No one will deny that modern science and its technical applications have brought the contemporary world many benefits, even if these sometimes turn out, in the longer term, to be somewhat ambiguous.
Nonetheless, many people feel a profound unease about many of the applications, interventions and changes which come in the wake of scientific discoveries. One need only mention such phenomena as genetic engineering, cloning, cryogenics, industrial diseases, “behavior modification”, the proliferation of drug-resistant viruses, nuclear and biological warfare, and environmental catastrophes of various kinds, to trigger well founded apprehensions about where science and technology might be taking us. Not without reason have some of the most disturbing and resonant literary works of the past two centuries been concerned with the unforeseen effects of a runaway science — think, for instance, of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or Aldous
Huxley’s dystopian vision in Brave New World. Increasingly, many thought- ful people are questioning the modern shibboleth of an inexorable “progress”, fueled by “science” and implemented by technology. In this brief article I wish to offer a few general reflections about the way in which science is understood in the contemporary world and to sketch out a perspective which runs against the grain of the modern mentality.

A decisive shift took place in the European worldview in the 17th century, through what we now think of as the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were amongst the
seminal figures. The triumph of the scientific outlook was more or less complete by the 20th century and provided the basis of the prevailing intellectual orthodoxies amongst the European intelligentsia. Modern science is not simply a disinterested and, as it were, a detached and “objective” mode of inquiry into the material world; it is an aggregate of disciplines anchored in a bed of very specific and culture-bound assumptions about the nature of reality and about the proper means whereby it might be explored, explained and controlled. It is, in fact, impossible to separate the methodologies of modern science from their theoretical base which we can signal by the term “scientism”. Perhaps the central plank in the scientistic platform is the assumption that modern science
contains within itself the necessary and sufficient means for any inquiry into the material world, and that it can and should be an autonomous and self-validating pursuit, answerable to nothing outside itself. This was a new idea in the history of human thought, radically at odds with the traditional view that any inquiry into the natural world could only properly proceed within a larger framework provided by philosophy and religion.

Modern science, as it has developed since the Renaissance, is flanked on one side by philosophical empiricism which provides its intellectual rationale, and by technology and industry on the other, a field for its applications. It is rational, analytical and empirical in its procedures, materialistic and quantitative in its object, and utilitarian in application. By its very nature modern science is thus unable to apprehend or accommodate any realities of a supra-sensorial order. Science (a method of inquiry) becomes scientism (an ideology) when it refuses to acknowledge the limits of its own competence, denies the authority of any sources which lie outside its ambit, and lays claim, at least in principle, to a comprehensive validity as if it could explain no matter what, and as if it were not contradictory to lay claim to totality on an empirical basis. (Witness Stephen Hawking’s bizarre and quite absurd pretensions to a “Theoryof Everything”!) Critiques of scientism are much in vogue these days both from within the scientific community and from without. The insecure philosophical foundations of modern science, its epistemological ambiguities, its inability to accommodate its own findings within the Cartesian-Newtonian frame, the consequences of a Faustian pursuit of knowledge and power, the diabolical applications of science in the military industry, the dehumanizing reductionisms of the behavioral sciences — all of these have come under trenchant attack in recent times.

New “discoveries” by physicists and the paradoxes of Quantum Theory throw conventional assumptions about time, space and matter into disarray; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Chaos Theory and the “New Physics” cut the ground from under the “objectivity” on which science has so much prided itself; the mechanistic conceptions of a materialistic science, the very language of science, are found to be useless in the face of bewildering phenomena to which European science has hitherto been blind. Everywhere cracks are appearing in the edifice of modern science. Titus Burckhardt, writing from a traditional viewpoint, exposes some of the issues involved here in writing:

…modern science displays a certain number of fissures that are not only due to the fact that
the world of phenomena is indefinite and that therefore no science could come to the end
of it; those fissures derive especially from a systematic ignorance of all the noncorporeal
dimensions of reality. They manifest themselves right down to the foundations of modern
science, and in domains as seemingly “exact” as that of physics; they become gaping cracks
when one turns to the disciplines connected with the study of the forms of life, not to
mention psychology, where an empiricism that is relatively valid in the physical order
encroaches strangely upon a foreign field. These fissures, which do not affect only the
theoretical realm, are far from harmless; they represent, on the contrary, in their technical
consequences, so many seeds of catastrophe.1

Social commentators have become more alert to the dangers of a totalitarian materialism, an instrumentalist rationality and its attendant technology. We see that rationality has been allowed to become man’s definition instead of his tool, a tyrannical master rather than a humble servant. We sense that the disfigurement of the environment mirrors our internal state, that the ecological crisis is, at root, a spiritual crisis which no amount of science and technology can, of itself, remedy. We know the truth of Victor Frankl’s claim that:

The true nihilism of today is reductionism…Contemporary nihilism no longer brandishes
the word nothingness; today nihilism is camouflaged as nothing-but-ness. Human phenomena
are thus turned into mere epiphenomena.2

