My Journey from Theory to Reality — Asad Zaman

Over the twenty years that I have been pursuing an Islamic approach — focusing on the production of USEFUL knowledge, I have managed to heal all three of these divides. This happens naturally, when you focus on solution of real world problems. You automatically need to combine information coming from many different specialization areas. You need to use reasoning and also intuition. You also need to use both theory and its applications to the real world experiences. This leads to substantial changes in the subject matter itself. I have applied this approach with great success to Econometrics, Statistics, Microeconomics, Macroeconomics, Experimental Economics, and even Mathematics itself. I am in process of creating textbooks and teaching materials in all of these areas. Because my work is most advanced in the area of Statistics, I am working on putting it all together in a new course on Real Statistics: An Islamic Approach. There is a large amount of pre-existing material – lectures, texts, exercises, references – that I have created over the past decade on working on this course. However, as I progress, I keep learning new things, and this time I want to put together a polished new version of this course for public use. My primary target audience is teachers of statistics — I would like to persuade them to use this new approach to teach statistics. Those who would like to follow my progress as I construct a new website on a lecture by lecture basis gradually are encourged to fill in the following Registration form. I will use emails to notify them when I complete a new lecture, and also invite feedback on what is there, so that we can build it up with clarity and consensus....

All thinking, since humans think in language, is based on context, meaning being determined by context. The shaper of context is the worldview in which the group is functioning. In the West, the contemporary worldview was shaped by the Western history, chiefly Greek thought, Judaeo-Christian religion, Roman law, and modern science. Its intellectual products were shaped by the Western intellectual tradition that culminated most recently in the rise of science, which new supervenes over what preceded it. The basic assumption of the Western scientific world view is methodological naturalism, which many if not most of the foremost exponents equate with metaphysical materialism.

This is taking place in the overarching worldview of Western liberalism that was developed in the 18th century as an antidote to theological dogmatism. Scientific naturalism and the ideal of unified scientific explanation, or consilience, replaced the great chain of being, as the dominant paradigm of explanation.

Regarding social, political and economic thought, many if not most of the foremost authorities equate economic liberalism with Western capitalism  as the dominant mode of production and also view political liberalism in the form of representative democracy being determined by capitalism as economic liberalism. Initially, economic liberalism implied laissez-faire and sought to replace government by the market. Subsequently, when it become clear that government was needed for institutional structure, classical economic liberalism shifted to neoliberalism, which is the view that economic and financial interest should control government and direct institutional arrangements and operations toward furthering economic interests.

While the West is still the most influential bloc worldwide, that is beginning to change. The rest of the world, which had accepted the assumptions on which this worldview is based owing to the success of the West. Now many are beginning to question whether these assumptions are as robust as they seemed as problems arise and the paradoxes of liberalism manifest.

Consequently, some of those that had accepted the Western stance previously and were also educated in it are beginning to rethink their positions in light of the traditional worldviews that prevail in their societies. Many of the traditional worldviews are embedded in a religious contexts that have become cultural. Even in secular China, President Xi is resurrecting Confucius as a cultural icon, and in the supposedly secular US, dominant religious groups are asserting influence more openly, with science itself subject to challenge when it is perceived to conflict with tradition.

Asad Zaman's post is good example of this rising trend, as well as what a highly educated person asking such questions might do about it. This process is an iteration of the historical dialectic as liberal and traditionalism interact to forge a complementary Zeitgeist that moves history forward a step.

What should a "good" liberal think about this? Freedom of thought and expression are fundamental to liberalism this implies tolerance. So the answer is given by none other than Mao Tse-Tung, "Let a hundred flowers bloom."

Asad Zaman makes one other point worth sharing for those that may not choose to read his post in full.

Sometime during this process of switching from teaching theory to teaching how to solve real world problems, I came across the “Statistics” textbook of David Freedman. This textbook actually implemented exactly this idea that I had come to believe in — do statistics in context of solving real world problems. One amazing characteristic of this textbook is that it has no mathematical formula – ZERO. Freedman explained that students use formulae as crutches to prevent them from thinking. So he explains all concepts in words only, exactly the same insight that I had learnt on my own. Formulas teach you techniques for calculation. We don’t need these techniques — leave them to the computer. We need to UNDERSTAND what these calculations mean. That is a VERY DIFFERENT process. I got involved in an email correspondence with David Freedman, who had very similar experience to mine. He had started out as a very heavily mathematically oriented researchers. His early papers are all very heavy mathematically. Later, when he got involved in doing some testimony in real world court cases, he realized that all of the theory he had learnt was useless in the real world. This is because the assumptions we make in theory are almost always false in the real world. Then he had to learn how to do real world statistics, exactly as I have had to do. Since most fancy assumptions we make in statistics and econometrics are wrong, we need to learn how to do simple and basic inferences, which actually makes life much easier for students of the subject — we need to teach them basic and intuitive things, not complex models and math....  

An Islamic Worldview
My Journey from Theory to Reality
Asad Zaman | Vice Chancellor, Pakistan Institute of Development Economics and former Director General, International Institute of Islamic Economics, International Islamic University Islamabad