 So, Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, people ask for the slides so I have made them available so you don't need to take snaps or photos of these. The links are given here for these set of slides and also for a related set of sites which deal with creating an alternative to Western education which I delivered earlier. So, these are closely related subjects. So, this is just the title, Rethinking Social Sciences and Humanities for Pakistan and this has been a central concern of mine for a long time. A paper I wrote in 2008 was entitled, Improving Social Science Education in Pakistan and basically my concern is that we are applying conceptual frameworks developed in the West without thinking about the fact that these are not applicable to Pakistan. So, for example, in Pakistan Marxists are still thinking about the laborer and the capitalist, the Masdoor and the Kisan even though this is not the class struggle in Pakistan. In fact, the class struggle here is between the English speaking class which inherited power after the colonizers left versus the vernacular class which is the people of Pakistan. So, basically it's the colonizers versus the colonized and this struggle never took place in the West and so the Western social theory does not deal with this. This is a heritage of colonization which the West never experienced and so to study the class structure and the power struggles within Pakistan requires going outside the boundaries of Western social science. So, one of the things that we need to study in developing a local social science is the impact of colonial heritage. Again, something never experienced by the West. So, the psychology of the colonized is very different from the psychology of the colonizer and I think this is one of the key messages of Edward Said's book Orientalism which basically says if you want to boil it down to one sentence is that the global colonization by the West created a superiority complex in the West and an inferiority complex in the East and this psychology of the colonized has been studied by very many people and basically it's psychological slavery and the solution to this problem is decolonization and this damage is done by the process of education. So, the colonization ended a long time ago but the colonization of minds continues today via the Western education which is globally in use. This Western education is deeply Eurocentric and what it teaches us basically if you want to simplify is that West is advanced and developed and the East is backward primitive underdeveloped and so this needs to be countered in the minds of the students and I have given a few talks on how we can counter this and but the basic is the central notion of development is not looting of wealth from other countries by force or other people by force but development consists of human development how to learning how to become better beings. So just as an illustration of the one of the efforts being done globally is to give Black pride, create Black pride and the Black Panther is a movie which has been praised for this effect but I would like to point out that in this effort and many other similar efforts all over the colonized nations including the Islamic world suffer from a deep defect. So this Black Panther movie basically shows a hidden kingdom a secret kingdom in Africa which has a certain kind of energy power and so certain science and technology in which they are very advanced. So this is the wrong kind of effort because basically it implicitly accepts the standards of the West to judge ourselves and the standard is scientific progress. In fact we don't need to play in the ball game according to the rules that they have created we need to develop our own standards which is basically human standards we should emphasize ginship family excellence in character skills integration with the environment which our religion and generally most cultures teach and honor whereas the colonizers only value wealth and disregard how it is acquired and so science and technology serve this purpose of providing power in the efforts to colonize and exploit either people or environment and this so we should not be attempting to create pride by competing them with them on those grounds rather we should emphasize the difference that we are we use different standards we we are concerned with human development not with the accumulation of capital so in order to be able to be able to reject social science and rebuild it we have to look at the puzzle created by social science in the use of the deceptive term science so when we say social science then the word science itself represents a claim to universality but when you look at the nature of social science this is obviously lessons derived from European historical experience there's it's very simple and many many people have remarked on it so for example Mitchell writes that the possibility of social science is based upon taking certain historical experience of the west as a template for a universal knowledge so the puzzle is why does social science when we when we talk social science we should be talking about the social science European or Eurocentric social science because obviously social scientists have used the institutional structures of Europe to develop their theories and so why should it be universally applicable it applies to European societies probably but certainly not to African societies or Islamic societies because we are we have entirely different institutions and conceptual frameworks and so the answer to this puzzle is the is the Edward Said's book on Orientalism that all western knowledge about the east is tainted by this conquest and colonization and because of the superiority complex created by this global conquest western society considers itself to be the more advanced and considers that all other societies that infants and when they grow up they will become like Europe and so basically development means becoming like Europe now this is actually not true and the counter narratives start by looking at the experience of the conquered so there are books describing the American conquest of the red Indians from the perspective of the Native Americans and similarly Dalrymple