 The title of this course is Introduction to Statistics for Muslims. The goal of the course is to present the material of an introductory and graduate first course in statistics to an audience of Muslim students. In this first lecture, our goal is to explain why it makes a difference that this course is targeted for Muslim students. Upon hearing this title, the first question that would occur to everyone is why do we restrict the audience to be Muslims? Why not teach statistics to everyone? The goal of this first lecture is to answer that question. So, basically the answer is that Islam has a unique approach to teaching and learning. And actually what we consider knowledge as Muslims is quite different from what is regarded as knowledge in the West. Our Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. was sent as a teacher and he was the best of teachers. So, he not only gave us the most perfect and complete message of Allah, but he also taught us how to teach and how to learn. All of this methodology is often in conflict with Western methodology of education and the Western approach to teaching and learning. One of the most fundamental differences is that a Muslim assumes the validity of the teachings of Islam without any question. As opposed to this, in the West, the only things which are admissible are those which are based on observations and knowledge. And one cannot cite the Quran or Hadith or universally accepted Islamic principles to support any idea in a Western tradition. So, the second misconception which has been created by the secular orientation of Western education is that there are areas of knowledge which have no relation to religion. In Islam, all our activities in life, whether it is teaching or learning or anything else, all of it is subject to our Deen. And in fact, all of our life is meant only for worship. So, there can be no realm of our life which is separate from Deen, which is independent of Deen and which makes no reference to Deen. This is entirely opposed to the fundamental idea of secular thought that there are two compartments of life. One compartment is an area which is completely independent of Deen, about which Deen has nothing to say. And there is another compartment which is our private personal life in which Islam has guidance for us to offer. So, we reject this secular idea that there are domains of knowledge which have nothing to do with Islam and that already differentiates what the Islamic approach to education is from a secular approach. Islam describes very clearly the purpose of our life and asks us to take all actions in order to achieve this purpose. According to Western secular teaching, life was created by an accident and there is no purpose, there is no meaning of existence. So, this question cannot be considered within a Western educational approach. So, in Islamic approach, you must think carefully about what is the goal of our life and how this education will help us to achieve this goal. So, the first thing is to understand the purpose of life and one of these purposes is mentioned under the word Ahsan, which means to live as if we are aware of the presence of God. The Qur'an says explicitly that man and jinn were created only for worship and that Allah Ta'ala created life and death to see who does the best of all deeds. So, all our actions must be worship and furthermore, we should try to do them in the best of all possible ways. Both of these things are possible only for a Muslim audience because only a Muslim audience can study in a way that it becomes worship and only Islam tells us how to do this studying in such a way that it becomes a good deed. So, how can we study statistics in such a way that it becomes an act of worship? In accordance with the Hadith, it is essential that our intention should be purely for the sake of the pleasure of Allah. So, we have to seek to fulfill the orders of Allah. The Qur'an says, instructs the Prophet to make dua Rabbizidni ilma. O Allah, increase me in my knowledge. And since we are ordered to emulate the Prophet, so this action applies to us as well. Since Allah Ta'ala has asked us to make dua for increase in knowledge, so it obviously follows that seeking knowledge is something which is desirable and it's part of our Deen. Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala has also described knowledge as a great gift from Allah. The Prophet Muhammad SAW himself was sent as a teacher. So, acquiring knowledge is definitely an important and essential ingredient of Islam. Now, what is the purpose of acquiring knowledge? Well, there are many purposes which are valid and recommended. Among them, an important one is that man has the potential to be the best of creation. Also, he has the potential to be the worst of creation. In order to learn how to be the best of creation, we have to acquire knowledge. Now, one portion of the knowledge is the eternal portion which is the Quran and the Hadith. But there is also another portion of knowledge which we must struggle to acquire. And this we might term as local knowledge. So, for example, Allah Ta'ala has given us the order to defend the boundaries of Islam. And these are required by our Deen. But how to do this may change from time to time. For example, there was a time when the knowledge of castles and cannons would have been an important part of how to defend a city. And as such, acquiring this knowledge would have been worship, if it was done with the intention of protecting the lives of Muslims. So, that of course is local and temporary knowledge. It is not eternal. It was suitable for its time period and it is no longer suitable. So, this is just to explain how some portions of knowledge that we acquire may be only of temporary value, but may still be part of Deen, even though they are not explicitly taught to us in the Quran and the Hadith. The Quran and the Hadith provide us with general principles and implementing them in today's world requires our acquisition of knowledge of importance and relevance for local circumstances, which is not part of the Quran and the Hadith. For example, the Quran orders us to be concerned about the feeding of the poor and to spread it. Now, how to feed the poor? This might require