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14th March, 2023: Commenced
30th March, 2023: Concluded
23rd April, 2023: Updated.
31st July, 2023: Editorial fine-tuning.
24th September, 2023: More editorial fine-tuning.
30th November, 2024: Added the N.B. Defining artificial intelligence and more editorial fine-tuning.
26th June, 2025: Expansion of the gloss on the Arabic term salat and overall re-editing.
Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.
~~ Lauryn Hill
A monkey on the moon peering through a cloud of excessive smoke, precipitation, and heat, will find a bunch of ragtag children in that Sin Valley, a.k.a. the Silicon Valley, gushing and blushing over a creation they call an artificial intelligence. The sight of children playing adult is not new to the monkey, but that playtime never was a sight of contention as the children knew all too well that it was all 'fun n play' after all. Today, though, the monkey's frown can scarce hide a confused exasperation.
It has been, in the past, very much been privy to their play with lego sets believing they can create a world of their imagination and escape into fantasia and magical realism. But the monkey knows well enough that 'em kids always come back to reality when dinner time beckons; for if the growling of their stomach does not give way, then surely the shrill shouting of their mothers will. In other words, there was always something in place to restrain behaviour.
The world of fantasy, though, is always on the look out for ways to circum-navigate around constraints in order to seek unbounded freedom. And there is little doubt that excursion is surely fun. It yields entertaining animated 3-D films that try hard to be real films, but end-up being renowned mainly for being animated. Much as these 3-D films in 21st century still struggle to gain lustre in front of Tom & Jerry cartoons of yesteryears, so will artificial intelligence always pale in front of the simple calculator.
While Tom & Jerry was authentic, entertaining and rather filmy but in possession of a personality, the 3-D films are contrived, trying all too hard to convince. And after the emptying of bloated budgets, all that they manage to leave behind is an unsolicited bequest of hollowed out form of film-making. Certainly fantasy is fun, but then that is all that is to it, and ought to be. Fantasy demands no more dignity.
And while, occassionally, it may garner fame & fortune, fatansy will, without exception, fail to bring to fruition fervour, freedom, finesse and form. It forever shall remain the product of the playfulness of some unabashed corner of our minds, and that is what is so disturbing about AI. It too is but a product of minds of many a children who, though they inhabit adult bodies, have inevitably lost their way amidst the forest of their algorithms.
This lineage traces its sacred origins to the false prophets of Alan Turing and cuts right down to Y Combinator. It is instructive to compare that (lineage) now to the perfectly straight line traced from Kabir to Gandhi: the adult mind will instinctively appreciate why the monkey is a bit perplexed, and frankly put off. For, it certainly expected better of mankind even though mankind itself seems to have lost that capacity to believe that it has been designed to aim for something nobler and more enlightened.
Mr. Monkey may also be surely amused of what has overcome mankind that it revels in creating a replica for what it can do for itself quite well: not only that, what it certainly needs to do so only by itself and for itself. It has been always a distinguishing mark of mankind that reading, writing, thinking and reflecting are what sets apart this creation of God's:
Remember, when your Lord said to the angels:
"I have to place a trustee on the earth."
they said: "Will You place one there
who would create disorder and shed blood,
while we intone Your litanies and sanctify Your name?"
And God said: "I know what you do not know."
Then He gave Adam knowledge of the nature
and reality of all things and every thing,
and set them before the angels and said:
"Tell Me the names of these
if you are truthful."
And they said: "Glory to You (O Lord),
knowledge we have none
except what You have given us,
for You are all-knowing and all-wise."
Then He said to Adam:
"Convey to them their names."
And when he had told them, God said:
"Did I not tell you that I
know the unknown of the heavens and the earth,
and I know what you disclose
and know what you hide?"
~~ 2:30-33, The Qur'an
But evidently this creation of His is itchy and impatient to transfer the soul of the gift it has received to a mechanical device, and atop that, unabashedly delight in that transferrence. It is happy to reprogramme its own mind so that it is content to simply ask a question to a device and await with bated breath for the answer relayed back. The problem truly begins when such transference is deemed an achievement of mankind that in turn leads to a surge and froth in stock prices, as now real money – the hard-earned savings of the laity – shall chase things artificial.
This behaviour is nought but a classic definition of vanity. Understandably, the ability of minds that code all the time to properly identify such behaviour is stunted since they themselves are its living and breathing examples. It is a behaviour that revels in childlike enthusiasm for what its own hands have created. But, if they were to pull apart their attention from their screens, and look afar on the world-stage they will find no cause for despair as they are amongst pristine and prime company.