has given an account of how the whites the Europeans who invaded India realized the superiority of the local culture and similarly in Australia and in Japan there are books which describe the point of view of the defeated and the colonized so in general in world history we have seen many examples where barbarians overcame advanced and effete civilizations and in general in those historical events the barbarians learned from the advanced civilization but in the most recent wave of conquest the European barbarians overran the world but did not learn from the more advanced civilizations instead they destroyed them now the one of the reasons for this inferiority complex that we have acquired is a book mentioned in a book by jack goodie called the theft of history which basically the Europeans have written history so as to erase the contributions of other civilizations so one of these is the one of the ways in which it has been done is described in this other book the Greek strategy which is that the Schumpeter says that there is a 500 year gap in which nobody had any economic thoughts on the planet and the reason for this is that all of the contributions of the Muslims or the Islamic civilization in general either they were moved back to the Greeks or they were moved forward to western copyists so we think of Aristotle and Plato as the wisest men on the planet because a lot of advances on those philosophers by Muslim scholars have been attributed back to the originals and similarly Copernicus basically copied from Ibn Shater but he is known as the revolutionary person who gave us the conception of a heliocentric system whereas the fact that he basically copied the book of Ibn Shater is not known and those who know it don't agree or acknowledge it and the reason he did he did this he hid these origins was because the Catholic Church was persecuting anybody who borrowed from Islamic thought so they had to hide their sources so this fabricated history is one of the deadliest weapons which has been used against us and I have given some more details so one of the consequences of this theft of history is a direct attack on the Islamic faith because according to Islam the greatest treasure of knowledge is the that which was given by God to man 14 centuries ago and what the knowledge that God gave to man is obviously superior to anything that any human could create but today a western education only mentions the contributions of the west over the past three centuries and these don't seem to have any links to the Quran and the hadith so it seems as if western knowledge is superior to all other knowledge indeed there is no knowledge other than that which is created by the west so this is in direct conflict with the message of the Quran so how can we rebut this idea that one bookshelf of an Englishman contains more knowledge than all of the literature of Arabia and India so the problem actually is subtle the conflict is comes from the theory of knowledge epistemology according to the Enlightenment philosophers all knowledge comes from observations and reason but this is not true because we are built our hearts are built to know the good and the evil and once you exclude the heart from considerations of knowledge the Quran mentions repeatedly and also the hadith about how the heart is a instrument of cognition and it is not the eyes which are blind but the hearts so actually although the western epistemology asserts the exact opposite of what I am going to say all human knowledge is built on moral foundations if we say something is worth studying it means that this is worth test spending our lives on and when we say that can you making a moral statement economics started out with a branch of moral philosophy and it remains a branch of moral philosophy although the moral basis of modern economics have been concealed and have and there's a pretense of objectivity just like social science pretends to be objective and universal when it is built on a moral framework developed by the Europeans so to understand this better we need to look at how religion became marginalized in the west to understand their theory of knowledge and this has been studied by many people but I will skip over the details but basically the key is that in the 16th century religion was the master interest of mankind it governed all departments of life and by the 18th century religion became marginalized and became a system of personal beliefs which does which did not interfere with the public domain there are many reasons for this but it is not our job our task today to discuss that although I have discussed this in a number of different places and the central reason is that there was a century of religious wars which had between Protestants and Catholics which had deep effects on European psyche and thought and the consequences of these wars was that Europeans experienced the fact that religion is not capable their religion was not capable of governing the public domain without creating battles both domestic and international and so they rejected religion as a basis for creating a society and this led to the necessity of rebuilding knowledge from scratch from zero so this involved rejecting authority and tradition and the new philosophies of knowledge of empiricism and rationalism came in that knowledge only comes from observations and reason hard soul intuition and subjective human experience were rejected as a basis of knowledge because they had led to the misconception that religion was the right path and since their experience the European experience showed that it was not so they rejected these sources of knowledge so basically once you understand how once you understand that there was a vacuum created by the rejection of religion about how to govern public life then you realize that social science comes from the rejection of Christianity it is a way of understanding how society should be constructed after rejecting Christianity and so it is based on an ontology that there is no God judgment day or afterlife and therefore the universe and life on it is meaningless and once you reject afterlife and judgment then it's obvious that the pursuit of life is a is the purpose of life is pursuit of