today understanding agriculture, understanding what Monsanto is doing in terms of its genetic engineering, how to produce better crops. Many other things might involve understanding current politics and how distribution of food takes place. And many contemporary facts which are not part of Quran and Hadith, nonetheless, in order to implement this order of feeding the poor, we must acquire this knowledge and if this knowledge is acquired for the purpose of implementing this order, then this will become worship. Accordingly, Quran tells us that it is not the blood or the flesh of the sacrifice which reaches Allah, but rather the spirit with which it is done. The enthusiasm with which we seek knowledge will have an important effect on whether or not this is the best of deeds as an amala. Accordingly, the Quran and the Hadith contain a substantial amount of encouragement for us to seek knowledge. The Quran itself starts, I mean the first revelation that was given to the Prophet Muhammad SAW was, I was with Allah from the Shaitan of the regime, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, Iqraa bismi rabbika ladhi khalaq, khalaq al-insana min alaq, Iqraa warabbuk al-akram wal-lazi, alam bil qalam, alam al-insana ma lam yalam. So, this Quran is telling us to read and is praising Allah for his characteristic that he gave, he taught man that which he did not know by the means of the pen. There are very important motifs that are being discussed here which are detailed in the written lecture that accompanies this. These slides. So, I will pass over it here. The Quran teaches us to pray for an increase in knowledge. According to Hadith, we should seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave. It is mentioned that the alim or the one who knows is superior to the abid, the one who worships. Like the moon is superior to the stars. So, the seeking of knowledge is very much encouraged by Islam. It is again mentioned that the ink of a scholar is like the blood of a martyr. So, Islam contains very strong encouragements to seek knowledge. The coming of Islam about fourteen and a half centuries ago brought a revolution to the planet. At that time, the Arabs were the most backward people living on the planet. At the same time, there were four civilizations which had achieved great success. Great advances, the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Chinese, the Egyptians had philosophy, culture, literature, technologies. And many accomplishments. Arabs were backwards in ignorance, Bedouin, living very simple lives. They were illiterate. They were quite savage, burying their daughters alive and killing each other for minor battles. Islam, the knowledge that was imparted to them by Islam led them to world leadership. And Muslims or the Islamic civilization was dominant on the planet for a thousand years. So, it was prophesied that Islam came as a stranger and will become a stranger. And it appears today that Muslims have lost this knowledge which led them to world leadership. So, we have to re-acquire the principles of learning which led Muslims to world leadership fourteen centuries ago as these principles are just as valid today as they were when they first came. And they have the same potential today as they did in the period of the Jahlia. So, in order to create this revolution, we must change our conception of knowledge. We must realize that the purpose of knowledge is self-purification. How we can become better people? It is spiritual advance and transformation. How we can grow as spiritual beings? Again, this concept has been lost in the West. It is just like an adult person has knowledge which he cannot give to the child. It requires certain amount of growth before the child has the maturity and the capability of understanding certain types of knowledge that mature adults have. In the same way, the spiritual growth creates a kind of knowledge which it is impossible to impart to those who do not have sufficient spiritual development. So, it was the acquisition and the transmission of the spiritual knowledge which changed the world. So, in our acquiring knowledge, we must make the intention to achieve this transformation for ourselves and to impart it to others as this is the process which will revolutionize the world. Western views on the purpose of an education are radically different from Islamic views. Accordingly, the methodology of learning and teaching is also radically different. We summarize some of the main differences in this slide. First of all, in the West, education is valued according to the amount of money that it can make. At the moment in Stanford, for example, while there is a huge boom in the number of students seeking admissions and engineering and many other fields which earn a lot of money are doing very well at exactly the same time. Enrollment in humanity is declining. The professors of the humanities have gotten together to combat this decline. But the main idea for how to combat is to prove that with a degree in humanities, you can also make money. They do not seek to promote humanities as an alternative of importance in and of itself. As opposed to this, in Islam, we seek knowledge for spiritual advances and for personal transformation and for learning how to change the world for the better. These are rather different from learning for the sake of making money. We seek an education in order to serve Allah and one of the ways to serve Allah is by serving the creation of Allah because all of the creation is called as the family of Allah in one narration. As opposed to this, in the West, knowledge and education is a means to career advancement. It's a means to earning profit from the ignorance of others. It's a mean of acquiring fame, something which is strictly prohibited in the Islamic tradition. According to Islamic traditions, learning for the sake of fame or learning for the sake of disputing elders and respected seniors is actually prohibited. Islam teaches us to concentrate on acquiring useful knowledge and to avoid useless knowledge. There are several prayers of the Prophet Muhammad to this effect where he seeks useful knowledge from Allah and seeks protection from useless knowledge. In contrast to this, in the West, all