Commentators like René Guénon, Theodore Roszak, E.F. Schumacher, and Wendell Berry awaken us to the provincialism of modern science and to the dangers of what William Blake, the great visionary poet, called “Single Vision”. Though modern science has doubtless revealed much material information that was previously unknown it has also supplanted a knowledge which infinitely outreaches it. As Gai Eaton has observed of the much vaunted “discoveries” of modern science, “Our ignorance of the few things that matter is as prodigious as our knowledge of trivialities.”3 We see this in the complacencies and condescensions of those scientists who like to suppose that we have “outgrown” the “superstitions” of our ancestors. Here is a random example from a prestigious contempo-
rary scientist:

I myself, like many scientists, believe that the soul is imaginary and that what we call our
mind is simply a way of talking about the function of our brains…Once one has become
adjusted to the ideas that we are here because we have evolved from simple chemical
compounds by a process of natural selection, it is remarkable how many of the problems
of the modern world take on a completely new light.4

Here indeed is the fruit of a rampant materialism, an “intelligence without wisdom”. One recalls Frithjof Schuon’s remark that it is the rationalism of frogs living at the bottom of wells to deny the existence of mountains: this is logic of a kind, but it has nothing to do with reality.5 It is nowadays a commonplace that many of the ills of our time stem from the rift between “faith” and “science” but few people have suggested any convincing means of reconciling the two. Certainly the effusions and compromises of the liberal theologians and “demytholgizers” are of no help, marking little more than a thinly-disguised capitulation of religion to science. (One might adduce the works of the English theologian, Don Cuppitt, as a case in point.) Nor should we be seduced by those apparently conciliatory scientists who seem willing to allow some sort of place for religious understandings, all the while making it clear that science will concede nothing of substance (here we can find no better exemplar of the mentality in question than E.O.Wilson’s immensely popular but muddle-headed work, Consilience.6) However, in the light of traditional metaphysical understandings many of the apparent contradictions between “science” and “religion” simply evaporate. It is not necessary, to say the least, to throw religious beliefs on the scrapheap because they are “disproven” by modern science; nor is it necessary to
gainsay such facts as modern science does uncover — provided always that what science presents as facts are so indeed and not merely precarious hypotheses.

The key to traditional understandings lies in the nature of their symbolism — a mode of knowledge quite inaccessible to the scientific mentality. No one will deny that, from one point of view, the earth is not the centre of the solar system; this is no reason for jettisoning the more important truth which was carried by the symbolism of the geocentric picture of the universe. Another example: it is preferable to believe that God created the world in six days and that heaven lies in the empyrean above the flat surface of the earth than it is to know precisely the distance from one nebula to another whilst forgetting the truth embodied in this symbolism, namely that all phenomena depend on a higher Reality which determines us and gives our human existence meaning and purpose. A materially inaccurate but symbolically rich view is always preferable to the reign of brute fact. In falling under the tyranny of a fragmentary, materialistic and quantitative outlook modern science is irremediably limited by its epistemological base. Of spiritual realities, modern science knows and can know absolutely nothing. As Frithjof Schuon observes discredited “facts” which stood between man and any true self-aware-ness — the mechanistic theories of the seventeenth century, for instance — on the grounds that these were, after all, only provisional hypotheses which a more “humane” scientific vision can now abandon. The simple fact is that modern science cannot be “humanized” or “reformed” from within itself because it is built on premises which are both inadequate and inhuman.

Note: I suck at telling stories so forgive me if it doesn’t quite make sense.

A man was traveling on his horse when he decided to stop for a bit and have a break. After getting off his horse he looked around for something he could tie his horse to. Being unable to find anything, he decided to hammer in a piece of wood he found lying around so that he could use it to tie up his horse.

After his little rest, the man was set to continue on his journey. He left the piece of wood in its place thinking that the next horsemen to come along might find it useful.

Some time later, another man came along and saw the piece of wood sticking out from the ground. He decided to remove it thinking that someone else might come along and trip over it.

Moral of the story:

Both of these men had good intentions and yet their actions appear to contradict each other. Hence, actions are not always a solid indication of one’s true intentions.

]]> http://curecurious.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/story-on-intentions/feed/ 1 curecurious http://curecurious.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/putting-man-before-descartes/ http://curecurious.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/putting-man-before-descartes/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:56:28 +0000 curecurious http://curecurious.wordpress.com/?p=72 ]]> But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding.”

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/putting-man-before-descartes/

Ep 1 1/5 Intro + Graeco/Romans
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=feqMQfRbRnk

ep 1 2/5 Ancient Egyptians
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=vk6PYAio__Q

Ep 1 3/5 Christianity P1
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=l6z6avH3ky8

ep 1 4/5 Christianity P2
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Ex-haOc8ZnE

Ep 1 5/5 Islam
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=nocVrTaBZpQ

1. Introduction
Human Rights activism emerged in the twentieth century with the potential of the universal recognition and application of its ideals as the only acceptable way of approaching human values. Based on the ideas of a large number of intellectuals, by and large of European origin, who lived in the last five centuries the ideas of human rights approach reached a conclusive phase in its ambition to universalize its ideals when the United Nations adopted Universal declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. The resolution was signed by a large number of member countries many of which were Muslim.

