society faces its nemesis when dogma, fear and a one-dimensional mindset take charge at the expense of other ways of seeing things. Any suggestion of rationality is then persecuted and religion turns into an instrument of control rather than illumination.

As a result, organised religion comes to resemble a shop selling edicts of purity/ impurity and faithfulness/ infidelity. In the Pakistani society today sloganeering and populism dominate every sphere of life, including religion. Sadly, many people in Pakistan lack sound understanding, making do with ‘capsule knowledge.’ Consequently, the society has less of religion than religiosity.

The current discourse on Islam in Pakistan is shaped by a rhetorical mindset and sophistry. This approach to debate has been prevalent for quite some time. With the recent revolution in information technology and the rise of social media, the sophistry of the religious class has found a new platform.

The dragon’s teeth sown by this rhetorical and juridical mindset are producing monsters in the form of mob lynchings, stonings and murder by the police in the name of blasphemy allegations. However, a dominance of rhetoric and sophistry is not unique to the Islamic world.

The tension between rhetoric and knowledge has ancient roots. The archetypal clash between the two appeared during the classical period of Greece, when Socrates took up the challenge on behalf of knowledge, opposing the tenets of the sophists and the opinions of the masses and the ruling class. His views on rhetoric and its critique are well illustrated in Plato’s dialogues, Gorgias and Phaedrus.

Socrates regarded rhetoric as a vacuous art, one that does not require knowledge of the subject matter. In the practice of sophistry, form is paramount, not content. Sophists were skilled at employing rhetorical logic, creating putative causal relationships between statements and conclusions.

The inner structure of sophistic logic is driven not by a genuine quest for truth, but by external needs to cater to people’s subjective likes and dislikes. The rhetorical-sophistic mindset focuses on appealing to sentiments and popular perceptions. In the realm of society and politics, this attitude often manifests as populism.

In a populist psychological state, people tend to hear what pleases them rather than risk losing the anchor of their certainties. For this reason, most people do not seek the truth. Instead, they flee from it. This mindset is akin to a ship that keeps its anchor lowered to protect itself from the tumultuous waters rather than exploring the sea’s riches.

A mind infected by populist rhetoric relies more on the opinions and dictates of others than independent exploration and knowledge. In ancient Greece, the Sophists used the art of rhetoric to distort the truth, presenting falsehoods as truths through the power of disputation.

In Socratic philosophy, ignorance is seen as evil and knowledge regarded as virtue. Socrates considered rhetoricians un-virtuous for two reasons: their lack of true knowledge and the consequences of their actions. He not only spent much of his life opposing rhetorical sophists but also faced death at their hands, as they held significant sway over the Athenian state and judiciary.

The ethical issues Socrates sought to elucidate through his ideas took on a tangible form during his public trial in 399 BC, the proceedings of which were magnificently documented by his student Plato in The Last Days of Socrates.

Socrates’s educational philosophy aimed to elevate individuals to the level of truth by enabling them to cast off the crutches of popular opinion and notions, which the sophists created to maintain a semblance of truth. During the time of Socrates and Plato, sophists and orators dominated both the philosophical and public arenas. The 500 members of the jury at Socrates’s trial were well-versed in rhetoric but lacked a deep understanding of legal and ethical matters. As ‘consumers’ of public rhetoric, they relied on sophistic devices rather than seeking genuine truth.

Although he was familiar with the art of rhetoric, Socrates chose to present his case from an ethical perspective. Rather than pandering to popular opinion, he likened himself to a gadfly, whose purpose was to sting the people of Athens out of their deep slumber of ignorance. In doing so, he sought to awaken them to the knowledge of their own ignorance, asserting that true knowledge begins with an awareness of the darkness within.

John Milton poignantly captures this moment of realisation in Paradise Lost, where he writes: “What in me is dark/ Illumine, what is low raise and support.”

The rhetoricians on the Athenian jury prevailed, 280 of the 500 jurists declaring him guilty of corrupting the youth with his ideas. The trial marks the first recorded instance of public opinion, devoid of knowledge, persecuting true wisdom.

Some fourteen centuries later, the Islamic world witnessed a similar trial in Andalusia. The persecuted philosopher in this instance was Abu Al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroës.

Muhsin Mehdi notes that Averroës, like earlier Muslim philosophers such as Al-Farabi and Avicenna, “learned from the death of Socrates and from Plato the lesson of how a philosopher needs to be both free and a good citizen at the same time.”

Ibn Rushd sought to explicate religion through philosophy. Rather than subsuming philosophy within religion, he advocated for a central role for philosophy in interpreting religion. This was because hikmah (philosophy) emerges when one attempts to understand and explain ambiguous aspects of life. Life reveals itself in myriad, often ambiguous ways. This ambiguity stimulates intellectual curiosity and exploration.

As we seek to explain new existential situations and experiences, we must rely on the available language, yet experience often exceeds the words. This excess of experience compels us to stretch the boundaries of meaning, infusing new interpretations into words to accommodate new phenomena in our understanding.

It is at the convergence of personal experience, knowledge and new phenomena that the meaning and understanding of any worldview or corpus expand. Consequently, we witness diverse religious experiences and varied ways of perceiving reality.