of the knowledge is considered useful because there is no purpose. Useful or useless is always according to purpose, so knowledge is useful if it helps us to achieve a certain purpose and useless if it cannot help us to achieve that purpose. However, if there is no purpose to learning as the Western secular tradition holds, then all knowledge is on equal grounds. Similarly, in the West, the approach to knowledge and the attitude towards knowledge is that one should be a neutral and detached observer. It is held in the Western tradition that you cannot be engaged because that will cause bias in your acquisition of knowledge. However, Islam tells us that we must be engaged. Islam tells us that if we see oppression or injustice, then we must seek to change this. We cannot watch as idle bystanders. We cannot remain neutral and detached. Furthermore, Islam teaches us that it is in the process of the struggle to change the world for the better that Allah will provide us with the necessary knowledge. So, engagement and struggle is actually part of the methodology for the acquisition of knowledge. This is directly opposed to Western ideas of neutral and detached observation. The struggle for justice and the struggle for eliminating oppression is important in Islam. We must acquire knowledge for this purpose or for some other purpose which is sanctioned by religious teachings. We cannot acquire knowledge just for the sake of idle curiosity. In the West, it is considered that everyone is selfish. So, if we try to engage in the struggle with the world, then we will automatically be biased and we will be biased towards our own point of view. In contrast, Islam teaches us a very high standard of justice. It says that we must be just even to our enemies and we cannot favor our friends or kin. Therefore, we must maintain justice and be just even while we are engaged in the struggle to change the world for the better. This creates a dramatic contrast with Islamic methodology for teaching. As already mentioned, the Western conception of what is knowledge differs radically from the Islamic conception. According to dominant Western theories, knowledge consists of that which is objective, observable by everybody and something which commands unanimous and universal consent. In particular, normative statements, morals, social norms are not part of knowledge. This is because morality is determined by what whatever the majority agrees to or whatever the society decides upon by mutual consent. That is moral. But such a thing obviously is not something which is determined by observations and by logic. Therefore, it is not part of knowledge or scientific knowledge according to Western theories of knowledge. As opposed to this, Islam considers the most fundamental type of knowledge to be moral knowledge which has been granted to mankind by Allah Ta'ala. And it has also been embedded into the hearts of human beings. So values are a most important part of human knowledge. This fact value distinction and the idea that facts are the important part of knowledge and values are meaningless is at the heart of Western theories of knowledge and therefore is also part of the methodology of education. This results in several problems with Western methods of teaching which are not shared by Islamic methods. For one thing, according to Western theories, the scientists are only supposed to observe facts. Since norms and values are not part of science, scientists in their capacity as scientists don't invoke normative considerations in the study of society or particles. So, for example, the inventor of the atom bomb was just doing science and the fact that this atom bomb might be used to kill people was not part of his concern. That is something that others who make value-based decisions or policy decisions are responsible for. In Islam, all participants in an act share the responsibility for it. So the person who witnesses a transaction of interest is also equally responsible in the social consequences of the deed. The statistical consultant in an Islamic society will have to ask the question, what is my statistical analysis going to be used for? As opposed to this, the statistical consultant in the West will only be concerned with interpreting the data in an objective way without any reference to any normative implications. So this creates a great difference in our responsibility as statisticians. If somebody is going to use our data analysis to do some injustice or oppression, for example, suppose that we believe that ethically, laborers should not be exploited and somebody asks us to do a data analysis which shows that laborers are not being exploited. When, in fact, we believe that they are, then we need to refuse to do this because we will share the responsibility for the outcome. In addition to this practical matter, there is also the theoretical matter that, in fact, according to Islam, the most important type of knowledge is moral knowledge. And this is the type of knowledge that was given to the Prophet Muhammad s.a.w. And this is the type of knowledge which revolutionized the world. In our point of view, in the Islamic point of view, we choose data because it is relevant to our moral concerns. Data is not objectively given to us in advance. Rather, we look at those aspects of the data which are relevant to solving issues that are of importance to us, where the important concerns are defined by Islamic context. According to Western theories, facts are objective and opinions are unimportant, where opinions also includes moral ideas and values. So there is a very big difference between Western ideas of knowledge and Islamic ideas of knowledge. I have shown elsewhere that, in fact, it is impossible to do as the West suggests and study purely facts without any reference to values because the way we select the facts and the way we present them will automatically represent value judgments. So what the West says overtly about the fact value distinction is not actually followed in their own analyses. And I have shown in different papers how values are hidden and embedded in Western theories which appear to have a factual appearance. But this topic is too complex for our first lecture. References are