The concerns expressed in the UN Resolution were in the areas which have also been traditionally the interest of Islamic teachings as well. It was quite natural to expect that religious people would look at the contents of the resolution in the light of their religious teachings on the subject. As a result of this exercise, some aspects of the resolution were found consistent with Islamic teachings while others were found inconsistent. This paper is an attempt to identify some of the prominent aspects of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that are consistent with Islamic teachings and some of those that are not, in an effort to discover the extent of co-operation possible between the two approaches. The paper also attempts to identify the reasons why there are differences in the two points of view and concludes by suggesting the right approach in addressing the situation that has arisen as a result of the conflict.

a: Disclaimer: The ideas expressed in this paper are what I understand about the issue on the basis of my understanding of Human Rights concerns on the one hand and the Islamic teachings on the same issues on the other. In no way do these thoughts claim to be the only representative understanding of Islamic teachings.

b: Divine Revelation and Human Intellect: According to the Qur’anic understanding, human intellect is in no conflict with the Divine Revelation the way it has been expressed in the Qur’an. However, there can be occasions when human intellect could be at a loss to understand the contents of Divine Revelation. One of the reasons such a possibility can arise is that at times Divine Revelation guides human intellect because of the latter’s inherent inability to come to concrete answers on certain issues on its own. The other possibility could be when human intellect may have degenerated because of persistent exposure to unfavourable environment and/or deliberate indulgence in known vices. The Qur’an is emphatic in its claim that a normal human intellect would find itself in agreement with Divine Revelation.

c: The Islamic law (Shari’ah) is not very elaborate. It confines itself to describing only a few important rules for regulating the individual and collective lives of Muslims. The Shari’ah mentions rules regarding worship and moral considerations in social, economic, and political life of humans. All rules of human rights should be allowed to influence Muslims only to the extent that they don’t go against the Shari’ah. There is therefore considerable scope for cooperation between Islamic teachings and secular understanding of the rules affecting human beings.

d: While forming academic opinions about Islamic teachings, one should confine one’s attention to the Qur’an and Sunnah (the religious practices given by the prophet). There can at times be considerable difference between what Islamic teachings say and what Muslims do. There could at times be differences between true Islamic teachings and what many Muslim scholars say or write

CONTINUE READING ON @

http://www.khalidzaheer.com/essays/kzaheer/social%20issues/human_rights.html

.

In this section, Faraz Rabbani explains that there is a comprehensive Islamic philosophy underpining Sharia.

For each We have appointed a divine law and a traced-out way. Had God willed, He could have made you one community. But that He may try you by that which He has given you. So vie one with another in good works. Unto God you will all return, and He will then inform you of that wherein you differ.Qur’an, 5:48

For Muslims, life did not begin at birth, but a long time before that. Before even the creation of the first man. It began when God created the souls of everyone who would ever exist and asked them, “Am I not your Lord?” They all replied, “Yea.”

God decreed for each soul a time on earth so that He might try them. Then, after the completion of their appointed terms, He would judge them and send them to their eternal destinations: either one of endless bliss, or one of everlasting grief.

This life, then, is a journey that presents to its wayfarers many paths. Only one of these paths is clear and straight. This path is the Sharia.

Divine guidance

The Great Mosque in Damascus, Syria ©

In Arabic, Sharia means the clear, well-trodden path to water. Islamically, it is used to refer to the matters of religion that God has legislated for His servants. The linguistic meaning of Sharia reverberates in its technical usage: just as water is vital to human life so the clarity and uprightness of Sharia is the means of life for souls and minds.

Throughout history, God has sent messengers to people all over the world, to guide them to the straight path that would lead them to happiness in this world and the one to follow. All messengers taught the same message about belief (the Qur’an teaches that all messengers called people to the worship of the One God), but the specific prescriptions of the divine laws regulating people’s lives varied according to the needs of his people and time.

The Prophet Muhammad (God bless him and give him peace) was the final messenger and his Sharia represents the ultimate manifestation of the divine mercy.

“Today I have perfected your way of life (din) for you, and completed My favour upon you, and have chosen Islam as your way of life.” (Qur’an, 5:3) The Prophet himself was told that, “We have only sent you are a mercy for all creation.” (Qur’an, 21:179)

Legal rulings

The Sharia regulates all human actions and puts them into five categories: obligatory, recommended, permitted, disliked or forbidden.

Obligatory actions must be performed and when performed with good intentions are rewarded. The opposite is forbidden action. Recommended action is that which should be done and the opposite is disliked action. Permitted action is that which is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Most human actions fall in this last category.

The ultimate worth of actions is based on intention and sincerity, as mentioned by the Prophet, who said, “Actions are by intentions, and one shall only get that which one intended.”

Life under the Sharia

The Sharia sets out rules of conduct for women and men ©

The Sharia covers all aspects of human life. Classical Sharia manuals are often divided into four parts: laws relating to personal acts of worship, laws relating to commercial dealings, laws relating to marriage and divorce, and penal laws.