These differing perspectives give rise to theological, rhetorical, juridical, philosophical and literary approaches, each with its own language. This diversity of thought enables people to contemplate the unconsidered dimensions of life and to explore the unexamined aspects of sacred texts.

Averroes held that through philosophical exploration, people expand their understanding of life, experience, religion and God. When they failed to engage in such exploration, they diminished His stature, ultimately worshipping a reduced/ limited deity. The potential of Averroes’s philosophy to explore the unexplored and think the un-thought was restrained short when he was persecuted by Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur in 1195.

Averroes was accused of Jewish ancestry and of engaging in a hermeneutical interpretation of the Quran through Aristotelian rationality. He was exiled first to the Jewish quarter and later to Morocco.

It has been argued that this persecution led to the intellectual stagnation of the Muslim world, trapping it in a mental prison where no fresh ideas could enter. A mind in such a state survives by regurgitating what has already been consumed.

Such a calcified mindset attempts to understand the world and the society through fossilised concepts, bland images and empty rhetoric rather than a dynamic engagement with new perspectives.

The rhetorical mindset has been further strengthened in the modern age with the advent of the social media revolution, which has provided an opportunity to pontificate without true knowledge. We see a plethora of so-called specialists lacking expertise, not only in the domain of religion but across all fields of life.

In the age of fame and glamour, there is no need any longer for a deep understanding of medicine, engineering, genetics, physics, religion or political science. All that is required is presenting one’s view in an easily consumable package.

The era of poring over books to conduct in-depth research appears to be over. Knowledge is now packaged in capsule form. As a result, a thirty-second reel about Immanuel Kant attracts a larger audience than all readers of his book The Critique of Pure Reason.

The rise of social media has coincided with the emergence of religious influencers. What was once confined to specific groups is now bursting onto our screens everywhere.

With no verification or checks on the accuracy of what is said or shown, the closed mind is running amok. The recent surge in blasphemy accusations and related murders in Pakistan is directly linked to this rhetorical mindset, which lacks actual knowledge but wields an arsenal of labels, edicts, religious authority, conspiracy theories and slogans.

Having destroyed its perceived “others,” this mentality is now devouring its own followers. The rhetorical mind has become a black hole, consuming the remaining stars of rationality in its dark firmament.

The street mullah of the past has gained an avatar on social platforms that is spreading religiosity through populist rhetoric and media sophistry. It has become a game where those who disagree with one are disliked and dismissed. The trajectory of religious institutions in our country stands in stark contrast to the rest of the world, where religious establishments like Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne and Heidelberg have evolved into world-class universities.

A new form of militancy is emerging. Some social media influencers are trying to shape their followers’ understanding of Islam through optics, rhetoric and sophistry rather than scholarly insight. If the trend continues, by the end of this century, we may see more religious interpretations available on platforms like TikTok and YouTube than in academic research.

The question is: how do we wrest the religious discourse from the clutches of media celebrities and self-proclaimed guardians of the sacred? The first step is to recognize that the existing epistemic structures and the knowledge they produce are incongruent with both the contemporary world and the zeitgeist of intellectual thought.

Professor Mohammed Arkoun says the epistemological posture of Muslims in modernity is a product of an official, closed corpus produced several centuries ago. A closed corpus of knowledge and a closed epistemic mindset cannot grasp the ever-emerging realities shaped by the ruptures of modernity and the simulacra of post-modernity.

There is a vast gulf between our worldview and the world. Our situation is thus akin to that of the sleepers in the cave described in S rat al-Kahf in the Holy Quran.

Professor Arkoun views the epistemic framework and thought processes of many theologians and jurists as increasingly irrelevant for interpreting both religion and the world. The rise of new sciences – such as anthropology, sociology, historiography, linguistics, philology, literary criticism, philosophy, political science and biology – has become the dominant means of defining our understanding of the world, including religion.

For this reason, Arkoun strongly advocates for the application of social and human sciences in the study of religious phenomena and discourse.

Despite being criticised for allegedly corrupting Islam through Averroesian and Avempacean (Ibn Bajjah) thought and postmodern hermeneutics, his research and ideas on religion and society are relevant to the current age.

I remember Arkoun giving us an assignment to analyse the story of ashab-i-kahf through the lens of ideas expressed in The Structural Study of Myth by renowned French anthropologist Levi Strauss. I, too, attempted the task, but did not do well. However, it was a rewarding experience in that it opened new ways of understanding social phenomena.

In the modern age, new perspectives on scriptures are available in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, Charles Taylor, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber. Their writings are rich with biblical references and allusions to religious history, contributing to the ever-expanding corpus of religious knowledge in the West.

The fear of being labelled blasphemous has meanwhile stifled intellectual engagement with scripture in the Muslim world and led to a poverty of religious knowledge production. The popular belief that most of us possess a deep understanding of Islam is, in fact an illusion. A society that lacks true knowledge and clings to its illusions is destined for decline and death.

We have neglected the sciences for centuries. As a result there is an epistemic gap that cannot be bridged by mere social media rhetoric. To emerge from this morass of ignorance, we must engage with the contemporary world. This requires reclaiming religion from the grip of a calcified mindset.

The writer is a social scientist interested in the history of ideas. Email: azizalidad@gmail.com