pleasure power and profits society is just a jungle of competition human beings are animals and the survival of the fittest is the only moral principle and so the key transformation which occurred from the 16th to the 18th century was that society was thought of as a community with common goals but just as Thatcher said there is no society and just as Hobbes said basically the natural state of human beings is war of all against all in this jungle of fierce competition so this was this is the conception which underlies all of modern social science and it's obvious that this conception is not matched with Islam so these toxic moral foundations where life is basically war of all against all and we don't care anything about others and certainly nothing about future generations there's no morality has led to the bloodiest century on the earth with continuous wars or there's the war against by the corporations against the planet for profits which has led to the extinction of millions of plants and animals the climate crisis which threatens human existence there there's a lead to individualism and hedonism which has led to loss of family community and since these are the prime sources of human welfare there has been a strong reduction of happiness in the advanced so-called the richer societies with 50 percent of the children more than 50 percent in the west being born to single mothers they never experienced the love and warmth of a family and this has been a dramatic loss but it is not measured when you count the GNP per capita so we need to develop an alternative to social science which is based on on Islamic foundations which accept God and consider success as being on the day of judgment and therefore they are built on generosity social responsibility cooperation and striving for success on the day of judgment and these are dramatically opposed to the capitalist ideas of greed competition individuality and hedonism so there has been a lot of work by different people so one of the one of my papers on this topic is listed here and Dr. Rajab Shantur has been working on decolonizing the social sciences and he has developed a fairly deep theory about this I have also offered a suggestion a sketch of an outline of how we can rebuild social sciences by going back to Ibn Khaldun rejecting the developments which took place on the west on the basis of western universalism the idea that everything that the western society is a template for universal society so we go back to Ibn Khaldun and we can develop Ulumul Umran on the basis of his work he is the first sociologist in fact and one of the key insights is that communities are created by collective identity and the communities are the drivers of social change and this is in contrast with methodological individualism at the heart of modern social science so one of the consequences of this is that in Islamic society we work at the community level not at the individual level and not at the national level those are the those are subsequent as opposed to this in secular society there is no community so the only possibility for collective action is at the government level and many Muslims being deceived by these conceptual frameworks have sought to implement Islam by working at the government level and this is impossible as while Halak has pointed out that the state itself is based on very highly Eurocentric conceptions and these are in conflict with Islam and therefore we can't use un-Islamic means to implement Islam the basic contradiction between nation-state and Islam is that in nation-state the state and the state authority holds supreme authority whereas in Islam the law of God the sharia stands above all state authority and will be enforced against the majority and against the king so that's a different conception of society and one can't create Islamic society by un-Islamic means so I have spelled out a three-dimensional framework for social change which we need to implement which is very different from modern social science and basically it involves looking at three different dimensions one is the normative dimension what is an ideal society look like which has been spelled out in the sharia and then there is the positive which describes the existing state of affairs and then there's the transformative how to get from where you are to where you want to be so each of these requires separate work one of the key elements in this new theory is to give human agency a vital role human history moves because we attempt to understand patterns of history by developing theories and when we use develop these theories then we our response to historical events is shaped by these theories these theories are often wrong but even when they are wrong they are effective in shaping history because our actions are based on our understanding of history and this understanding is mediated by theories so human agency plays a very important role in creating history human beings are not robots subject to mathematical laws and the trajectory of nations or societies is not determined by any mathematical laws and cannot be determined by regression because of the freedom that we have to think about what's happening and to change and to choose so the study of history cannot be insulated from human agency as in science where you're studying mechanical objects which have no free will in particular I have studied Islamic economics and I have explained how we have been stuck and an impasse because Islamic economists have accepted as a neutral and objective description of reality modern economics even though it is actually the neoliberal economics is a religion and not a science and the modern economics is based on assuming homo economicus and I have ongoing set of lectures in which the first lecture I said that let's develop a theory of behavior on the basis of gratitude contentment and trust and these will be opposed to the homo economicus behavior basis of greed and selfishness and distrust and so we can develop a theory on dramatically different foundations so this is the last slide and it gives you the link to these slides themselves and talk on rebuilding the social sciences and on also a talk which describes how we might go about developing