Legal philosophy

God sent prophets and books to humanity to show them the way to happiness in this life, and success in the hereafter. This is encapsulated in the believer’s prayer, stated in the Qur’an, “Our Lord, give us good in this life and good in the next, and save us from the punishment of the Fire.” (2:201)

The legal philosophers of Islam, such as Ghazali, Shatibi, and Shah Wali Allah explain that the aim of Sharia is to promote human welfare. This is evident in the Qur’an, and teachings of the Prophet.

The scholars explain that the welfare of humans is based on the fulfillment of necessities, needs, and comforts.

Necessities

Necessities are matters that worldly and religious life depend upon. Their omission leads to unbearable hardship in this life, or punishment in the next. There are five necessities: preservation of religion, life, intellect, lineage, and wealth. These ensure individual and social welfare in this life and the hereafter.

The Sharia protects these necessities in two ways: firstly by ensuring their establishment and then by preserving them.

• To ensure the establishment of religion, God Most High has made belief and worship obligatory. To ensure its preservation, the rulings relating to the obligation of learning and conveying the religion were legislated.
• To ensure the preservation of human life, God Most high legislated for marriage, healthy eating and living, and forbid the taking of life and laid down punishments for doing so.
• God has permitted that sound intellect and knowledge be promoted, and forbidden that which corrupts or weakens it, such as alcohol and drugs. He has also imposed preventative punishments in order that people stay away from them, because a sound intellect is the basis of the moral responsibility that humans were given.
• Marriage was legislated for the preservation of lineage, and sex outside marriage was forbidden. Punitive laws were put in placed in order to ensure the preservation of lineage and the continuation of human life.
• God has made it obligatory to support oneself and those one is responsible for, and placed laws to regulate the commerce and transactions between people, in order to ensure fair dealing, economic justice, and to prevent oppression and dispute.

Needs and comforts

Needs and comforts are things people seek in order to ensure a good life, and avoid hardship, even though they are not essential. The spirit of the Sharia with regards to needs and comforts is summed up in the Qur’an, “He has not placed any hardship for you in religion,” (22:87) And, “God does not seek to place a burden on you, but that He purify you and perfect His grace upon you, that you may give thanks.” (5:6)

Therefore, everything that ensures human happiness, within the spirit of Divine Guidance, is permitted in the Sharia.

Sources of the Sharia

A girl studying the Qur’an ©

The primary sources of the Sharia are the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Muhammad.

The Qur’an

The Qur’an was revealed to the Prophet gradually, over 23 years. The essence of its message is to establish the oneness of God and the spiritual and moral need of man for God. This need is fulfilled through worship and submission, and has ultimate consequences in the Hereafter.

The Qur’an is the word of God. Because of its inimitable style and eloquence, and, above all, the guidance and legal provisions it came with, it ensures the worldly and next-worldly welfare of humanity.

God Most High said, “Verily, this Qur’an guides to that which is best, and gives glad tidings to the believers who do good that theirs will be a great reward.” (Qur’an, 17:9) And, “There has come unto you light from God and a clear Book, whereby God guides those who seek His good pleasure unto paths of peace. He brings them out of darkness unto light by His decree, and guides them unto a straight path.” (Qur’an, 5:15)

The Prophetic example (Sunna)

The Prophet’s role was expounded in the Qur’an, “We have revealed the Remembrance [Qur'an] to you that you may explain to people that which was revealed for them.” (16:44)

This explanation was through the Prophet’s words, actions, and example. Following the guidance and the example of the Prophet was made obligatory, “O you who believe, obey God and obey the Messenger,” (4: 59) and, “Verily, in the Messenger of God you have a beautiful example for those who seek God and the Last Day, and remember God much.” The Prophet himself instructed, “I have left two things with you which if you hold on to, you shall not be misguided: the Book of God and my example.” [Reported by Hakim and Malik]

Derived sources

There are two agreed-upon derived sources of Sharia: scholarly consensus (ijma’) and legal analogy (qiyas).

Scholarly consensus

The basis for scholarly consensus being a source of law is the Qur’anic command to resolve matters by consultation, as God stated, “Those who answer the call of their Lord, established prayer, and whose affairs are by consultation.” (42:38) Scholarly consensus is defined as being the agreement of all Muslim scholars at the level of juristic reasoning (ijtihad) in one age on a given legal ruling. Given the condition that all such scholars have to agree to the ruling, its scope is limited to matters that are clear according to the Qur’an and Prophetic example, upon which such consensus must necessarily be based. When established, though, scholarly consensus is decisive proof.

Legal analogy (Qiyas)

Legal analogy is a powerful tool to derive rulings for new matters. For example, drugs have been deemed impermissible, through legal analogy from the prohibition of alcohol that is established in the Qur’an. Such a ruling is based on the common underlying effective cause of intoxication.

Legal analogy and its various tools enables the jurists to understand the underlying reasons and causes for the rulings of the Qur’an and Prophetic example (sunna). This helps when dealing with ever-changing human situations and allows for new rulings to be applied most suitably and consistently.

Beyond ritualism

Hassan II Mosque, Morocco ©

The ultimate aim of those who submit to the Sharia is to express their slavehood to their Creator. But the Sharia does bring benefit in this world too.

