Muslims in the Service of a Rigged Academic System
Dr. Pasha
(Bringing Islam to the World One Concept at a Time!
Taking the Qur'an to Every Home and Heart that Needs It --
And which One Does Not?)
The story of a Muslim caught by circumstance and by the meticulous planning of Allah in the Service of a Rigged Academic System is this:
Whether you like it or not, Atlas-like you have taken the weight of the world on your shoulders. As a result, you need to be able to think beyond Power, Money and "Success" as the supreme values in your life.
Saving the World and Making the World a Better Place for All, along the dimensions of Health, Hunger, Poverty, Education, Pollution, Corruption, Justice, Equality, Unjust Wars, and all that, should be.
Maybe you still need to continue to work because, as they say, you still have the obligation of putting "Bread on the Table." Even though you know very well that Allah is the one, and he is the only one, who really can and does give you your Daily Bread.
So, as a Muslim, you have to work very hard, maybe harder than most others, to fulfill your academic duties and responsibilities. But you must work even longer and harder in the service of the causes you have been guided and blessed to embrace: To Save the World and Make It a Better Place for All.
You should see teaching and helping your students as a part of that larger commitment to Build a Better World. Your students are likely to be mostly innocent, abandoned, "orphaned" children, generation after generation of them, who have been betrayed by corrupt politicians and self-seeking, personal-agenda-driven academicians.
These young people are likely to be the product of a Rigged Educational System that is required to service a Rigged Economic, a Rigged Social and a Rigged Political System.
In the midst of all this, your choice, and your line of action, is quite clear: you must try to educate your students the best way you can. You must try to teach them everything you possibly can; everything that your long-neglected students need to learn to bridge over their deficiencies; and everything you are able to.
You will see with your own eyes that their lives change when they come into your classes and interact with you.
That you must find, in some small way, rewarding and comforting from a purely worldly point of view.
The Academy, the World of Higher Education as it were, being part of a wider Rigged Education System, is rife with corruption in all kinds of ways and at all kinds of levels. Often, incompetence and lack of quality and professionalism among academicians correlate closely with corruption.
These things generally go hand in hand.
There are people in the Academic World whose concerns and commitments rarely go beyond building their own personal and professional futures using every means available to them.
Often, their morals are shot and their "Ethics" is frequently little more than a Fig Leaf to their personal ambition, corruption and inadequacies.
In such a world, Good People need to learn to deal effectively with the Bad People that surround them and still continue to advance their own Mission and Agenda of Building a Better World and generating a Corruption-Free Academic Environment -- to the extent they can.
And to the Extent They Are Able To.
For, Allah asks nothing more of them -- beyond what they are able to endure and beyond what they are able to produce.
Hear Allah himself say this in the Qur'an:
Laa Yukallifullahu Nafsan Illaa Wus'ahaa!
That way, these Muslim Academicians can at least save their own souls -- if they do have a soul -- and continue their Mission of Building a Better World wherever God Almighty has placed them -- and however best they can.
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