They shall find many a comrades who delight in being afflicted and bedridden with nationalist fever, and who, in their delirium, delight even more in tearing down existing structures and erecting new formless and tasteless ones in their place. The masochistic high felt by these tearers is not unlike that felt by the brains of 'em creators that train a machine with what 'em brains know. Both the fascist and the nerdie techie fail to realise that underneath the construction of monuments and machines is a furious and an unsatiable desire to constantly fondle their own conceits.
Those gifted though with an adult sensibility acutely sense the dangers that sprint to attach themselves to this jaunty excursion. It is certainly not because they harbour greater intelligence, but rather their common-sense, soaked in history's numerous imprints, informs them of the inevitable futility of such cravenous enthusiasm. This is especially poignant as this time around, the nature and extent of the enthusiasm has pushed at the very secured gates of the definition of absurdity itself.
In grappling with the ongoing rush of the flurry-of-answers from their newly minted toy, the questioners of ChatGPT and their compatriots have hardly paused to ponder that the mechanical instrument with a dollop of artificial intelligence that they are conversing with is fed with intelligence that is a creation of man's own mind. And, without exceptions, we all are privy to how fickle a man's own mind is, since every few years it keeps changing its position on almost everything. And given the right circumstances, as the wise have always warned, it is able to put its faithin in anything and everything. For,
Then the satan whispered to them, to make manifest to
them what was hidden from them of their shame. He said:
"Your Lord forbade you this tree only lest you become
angels, or of those abiding eternally."
And he swore to them: "I am to you a sincere counsellor."
And he led them by delusion; then when they tasted of
the tree, their shame was made manifest to them, and they
began to draw over them of the leaves of the garden. And
their Lord called to them: "Did I not forbid you that tree?
And did I not say to you: "The satan is an open enemy to
you?"
~~ 7:20:22, The Qur'an
After the second World War, mankind thought fascism was extant only to discover it is quite alive and kicking. Some scientists believe sugar is bad for diabetes while some believe it is its cause yet others assert it is neither. Economics as a whole can't even make up its mind on what money really is, given especially how central it is to mankind's own existence, continuing to remain an eternal object of its prying lust. Is money gold or bank-notes or the government's promise or crypto-currency or none of these but an article of faith?
(N.B. The real answer, if it be of any interest, is that money today is nothing but entries in a glorified ledger-system maintained digitally by the banking system. Money had long gone digital, much before the first sightings of bitcoin in January, 2009, and the more recent talk of digital currencies. This answer though, like many substantive ones, is only to be found outside of the decorated halls of academia. It is but an eternal fact that what the banker knows on the back of his hand forever mystifies the economist, and if AI is to learn from the Economist instead of the Banker, then the Banker rubs his hands in glee.)
Moving on, progressives believe the medieval age reeked of barbarism, while Conservatives regret indeed that it is the modern which has surpassed the bounds of barbarism and that in fact it is very much the tenets of the much maligned medieval which demand urgent repair, remembrance and revival.
But with little time for past ruminations, progressives remain busy assembling a future under the banner of sustainability, equality, and equity to subliminally usurp authority. In this, they find common cause with Conservatives for they all differ only in who gets to sit upon the throne: a technicality which only leads one to wonder what the fuss and fight is all about as the lot of the poorest remains shrouded always in poverty. All this, and more, when the nationalists and the fascist win elections after elections by chewing from within the hollowed out institutional carcass of democracy.
While the institution of politics disillusions, schooling is in no mood to be left behind. Not too long ago, schooling meant to get an education but, today, it is efficiently reducing itself to actively steering students to avail loans to procure an expensive paper certificate: a clear and continuing testament to the age-old folly of mankind whereby an honest and noble exertion is demeaned by affixing it to debt. Modern schooling then, is, effectively, nought but foolishness financially levered up.
The fact that a measurable outcrop of this foolish undertaking will spend a better part of their collective lives feeding intelligence to a machine – and paid handsomely for doing so – seems to fully escape the sense of irony of those who are confidently underwriting this academic undertaking. It is a scene which bears eerie likeness to that of the highly literate priesthood of yesteryears feeding idols crafted by mortal hands: an unenviable caricature that cages the false capitalists of today.