This way has been indicated in a Divine statement conveyed by the Prophet.

My servant approaches Me with nothing more beloved to Me than what I have made obligatory upon him, and My servant keeps drawing nearer to Me with voluntary works until I love him. And when I love him, I am his hearing with which he hears, his sight with which he sees, his hand with which he seizes, and his foot with which he walks. If he asks Me, I will surely give to him, and if he seeks refuge in Me, I will surely protect him.Prophet Muhammad, reported by Bukhari

If the legal dimension of the Sharia gives Islam its form, the spiritual dimension is its substance. The spiritual life of Islam, and its goal, was outlined in the Divine statement (mentioned above).

The Prophet explained spiritual excellence as being, “To worship God as though you see Him, and if you see Him not, [know that] He nevertheless sees you.

The spiritual life of Islam is a means to a realization of faith and a perfection of practice. It is to seek the water that the Sharia is the clear path to, water that gives life to minds and souls longing for meaning.

It is this spiritual life, at its various levels, that attracts Muslims to their religion, its way of life, and to the rulings of the Sharia.

And those who believe are overflowing in their love of God.Qur’an 2:165

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/beliefs/sharia_2.shtml

Why Shariah?

By NOAH FELDMAN

Last month, Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, gave a nuanced, scholarly lecture in London about whether the British legal system should allow non-Christian courts to decide certain matters of family law. Britain has no constitutional separation of church and state. The archbishop noted that “the law of the Church of England is the law of the land” there; indeed, ecclesiastical courts that once handled marriage and divorce are still integrated into the British legal system, deciding matters of church property and doctrine. His tentative suggestion was that, subject to the agreement of all parties and the strict requirement of protecting equal rights for women, it might be a good idea to consider allowing Islamic and Orthodox Jewish courts to handle marriage and divorce.

Then all hell broke loose. From politicians across the spectrum to senior church figures and the ubiquitous British tabloids came calls for the leader of the world’s second largest Christian denomination to issue a retraction or even resign. Williams has spent the last couple of years trying to hold together the global Anglican Communion in the face of continuing controversies about ordaining gay priests and recognizing same-sex marriages. Yet little in that contentious battle subjected him to the kind of outcry that his reference to religious courts unleashed. Needless to say, the outrage was not occasioned by Williams’s mention of Orthodox Jewish law. For the purposes of public discussion, it was the word “Shariah” that was radioactive.

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world. Today, when we invoke the harsh punishments prescribed by Shariah for a handful of offenses, we rarely acknowledge the high standards of proof necessary for their implementation. Before an adultery conviction can typically be obtained, for example, the accused must confess four times or four adult male witnesses of good character must testify that they directly observed the sex act. The extremes of our own legal system — like life sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, in some cases — are routinely ignored. We neglect to mention the recent vintage of our tentative improvements in family law. It sometimes seems as if we need Shariah as Westerners have long needed Islam: as a canvas on which to project our ideas of the horrible, and as a foil to make us look good.

In the Muslim world, on the other hand, the reputation of Shariah has undergone an extraordinary revival in recent years. A century ago, forward-looking Muslims thought of Shariah as outdated, in need of reform or maybe abandonment. Today, 66 percent of Egyptians, 60 percent of Pakistanis and 54 percent of Jordanians say that Shariah should be the only source of legislation in their countries. Islamist political parties, like those associated with the transnational Muslim Brotherhood, make the adoption of Shariah the most prominent plank in their political platforms. And the message resonates. Wherever Islamists have been allowed to run for office in Arabic-speaking countries, they have tended to win almost as many seats as the governments have let them contest. The Islamist movement in its various incarnations — from moderate to radical — is easily the fastest growing and most vital in the Muslim world; the return to Shariah is its calling card.

How is it that what so many Westerners see as the most unappealing and premodern aspect of Islam is, to many Muslims, the vibrant, attractive core of a global movement of Islamic revival? The explanation surely must go beyond the oversimplified assumption that Muslims want to use Shariah to reverse feminism and control women — especially since large numbers of women support the Islamists in general and the ideal of Shariah in particular.

Is Shariah the Rule of Law?

One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of Shariah is that we are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Although it is commonplace to use the word “Shariah” and the phrase “Islamic law” interchangeably, this prosaic English translation does not capture the full set of associations that the term “Shariah” conjures for the believer. Shariah, properly understood, is not just a set of legal rules. To believing Muslims, it is something deeper and higher, infused with moral and metaphysical purpose. At its core, Shariah represents the idea that all human beings — and all human governments — are subject to justice under the law.

In fact, “Shariah” is not the word traditionally used in Arabic to refer to the processes of Islamic legal reasoning or the rulings produced through it: that word is fiqh, meaning something like Islamic jurisprudence. The word “Shariah” connotes a connection to the divine, a set of unchanging beliefs and principles that order life in accordance with God’s will. Westerners typically imagine that Shariah advocates simply want to use the Koran as their legal code. But the reality is much more complicated. Islamist politicians tend to be very vague about exactly what it would mean for Shariah to be the source for the law of the land — and with good reason, because just adopting such a principle would not determine how the legal system would actually operate.