available in the write-up for this lecture. Because our Prophet Muhammad SAW was sent as a teacher and he is the perfect model for us, so Islamic law or Sharia contains a lot of information about the process of teaching and learning. From these we can derive rules for conduct for teachers and students. These are so extensive that it is impossible to summarize them here. We will just highlight a few important issues which differentiate Islamic methodology for teaching from Western methodology. As far as the teacher is concerned, he is to regard the students as precious according to Hadith. People are minds of gold and silver. That is, if we develop them properly, then rare and unexpected treasures will be discovered in the process. So the teacher has to value the potential of each student and treat them with respect and courtesy. We must invite and facilitate learning. We must value the time of our students and make sure that what we are teaching them is of value and use. And we must provide them with useful knowledge. This is a rather difficult requirement. It will require doing research because in the West they do not differentiate between useful and useless knowledge. So anything that you take from a book and teach, it is automatically useful. However, for the Muslim teacher, he must consider how this knowledge that I am imparting will help the student, not just to pass the exam for the course, but in his life. This will often be difficult to do because this is something which is not actually part of the Western texts. For example, if somebody is teaching labor theory and he teaches the student about the effect of labor unions, the issue is only relevant to the U.S. economy. So the teacher must consider that this is not of use to the student. So he must consider how to teach the issue in the context of whichever country he is in and whether or not it applies. He cannot make the excuse that this is what's in the book, so I will just teach it because the time of his students is precious and he must try to make the material relevant, important and useful for their daily lives. This will often require research on the part of the teacher, but it is part of his responsibilities as a teacher to do this research. Similarly, Islam provides us with guidance to students on how they should seek knowledge. In particular, we must seek knowledge with humility knowing that knowledge belongs only to Allah and he gives it to those to whom he wishes to give it. So we humbly ask Allah, request Allah to provide us with the knowledge that we need. We seek knowledge in obedience to the commands of Allah who has asked us to search for knowledge. We must not seek knowledge for status or pride or fame or to learn how to argue with others. These are specifically prohibited by Islamic teachings. We must seek knowledge with enthusiasm and accept any effort or sacrifice or struggle, understanding that this is a great treasure of Allah. In fact, the Ayat Waladina Jahadu Finaalina Diyannam Subalina suggests that those who have the knowledge will be given to us in the process of the struggle to acquire the knowledge of Allah or to become closer to Allah. So knowledge is very action oriented in the Islamic conception. It is not passively learned by studying books, but it is actively learned by engaging in the process of struggling with the world in the manner desired by Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala and in the manner demonstrated by the Prophet Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Acquisition of knowledge has a central place in Islamic teachings. As the indicated Ayat shows, we should feel gratitude to Allah for providing us with knowledge of the things that we did not know and that this is a tremendous favor upon us. Separately, it is mentioned that if we are grateful to Allah for His blessings, then He will increase His blessings upon us. So this is also a methodology for getting more of this blessing from Allah. It has been mentioned that one of the key ingredients in the rise of Muslims to world power was the thirst for knowledge that was created by Islamic teachings among the early Muslims. As discussed earlier, Islam places great emphasis on applying the knowledge that we have learned to solve the problems and this action oriented approach distinguishes Islamic approach to knowledge from western approaches. As the Hadith mentioned on the slide states, it is only if we act upon it that knowledge becomes useful, this places a burden on both the teacher and the student. The teacher is responsible to make sure that the knowledge he is imparting is of the kind which is practical and useful. And the student must make the intention that he will use the knowledge acquired to serve the Ummah in the best possible way. To summarize, the goal of this lecture was to show that the approach to teaching and learning for Muslims is radically different from that currently in use in the West. For the most fundamental thing, the act of teaching and the act of learning is an act of worship and therefore in performing these tasks we must be guided by the Sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam who was the best of teachers. To put it in more concrete terms, in the West the idea of secular thinking developed in the past few centuries that there were some areas of life and some areas of knowledge which were independent of religion. In those areas, such as economics, physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc., religion has no role to play. This is a big mistake. This is not correct. According to Islam, all of the knowledge belongs to Allah. The Qur'an mentions the forging of steel as a knowledge given by Allah to human beings, one of His prophets. And so we cannot accept the secular idea of the separation of domains of knowledge. Once we realize that all knowledge is integrated and there is only one type of knowledge, then it is necessary that Muslims, when we study any field, we use the Islamic rules for education. So we have to learn statistics in a way that our acquiring the knowledge and our use of the knowledge will be pleasing to Allah. Exactly how this affects the subject matter itself will become clear as we progress through the lectures.