The future false capitalist too will be an outcrop of that levered schooled undertaking and will be paid handsomely to force the ways of the machines onto the rest of mankind, an inevitability whic has escaped convenientlyour sense of collective foreboding. Indeed, these mavericks of the machines will even be publicly-feted and be thrust as role models to aspire to for a duly-certified generation of school-goers.
Altogether, then, the picture bleeds of a motion-picture reel hand-in-glove with the 1952 Charlie Chaplin classic Modern Times, whose mockery of mankind, for long, lacked a comparable cinematic parallel. Now, finally landing upon a real-life one, that cinematic jewel may finally be retired permanently to the archives of the US Library of Congress, with an obtuary that would state that it, despite its long innings, truly failed to alert its audience to the nature of its own stubbornly irrevocable foolishness.
With so much accumulated muddled mist, then, in its own mind, does mankind, in all honesty believe that transferring this dirt and grime to the custodianship of a machine will somehow cleanse its own mind of it all? Much as the law is only as good as those who administer it, it is an axiom of programming that any computational scheme is only as good as its input. And this axiom will truly be put to test when it comes to AI: when we already know a priori how garbage the data really is, whither this excitement then?
Grounding reasoned thinking upon responses from a machine goes beyond outsourcing man's intellectual faculty: it amounts to relinquishing an ability to make an effort. It is putting greater faith in an insatiably cravenous self-generative and re-generative database designed, admittedly, with a most superior pattern-matching skill. The pattern-matching-skill portion is a laudable mathematical feat indeed, but it need not overwhelm our sense of balance: resulting thereby in an unpalatable view of seeing mankind bow in worship of such a phenomenon, a view which, at once, evokes pathos and triggers aversion in equal measure.
And this, when mankind's relationship with AI has yet to breach the ramparts of the know-how that it (mankind) possesses of nuclear fission and fusion. Such knowledge, when joined with mankind's zeal to invent new wartime furniture, that has led to a calculated coldness in bombarding and making desolate huge tracts of South Vietnam, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, while commissioning genocides in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. And, if this was not enough, mankind revels in gifting the crown of prime ministerships to those who preside over such acts with a sense of cozy self-righteousness.
And, once AI goes beyond being fed the regular mental mess of the average Joe, and gets to devour mind's true madness, it's nominal claim to intelligence will itself be cast in doubt. For, it is madness indeed to call strategising for war or diverting physics to kill your fellow-men as intelligence. It requires an unnatural (artificial) and perverse imagination to label such acts results of sound intellect; artificial criminality may, perhaps, be a term more apt for those machines, and their masters, raised on this pungent porridge.
The monkey is understandably dejected. But, the remedial saving grace, as always, lies in some strains that have historically escaped the corruption of man's intellect: mathematics, music, and the meaning of things: all three of which, together, constitute the language of the Divine. That this triplet, especially the last of its member, will always stand in the way of the spread of AI, shall, forever frustrate those who owe their allegiance and economic sustenance to silicon wafers. For, after all, things do have a meaning, and the most important of things have only one meaning; whenever man has spent time discovering that singular meaning he has come closer to the Truth.
The funny thing about the Truth is that it is encapsulated: much as a baby curls itself up to take full advantage (of) the security of its mother's womb. To know the Truth, it must, therefore, be unfurled, unpacked, or in other words, revealed. And revelation, lo and behold, has grace, a quality no machine since time immemorial has come close to achieving, and none – it may be safely said – will in whatever future remains of mankind on this planet, one that was entrusted to its care. For, grace is under exclusive sovereignty of its Creator, and mankind may only acknowledge (it), if it wishes to:
All praise belongs to God, the Lord of all creation
~~ 1:2, The Qur'an
The trainer of AI, training its tiny-tot-of-a-toy on the above ayat, will need to deal (it) a heavy hand of questions: what does praise as used above truly mean? Does it mean appreciation or gratitude or being thankful? Or does it really represent that attitude which is the distillation of the whole of The Qur'an, an attitude which The Qur'an tries to instill in its listener: an unblemished, perfectly balanced, and the most sublime mixture of gratitude, humility and fear of God? If, indeed, it is this mixture, what does it truly mean, and, importantly, what does it really feel like to carry it in one's heart as one goes through the day?
Furthermore, why is praise conjoined with God? Why does the term Lord follow the term God? And importantly, why is this the very second line of The Qur'an? Pray, if this is the difficulty involved in unfurling a single ayat, what happens when the rest of nearly 6,207 ayats must be unfurled word by word and then threaded all together into one all-encompassing narrative?