Shariah is best understood as a kind of higher law, albeit one that includes some specific, worldly commands. All Muslims would agree, for example, that it prohibits lending money at interest — though not investments in which risks and returns are shared; and the ban on Muslims drinking alcohol is an example of an unequivocal ritual prohibition, even for liberal interpreters of the faith. Some rules associated with Shariah are undoubtedly old-fashioned and harsh. Men and women are treated unequally, for example, by making it hard for women to initiate divorce without forfeiting alimony. The prohibition on sodomy, though historically often unenforced, makes recognition of same-sex relationships difficult to contemplate. But Shariah also prohibits bribery or special favors in court. It demands equal treatment for rich and poor. It condemns the vigilante-style honor killings that still occur in some Middle Eastern countries. And it protects everyone’s property — including women’s — from being taken from them. Unlike in Iran, where wearing a head scarf is legally mandated and enforced by special religious police, the Islamist view in most other Muslim countries is that the head scarf is one way of implementing the religious duty to dress modestly — a desirable social norm, not an enforceable legal rule. And mandating capital punishment for apostasy is not on the agenda of most elected Islamists. For many Muslims today, living in corrupt autocracies, the call for Shariah is not a call for sexism, obscurantism or savage punishment but for an Islamic version of what the West considers its most prized principle of political justice: the rule of law.

The Sway of the Scholars

To understand Shariah’s deep appeal, we need to ask a crucial question that is rarely addressed in the West: What, in fact, is the system of Islamic law? In his lifetime, the Prophet Muhammad was both the religious and the political leader of the community of Muslim believers. His revelation, the Koran, contained some laws, pertaining especially to ritual matters and inheritance; but it was not primarily a legal book and did not include a lengthy legal code of the kind that can be found in parts of the Hebrew Bible. When the first generation of believers needed guidance on a subject that was not addressed by revelation, they went directly to Muhammad. He either answered of his own accord or, if he was unsure, awaited divine guidance in the form of a new revelation.

With the death of Muhammad, divine revelation to the Muslim community stopped. The role of the political-religious leader passed to a series of caliphs (Arabic for “substitute”) who stood in the prophet’s stead. That left the caliph in a tricky position when it came to resolving difficult legal matters. The caliph possessed Muhammad’s authority but not his access to revelation. It also left the community in something of a bind. If the Koran did not speak clearly to a particular question, how was the law to be determined?

The answer that developed over the first couple of centuries of Islam was that the Koran could be supplemented by reference to the prophet’s life — his sunna, his path. (The word “sunna” is the source of the designation Sunni — one who follows the prophet’s path.) His actions and words were captured in an oral tradition, beginning presumably with a person who witnessed the action or statement firsthand. Accurate reports had to be distinguished from false ones. But of course even a trustworthy report on a particular situation could not directly resolve most new legal problems that arose later. To address such problems, it was necessary to reason by analogy from one situation to another. There was also the possibility that a communal consensus existed on what to do under particular circumstances, and that, too, was thought to have substantial weight.

This fourfold combination — the Koran, the path of the prophet as captured in the collections of reports, analogical reasoning and consensus — amounted to a basis for a legal system. But who would be able to say how these four factors fit together? Indeed, who had the authority to say that these factors and not others formed the sources of the law? The first four caliphs, who knew the prophet personally, might have been able to make this claim for themselves. But after them, the caliphs were faced with a growing group of specialists who asserted that they, collectively, could ascertain the law from the available sources. This self-appointed group came to be known as the scholars — and over the course of a few generations, they got the caliphs to acknowledge them as the guardians of the law. By interpreting a law that originated with God, they gained control over the legal system as it actually existed. That made them, and not the caliphs, into “the heirs of the prophets.”

Among the Sunnis, this model took effect very early and persisted until modern times. For the Shiites, who believe that the succession of power followed the prophet’s lineage, the prophet had several successors who claimed extraordinary divine authority. Once they were gone, however, the Shiite scholars came to occupy a role not unlike that of their Sunni counterparts.

Under the constitutional theory that the scholars developed to explain the division of labor in the Islamic state, the caliph had paramount responsibility to fulfill the divine injunction to “command the right and prohibit the wrong.” But this was not a task he could accomplish on his own. It required him to delegate responsibility to scholarly judges, who would apply God’s law as they interpreted it. The caliph could promote or fire them as he wished, but he could not dictate legal results: judicial authority came from the caliph, but the law came from the scholars.

The caliphs — and eventually the sultans who came to rule once the caliphate lost most of its worldly influence — still had plenty of power. They handled foreign affairs more or less at their discretion. And they could also issue what were effectively administrative regulations — provided these regulations did not contradict what the scholars said Shariah required. The regulations addressed areas where Shariah was silent. They also enabled the state to regulate social conduct without having to put every case before the courts, where convictions would often be impossible to obtain because of the strict standards of proof required for punishment. As a result of these regulations, many legal matters (perhaps most) fell outside the rules given specifically by Shariah.

