference between a 62% and 64% essay? Why is it so deplorable to social scientists to except the world on face value? Did Rubens really think about all those things when painting, that my art teacher thinks he did? Particularly insightful is his “six degrees of obfuscation” by which academics will command their supremacy over students. Another must read section is “how to write an argument” guaranteed A’s for all those who follow it. The triumph of this book is that having dragged out the faculty of mystification from university, it helps us draw upon our own faculties to rediscover what it means to be “educated". By doing this, Graff proves the old adage right, that most academic disputes are especially vicious because so little is at stake in them. 8. What is History?, E.H. Carr More than just a profile of what the historian does, Carr calls into question the history of history. Is it merely an unfettered study, which is to be left unchallenged? An emphatic no, is Carr’s response. He takes on the burden of this conundrum and argues that facts of the past and historical facts are two completely disparate entities. The former being the body of events, which forms the past, the latter is the selective process by historians choose what is worthy for people to know of the past. Carr’s revelations about ‘top-down’ history, subsequently sparked a torrid of books in the late 20th century to tell history from the ‘bottom up’ (Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States, is a shining example of such literature). 9. Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman By the age of 40, Neil Postman writes, the average American will have seen over 1 million advertisements. What could be the effects of such exposure? This question is the central kernel of questioning throughout this classic book. Concentrating its venom most readily on television, this book shows how just a hundred years ago America was amongst the most literary active and politically engaged societies, whereas today it has fallen into a pit of trivialities because the medium through which serious discussion is done, is in fact the most ludicrously benign. Postman’s particular message to the Big Brother generation deserves our collective attention: that unlike Orwell who thought what we despise will cause our eventual demise, he prefers the Huxley vision that what we love will destroy us. 10. Crime and Punishment, Fyodr Dostoyevsky To choose one novel as a ‘must read’ is certainly challenging and to have chosen Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, I am hoping to have appeased true novel lovers. Crime and Punishment tells the story of a gifted young Russian student, Raskolnikov, who decides to kill an evil pawnbroker and her sister. However, after the act, of which Raskolnikov felt morally justified, he suffers physical illness, mental woes and a prison sentence in Siberia. Raskolnikov, which means schism in Russian, is torn by the moral questions that instigated the initial murders: is it morally justified to perform an immoral act under the considerations that it will lead to something morally better? We come to realise that the crime itself was punishment enough. I’ll say it again: a must read. Mujadad Zaman begins his M.Phil at Oxford University this autumn where he will study the philosophy of education. |