This is Truth beyond the ken of any machine. Truth, whose meaning is worth spending a life-time acquiring. Truth, which must also, without doubt, ought to truly gain enthusiastic following, and newspaper headlines, in lieu of the algorithms that spew out answers which mankind itself has fed it.
If AI is anything, it is but a sure way to drift away from the Truth: for, when the much-acclaimed database is likely to be raised on confusion, pretend-truth, post-truth and delusion – and to make matters worse, all strung together by an impeccable computational logic – which sensible mind is going to rely upon it to seek the Truth?
Introducing the lens of Truth into the discourse on AI leaves only one way to define AI: the culmination of the madness of a post-modernist struggle to gain authority over Truth itself. Some Libertarians in the Sin Valley may be elated with the sparkling illusion of gaining the much coveted 'authorship' of Truth, and, so will their imitators closer home, in places like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Gurgaon and Noida.
But an old woman living in a small village in Jharkhand, amidst the confines of mountains, rivers and trees — and who has seen the Naxalites, the Maoists, the Saffronites, the Hypocrites, and everyone in-between — she knows the Truth for a simple reason: she happens to breath it. She has no need to redefine it, challenge it, gain control over it, and least of all, hinge her intellectual, economic, emotional and spiritual independence to a machine.
For, she is the one who refuses to turn away:
Who will turn away from the creed of Abraham but one dull of soul?
We made him the chosen one here in the world,
and one of the best in the world to come,
(For) when his Lord said to him: "Obey," he replied:
"I submit to the Lord of all creation."
~~ 2:130-131, The Qur'an
If the above ayats were fed into ChatGPT, unlike the heart of that old woman, it will tear its hair out trying to get at their meaning. Indeed, some very eminent members of mankind have spent 1,400 years fishing for the meaning of that corpus of ayats which describes the way the world ought to work. While it eluded many an analytical, rational and logical minds, it entered, as if by magic, the heart of Kabir, who had simply to do nought but be borne to be fully sorted, without the aid of any psychedelic drugs, inertia-sustaining machines, anti-depressants, or even the intoxication of liquor.
Meanwhile, the coders in the Sin Valley may furiously punch their keys, trying to encode the underlying grammatical, etymological, rhetorical, contextual and analytical logic of The Qur'an but shall come away disappointed. And the reason is quite elementary:
If my line of thinking is correct, then it is a mistake to think that there is a body of propositions which can be rightly labelled "religious knowledge", in a sense even remotely analogous to scientific knowledge. Unlike 'religious knowledge' there may indeed be 'religious wisdom', but if there is, it is to be found embodied in the lives of religious people, and as with philosophical wisdom, cannot be defined in a set of propositions but is embodied in practice. Unlike knowledge, wisdom is thus spared the indignity of becoming a commodity."
~~ Mind and Verification, Rationality and Mind in Early Buddhism, Hoffman, J. Frank
The reason religious wisdom defies neat propositions is because its acquisition has a singular cause: that thing called humility. A machine is dumb, not humble. With an arrogant and vain master, it too shall acquire vanity in a jiffy. On the other hand, if the master was indeed steeped in humility, his mind would not be infected with the thought of artificial intelligence at all. By implication, such a mind will never consider it a moment of exhilaration, and pride, to be deemed a master of any machine. It shall always properly place a machine for what it is: a thing which aids a man. Excitement and machine are two nouns which ought not to cohabit within a single sentence inside a mature mind.
The test for AI, then, is quite rudimentary: what is the entirety of the meaning of the entirety of The Qur'an, the perfect speech? And if that proves (to be) too tall an order, then here is a seemingly manageable puzzle (for AI): can it exhaust the last ounce of meaning in The Fatihah?
For, by The Qur'an's own definition, The Fatihah is "the Writ free of doubt and involution", and that which is "free of doubt and involution" is free of corruption by any outside (exogenous) intellectual force. It should then, by definition, constitute the Truth, with meaning independent of the Subject who tries to interpret (its meaning). Those that do try (to interpret it) can neither conceal its meaning, distort it, or turn the page over without consequence.
For,
1. In the name of God, the most benevolent, the ever-meriful
2. All praise belongs to God
Lord of all the creation.
3. Most beneficent, ever-merciful,
4. Sovereign of the Day of Reckoning.
5. You alone we worship and to You
alone turn for help.