The upshot is that the system of Islamic law as it came to exist allowed a great deal of leeway. That is why today’s advocates of Shariah as the source of law are not actually recommending the adoption of a comprehensive legal code derived from or dictated by Shariah — because nothing so comprehensive has ever existed in Islamic history. To the Islamist politicians who advocate it or for the public that supports it, Shariah generally means something else. It means establishing a legal system in which God’s law sets the ground rules, authorizing and validating everyday laws passed by an elected legislature. In other words, for them, Shariah is expected to function as something like a modern constitution.

The Rights of Humans and the Rights of God

So in contemporary Islamic politics, the call for Shariah does not only or primarily mean mandating the veiling of women or the use of corporal punishment — it has an essential constitutional dimension as well. But what is the particular appeal of placing Shariah above ordinary law?

The answer lies in a little-remarked feature of traditional Islamic government: that a state under Shariah was, for more than a thousand years, subject to a version of the rule of law. And as a rule-of-law government, the traditional Islamic state had an advantage that has been lost in the dictatorships and autocratic monarchies that have governed so much of the Muslim world for the last century. Islamic government was legitimate, in the dual sense that it generally respected the individual legal rights of its subjects and was seen by them as doing so. These individual legal rights, known as “the rights of humans” (in contrast to “the rights of God” to such things as ritual obedience), included basic entitlements to life, property and legal process — the protections from arbitrary government oppression sought by people all over the world for centuries.

Of course, merely declaring the ruler subject to the law was not enough on its own; the ruler actually had to follow the law. For that, he needed incentives. And as it happened, the system of government gave him a big one, in the form of a balance of power with the scholars. The ruler might be able to use pressure once in a while to get the results he wanted in particular cases. But because the scholars were in charge of the law, and he was not, the ruler could pervert the course of justice only at the high cost of being seen to violate God’s law — thereby undermining the very basis of his rule.

In practice, the scholars’ leverage to demand respect for the law came from the fact that the caliphate was not hereditary as of right. That afforded the scholars major influence at the transitional moments when a caliph was being chosen or challenged. On taking office, a new ruler — even one designated by his dead predecessor — had to fend off competing claimants. The first thing he would need was affirmation of the legitimacy of his assumption of power. The scholars were prepared to offer just that, in exchange for the ruler’s promise to follow the law.

Once in office, rulers faced the inevitable threat of invasion or a palace coup. The caliph would need the scholars to declare a religious obligation to protect the state in a defensive jihad. Having the scholars on his side in times of crisis was a tremendous asset for the ruler who could be said to follow the law. Even if the ruler was not law-abiding, the scholars still did not spontaneously declare a sitting caliph disqualified. This would have been foolish, especially in view of the fact that the scholars had no armies at their disposal and the sitting caliph did. But their silence could easily be interpreted as an invitation for a challenger to step forward and be validated.

The scholars’ insistence that the ruler obey Shariah was motivated largely by their belief that it was God’s will. But it was God’s will as they interpreted it. As a confident, self-defined elite that controlled and administered the law according to well-settled rules, the scholars were agents of stability and predictability — crucial in societies where the transition from one ruler to the next could be disorderly and even violent. And by controlling the law, the scholars could limit the ability of the executive to expropriate the property of private citizens. This, in turn, induced the executive to rely on lawful taxation to raise revenues, which itself forced the rulers to be responsive to their subjects’ concerns. The scholars and their law were thus absolutely essential to the tremendous success that Islamic society enjoyed from its inception into the 19th century. Without Shariah, there would have been no Haroun al-Rashid in Baghdad, no golden age of Muslim Spain, no reign of Suleiman the Magnificent in Istanbul.

For generations, Western students of the traditional Islamic constitution have assumed that the scholars could offer no meaningful check on the ruler. As one historian has recently put it, although Shariah functioned as a constitution, “the constitution was not enforceable,” because neither scholars nor subjects could “compel their ruler to observe the law in the exercise of government.” But almost no constitution anywhere in the world enables judges or nongovernmental actors to “compel” the obedience of an executive who controls the means of force. The Supreme Court of the United States has no army behind it. Institutions that lack the power of the sword must use more subtle means to constrain executives. Like the American constitutional balance of powers, the traditional Islamic balance was maintained by words and ideas, and not just by forcible compulsion.

So today’s Muslims are not being completely fanciful when they act and speak as though Shariah can structure a constitutional state subject to the rule of law. One big reason that Islamist political parties do so well running on a Shariah platform is that their constituents recognize that Shariah once augured a balanced state in which legal rights were respected.

From Shariah to Despotism

But if Shariah is popular among many Muslims in large part because of its historical association with the rule of law, can it actually do the same work today? Here there is reason for caution and skepticism. The problem is that the traditional Islamic constitution rested on a balance of powers between a ruler subject to law and a class of scholars who interpreted and administered that law. The governments of most contemporary majority-Muslim states, however, have lost these features. Rulers govern as if they were above the law, not subject to it, and the scholars who once wielded so much influence are much reduced in status. If they have judicial posts at all, it is usually as judges in the family-law courts.