6. Guide us (O Lord) to the path that is straight,
7. The path of those You have blessed (eased),
Not of those who earn anger,
nor those who go astray.
~~ 1:1-7, The Qur'an
The adult mind shall eventually realise that The Fatihah is really for all of us. What does it indeed tell of mankind when some of its most mathematically gifted minds are behaving in violation of all of the lines above? They are busy creating new idols, ones that are a creation of their coding; those who mistakenly equate maximisation of intellect alone to progressing on the straight path; who take as role models those who are a far cry from 'those You have blessed'; and who certainly, as per the monkey on the moon, have gone terribly astray. Hope and mercy watch over them that they let not their enthusiasm draw them in the direction where they earn anger.
It, The Fatihah, is also what shall always distinguish man from the machine, for it offers man a chance to turn inwards, examine his own behaviour, reach a conclusion that he has strayed way too far and prompt him to turn a few pages to find the definition of the straight path 'encapsulated' within a single ayat:
Conscientiousness does not lie in turning your face
to East or West:
Conscientiousness lies in seeking safety in God,
the Last Day and the angels,
the Writ and the messengers,
and disbursing your wealth out of love for God
among your kin and the orphans,
the wayfarers and mendicants,
freeing the slaves;
and (in him) who (ensures he) heeds to the alignment (in his acts)
and (in him who ensures he) renders purity (to his acts);
and (in) those who (ensure they) fulfill their covenant when they make a covenant
and (in) the patient in hardship, adversity, and times of peril.
These are the men who affirm the truth,
and they are those who follow the straight path.
~~ 2:177
(Please refer to the note at the end of this article for a gloss on the term 'alignment' as used above.)
Now, did it really need a ChatGPT to know of a single ayat which summarises how man ought to think and behave when a well-bred habit of reading and curiosity from childhood would have more than sufficed? Mankind may only pray there never comes a time when it actually may need a ChatGPT to discover its own essence.
For, such (matters) are not matters of 'chatting'; they are (matters) of conversing and canvassing our own minds. The day conversations inside our minds are replaced by chats shall be the day when the pride of God's creation shall have learnt to completely humiliate itself, while all it needed was to learn to humble itself.
If AI really is the cynosure of man's creative eye, let mankind raise to it the question: "Tell me, O AI, how shall I humble myself before my Lord?" If AI answers back, then rest assured, the satans finally won.
(N.B. Proof:
1. AI shall never know the answer, hence it is, in effect, a rhetorical question.
2. AI answering back implies it will have scanned through pages of philosphical ink poured over this question and is therefore throwing back a deceivingly sophisticated response.
3. If mankind takes to this sophistry, then it means it has lost all sense of rhetoric. Behind this loss (of rhetoric) sits a tragic loss of language and literary heritage; and, by extension, then, the language of programming has overshadowed the faculty of natural language, a language the baby was privy to in the womb.
4. With loss of natural language comes losing acquaintence with hikma (wisdom: context-sensitive thinking and response) and being in possession of only a limited form of ilm (knowledge). This depravity, irrevocably, results in mankind falling to levels below those in Iblis' wildest, most jealous and vindictive of dreams.
5. In other words, the satans finally won.)
The reason AI is guaranteed to not answer back with the Truth is because everything that is a product of man's own vanity, hides within it the seed of its own destruction. A mortal can only create artefacts that themselves are bound by laws of mortality, i.e., impermanence. The ultimate and unbreakable test for AI is one and only, a test it is designed, from its very inception, to fail:
God: there is no god but He,
the Exclusively Self-Subsisting, the Eternally Awake.
~~ 3:2, The Qur'an
Many men from Alexander 'the Great' to Richard Nixon forgot this with rhythmic regularity. Many continue to grow-up to spend their lives proudly perpetuating that tradition, and as a consequence, continue to pay a price for their forgetfulness: their names scribbled in black in the records of history. There is no reason to conclude a different colour of ink for a machine which too aspires likewise to a God-complex. It too shall meet its due end, all the while enthusiasm for it survives, perhaps, in the childlike fantasy of science-fiction writers alone.
The modern age is remarkable for its descent into childishness, and is, by every passing year, losing whatever sense and meaning remains of being an adult, i.e., a living entity which understands that it will be held to account for its actions. 'You Only Live Once' may well be the modern credo on bumper stickers, while the credo and creed of Abraham remains to be read and reflected upon. But, as long as there is an old woman in Jharkhand the creed will remain housed in some hearts.
Today, as the East follows the West, even if the East may like to think otherwise, it is important to make an unsolicited remark. The Western civilisation, if it has forgotten the meaning of God, needs to at least forsake Plato and Aristotle and revive Spinoza. It also needs to stop its impressionable minds from ogling at the acolytes of Turing and Ayn Rand. For, the voyeurism is catching on in lands far away from the Sin Valley, spreading with alarming alacrity and turning the most intelligent of its brains to delight in the superficial and the shallow.
AI may be useful, but nothing useful is worth getting excited about; least of all elevating as an idol to gape at. Mistaking our own vanity for a creative achievement paints a sorry picture of mankind. If a monkey can 'get this', surely then, mankind too can without the aid of a machine, least of all one which ruins its own reputation by baptizing itself as 'artificial'.
And to end with an edifying reminder: this page was 'typed' with the aid of ed, a 1969 vintage line-editor on a command-line console (bash). Ed's abiding reliance on the elegantly powerful mathematical language of regular-expression has, over the years, saved many a redundant keystrokes; while its more modern and seemingly intelligent peers, notably the Word Document, have only served to sever the hand (and mind) of the writer from the word by introducing layers of needless intermediation. In most things in life, less-technology-rather-than-more is usually a safer doctrine; and in the balance of affairs, the dictum of technology-in-just-the-right-dosage-and-not-more suffices.
Will anyone then pay heed?
N.B. Gloss for the term 'alignment', in the sense of 'aligning to an axis' in 2:177.
The word 'alignment' stands in for the Arabic term salat, whose root-sense of 'to provide an attachment with constancy or homogeneity', indicates a concept that is quite broad and abstract, thereby making it dificult to find one appropriate English equivalent. Most translations supplant salat with 'prayer' or 'devotion'. Another forceful instance of its translation is – as convincingly demonstrated by Sam Gerrans – 'duty'. A less common but equally potent translation is 'following closely', mirroring a common imagery evoked in usage of salat that refers to a horse following a lead-horse very closely, or marching of soldiers in a line.
Of these four translations, three, namely devotion, prayer, and duty, possess intensity while 'following closely' tones down that intensity a notch. What all of them however do share in common is that they indicate a sense of closeness in relationship, one that is also confirmed by a reading of all ayats where salat is mentioned. And, given The Qur'an, this close relationship clearly refers to that between man and God.
This sense is also confirmed by the term 'attachment' present in the phrasing of the root-meaning of salat. Now, attachment certainly implies a kind of joining wherein two things so joined cannot so easily be severed, but it also comes in many flavours. An attachment of a lover to a loved one, an attachment of a son to his father, the attachment of a soldier to his battalion, the attachment of mother to her children, or, for that matter, attachment of the roots of a tree to the soil. In The Qur'an which of these flavours is then being referenced?
The clue perhaps lies in the second operative word in the root-meaning phrase: constancy or homogeneity. This seems to emphasise a kind of attachment that is consistently whole, or, wholesome in its nature, and wherein no force, without or within, will be weaken or sever it. More directly then, salat refers to the aspect of homogeneity of closeness in relationship between man and God. To grasp at a sense of salat is thus to intuit the relationship between man and God, the closeness of it and what homogeneity in that closeness would imply. Salat is effectively of compound-meaning that does not endear itself to intuition easily. It is a word that requires cultivated taste.
Interestingly, salat often occurs side by side with another on whose meaning it is easier to put a finger on: sabr, commonly translated as patience, perseverance, persistence or fortitude. Fortunately, sabr is something that, while abstract, is closer to our lived experiences and easy to ascertain through observable traits of behaviour. In light of this co-location of salat and sabr it is not unreasonable to postulate that they actually both refer to the same essential idea and represent two sides of it: one, the more physical and felt aspect of it while the other that is highly abstract, deeply embedded in mind but equally real and potent.
Consider,
1:4~~Thee alone do we serve, and from Thee alone do we seek help.
2:153~~O you who heed warning: seek help through sabr and salat; Indeed, God is with those who (have) sabr.
The first exhorts that man seek help from God alone and the second suppplies the very definition of taking help. That definition involves both the terms salat and sabr. The physical exertion, as represented by sabr, helps bring to fruition the quality of salat. Rephrasing thus: sabr is but an observable manifestation of salat, a quality of mind and heart whereby a man makes every effort to maintain the wholesomeness of his closeness in his relationship with God.
Given that homogeneity as a word has a rounded edge to it, eschewing the flavours of toughness, rigidity or firmness on one hand avoiding the trappings of mystical overtones on the other, the term 'alignment', as opposed to duty, prayer or devotion may fit the bill of salat better. In that sense, alignment is closer to the 'following closely' in implication and intonation. It speaks well to the idea of being close to something and trying hard to not become distant, detached or drift away from it.
In translating the ayats of The-Qur'an then, alignment in lieu of salat is to be understood and used in a special sense so as to indicate that a conscious effort is made to ensure that any action does not 'go out of line' from the 'straight path'. A good analogy is that of driving a car on a highway: any accomplished driver knows the need to control the steering well enough so that, at high speed, the car does not veer from its axis. Admittedly, this use of the term 'alignment – in the sense of 'aligning to an axis' – is both awkward at first glance and unconventional.
In the end, salat is one word on which the jury will always differ. Whatever the interepretation employed, it connotes something deeply innate, wholesomeness and without fail alludes to the sense of closeness in relationship, and it is the alignment with this fuller meaning that should not be lost sight of.
N.B. Defining artificial intelligence. It is a common-mistake to presume that artificial intelligence is contained inside the code which resides on a machine. Nothing in the two words, artificial and intelligence, requires that to be true. It can instead be argued that the dawn of artificial intelligence commenced when science gained supremacy over other forms of knowledge in influencing everday affairs.
Science, as is its wont, works through analysis, identification, naming and controlling. When scientific thinking becomes the dominant mode of organising society it can be said that the society has drifted aways from its natural way of being and towards a more contrived and artificial method of existence.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the decline of what may be termed as the moral aesthetic of society. The basis of any moral action is rooted in, what The Qur'an calls, the belief in the Unseen. The act of believing, i.e., organising one's life, based on that which is true but cannot be seen, requires a certain kind of heart and mind. It is as much an aesthetic experience as it is an intellectual one. It is one thing to say that honesty is a virtue and altogether another to live a life in full abidance of it.
For, there is nothing in experience to prevent a man from falling foul of it from time to time, if no one is noticing. On the other hand, a man who is in constant trepidation of the Unseen knows that, even if no fellow man sees his dishonesty, the One above everyone has still seen and recorded it. This fear is very much palpable and cannot be explained by force of intellect alone.
Likewise, the quality of perseverance and adherence to a belief, no matter what, requires a force that no amount of intelligence can conjure. It requires a kind of hajj which The Qur'an speaks of: continuous revolution of the mind around the core messages contained within the scriptures till the mind has fully convinced itself of the Truth contained in them. The act of carrying out hajj in this sense itself is a matter of placing an initial conviction in the message itself. Speaking of The Qur'an itself, initial conviction in it is triggered not through the force of its intellectual content alone, but predominantly and simply its literary beauty: specifically, the mesmerising effect it can have when it is actually heard being recited. And of course, no where is this moral aesthetic more visible than the idea of worship itself – what The Qur'an labels as ibadat
For all practical purposes, it may be considered a truism that once the material progress of mankind crosses a certain inflection point, its moral aesthetic starts declining at an alarming rate. And its most potent symptom is felt most in the vulgarisation of language itself. It has always been the case that literary heritage was preserved through the media of scriptures of some kind or another. For instance, the Vedic and the Upanishidic corpus contained in themselves the gems of Sanskrit. Likewise, for someone keen to learn Pali, the Buddhist cannon would serve as a veritable starting point. The Classical Arabic of The Qur'an continues to be the gold standard on how Arabic ought to be used to craft an elevating dialogue.
In other words, the moral aesthetic was captured in the tradition of language housed within the scriptures. The puzzling part of all scriptures was, by and large, that they did not use highly sophisticated jargon: their vocabulary was limited and easily accessible to the laity. But it was the manner in which they used the language – what may be termed as rhetoric – is where people turned to them. For, it was through the manner in which the scriptures said the most important of things that the soul found solace.
Material progress has severed this reliance on the scriptural language and supplanted it with the language of science. That is inevitably the case because what society calls progress today is based increasingly on knowing more and more of the seen, something which science excels at. In the process, mankind distances itself from the language of the Unseen, and in the end from the Unseen itself.
And it is with this direct loss of rhetoric in language that comes the loss of moral aesthetic. But what really is a moral aesthetic? In its finest terms it is but a sensibility and an ability to discern the right from the wrong in a given situation. Or, in other words, a context-sensitive sensibility. The fact that it is a sensibility and context-sensitive is what makes an intelligence which contains it natural versus artificial.
(N.B. Within the corpus of The Qur'an, the Arabic consonant Qaf most distinctly captures this sense. This single letter serves as the marker to begin that section of The Qur'an comprising the Surahs from 50 till the end, which paint, in very vivid language, that actions undertaken in this life shall constitute the body of recorded evidence to determine consequences to be faced in lieu of them in the life to come.
Qaf is also one of the three root-letters of the conceptually-critical word taqwa, which, amongst all of the Quranic terms, most comprehensively captures the gist of these 65 Surahs from the 50th to the 114th: "an awareness which is warily watchful of its own actions".)
For, something that is artificial can be codified as a set of rules in the form of "If this happens then do that" based on analysis of past data and search for patterns. However, things like honesty, piety, compassion, empathy, sufferenace, fortitude, generosity, accountability, fidelity, uprightness, straightforwardness, and so forth are not amenable to a rule-set.
Every moral aesthetic is couched inside a man's conscience, and every man who does wrong feels, even for a fraction of a second, a pinch of that conscience. Something within knows that what was done was not appropriate to the context at hand. This prodding pinch, then, is part of that moral aesthetic. Likewise, the act of giving alms to someone in need imbues a sense of contentment that is not replicable by any rule-set. It is simply a result of satisfaction at knowing that a good act was done.
A society which adopts moral aesthetic as its governing principle would be materially different from that which chooses to govern itself under the aegis of the scientific method. The former will not need to conjure the mindless acronyms of ESG, LGBTQ, Gender, Caste, Democracy, Equality, Human Rights, Feminism, Patriarchy, and so forth. A cursory look at such words reveals that they actually are concotions out of academia and not words that spring naturally from the vernacular of the conscience. Colloquially, they would be called jargons and words that children by mistake for curse-words to be used creatively in their school play-yards.
The idea of civility for long was established through use of very simple terms whose meanings could always be sourced from the scriptures and the literary heritage which built itself around those scriptures. To the degree that that heritage has been abandoned, the language in which the intellect thinks today has become less natural and more artificial. Acronyms, most certainly, do not make for a civil discourse.
Many, and perhaps most, today will not agree with the above chracterization of their own intellect. But, sometimes, the best way to realise the folly of foolishness is to change the dictionary the intelligence banks upon, and then weigh the contrast in the moral aesthetic that results from adoption of a different kind of language.
If upon such adoption, the aesthetic becomes sublime then it is an indication that perhaps the original dictionary in whose womb the intellect was bred was artificial and distasteful after all. Furthermore, this mode of verification should appeal to all slaves of science, including so-called social sciences. If they do try hard, they may also chance upon the fact that the scriptures, under their literary shade, hide the scorching science of cause-and-effect: a science to beat all other sciences.
The choice between artificial and natural intellect is an easy one to frame: to be literal or to be literary? The former lacks humour, parody, wit, sarcasm, irony, persuasion, flair, intonation, melody and rhythm. The latter is full of them and more. The latter has evidently stood the test of several thousand years, and, of all people, men who rely on pattern-matching, data-based and evidence-dependent thinking, ought certainly not to refute what evidence across time has shown to hold true. As The Qur'an puts this literal truth in quite a literary way:
Time and age are witness
That man is certainly in loss
except those who believe, do good and enjoin truth on one another, and enjoin one another to bear with fortitudue (the trials that befall)
~104, The Qur'an
Now, where is the need to jargonise that which can be said so simply in three ayats? Yet, the modern age persists in its abuse of language, loss of rhetoric and sucking out the naturalness of its soul. Artificial intelligence inside a machine is a signal that this direction-of-diminution (of intellect), long underway, is perhaps now irreversible. In other words, it is a clear testament that it is not a new form of intelligence that is being created; rather, an existing form of intelligence that is tending towards the artificial.
Yet, in the world of literature, unlike science, there is always the possibility of hope. For, who knows, at the next turn of phrase, the rhetoric may shift from one of contrivance to one of contrition. The Qur'an has 6,201 additional ayats to explain what is said simply in its first seven so as to give man sufficient time to unwind his folly and take a different turn. And if The Qur'an can give such a long rope, then perhaps mankind should take the hint by gradually switching its dictionary, if it can.
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