In only two important instances do scholars today exercise real power, and in both cases we can see a deviation from their traditional role. The first is Iran, where Ayatollah Khomeini, himself a distinguished scholar, assumed executive power and became supreme leader after the 1979 revolution. The result of this configuration, unique in the history of the Islamic world, is that the scholarly ruler had no counterbalance and so became as unjust as any secular ruler with no check on his authority. The other is Saudi Arabia, where the scholars retain a certain degree of power. The unfortunate outcome is that they can slow any government initiative for reform, however minor, but cannot do much to keep the government responsive to its citizens. The oil-rich state does not need to obtain tax revenues from its citizens to operate — and thus has little reason to keep their interests in mind.

How the scholars lost their exalted status as keepers of the law is a complex story, but it can be summed up in the adage that partial reforms are sometimes worse than none at all. In the early 19th century, the Ottoman empire responded to military setbacks with an internal reform movement. The most important reform was the attempt to codify Shariah. This Westernizing process, foreign to the Islamic legal tradition, sought to transform Shariah from a body of doctrines and principles to be discovered by the human efforts of the scholars into a set of rules that could be looked up in a book.

Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the scholars as the source of authority. Codification took from the scholars their all-important claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the scholars, the government kept the Shariah courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters. This strategy paralleled the British colonial approach of allowing religious courts to handle matters of personal status. Today, in countries as far apart as Kenya and Pakistan, Shariah courts still administer family law — a small subset of their original historical jurisdiction.

Codification signaled the death knell for the scholarly class, but it did not destroy the balance of powers on its own. Promulgated in 1876, the Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies — one elected, one appointed by the sultan. This amounted to the first democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it might have popularized the notion that the people represent the ultimate source of legal authority. Then the legislature could have replaced the scholars as the institutional balance to the executive.

But that was not to be. Less than a year after the legislature first met, Sultan Abdulhamid II suspended its operation — and for good measure, he suspended the constitution the following year. Yet the sultan did not restore the scholars to the position they once occupied. With the scholars out of the way and no legislature to replace them, the sultan found himself in the position of near-absolute ruler. This arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim world after the Ottoman empire fell. Law became a tool of the ruler, not an authority over him. What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was dictatorship and other forms of executive dominance — the state of affairs confronted by the Islamists who seek to restore Shariah.

A Democratic Shariah?

The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they are rarely scholars themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the scholars to their old role as the constitutional balance to the executive. The Islamist movement, like other modern ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform society through the tools of modern government. Its vision for bringing Shariah to bear therefore incorporates two common features of modern government: the legislature and the constitution.

The mainstream Sunni Islamist position, found, for example, in the electoral platforms of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, is that an elected legislature should draft and pass laws that are consistent with the spirit of Islamic law. On questions where Islamic law does not provide clear direction, the democratically chosen legislature is supposed to use its discretion to adopt laws infused by Islamic values.

The result is a profound change in the theoretical structure underlying Islamic law: Shariah is democratized in that its care is given to a popularly elected legislature. In Iraq, for example, where the constitution declares Shariah to be “the source of law,” it is in principle up to the National Assembly to pass laws that reflect its spirit.

In case the assembly gets it wrong, however, the Islamists often recommend the judicial review of legislative actions to guarantee that they do not violate Islamic law or values. What is sometimes called a “repugnancy clause,” mandating that a judicial body overturn laws repugnant to Islam, has made its way into several recent constitutions that seek to reconcile Islam and democracy. It may be found, for example, in the Afghan Constitution of 2004 and the Iraqi Constitution of 2005. (I had a small role advising the Iraqi drafters.) Islamic judicial review transforms the highest judicial body of the state into a guarantor of conformity with Islamic law. The high court can then use this power to push for a conservative vision of Islamic law, as in Afghanistan, or for a more moderate version, as in Pakistan.

Islamic judicial review puts the court in a position resembling the one that scholars once occupied. Like the scholars, the judges of the reviewing court present their actions as interpretations of Islamic law. But of course the judges engaged in Islamic judicial review are not the scholars but ordinary judges (as in Iraq) or a mix of judges and scholars (as in Afghanistan). In contrast to the traditional arrangement, the judges’ authority comes not from Shariah itself but from a written constitution that gives them the power of judicial review.

The modern incarnation of Shariah is nostalgic in its invocation of the rule of law but forward-looking in how it seeks to bring this result about. What the Islamists generally do not acknowledge, though, is that such institutions on their own cannot deliver the rule of law. The executive authority also has to develop a commitment to obeying legal and constitutional judgments. That will take real-world incentives, not just a warm feeling for the values associated with Shariah.

How that happens — how an executive administration accustomed to overweening power can be given incentives to subordinate itself to the rule of law — is one of the great mysteries of constitutional development worldwide. Total revolution has an extremely bad track record in recent decades, at least in majority-Muslim states. The revolution that replaced the shah in Iran created an oppressively top-heavy constitutional structure. And the equally revolutionary dreams some entertained for Iraq — dreams of a liberal secular state or of a functioning Islamic democracy — still seem far from fruition.

Gradual change therefore increasingly looks like the best of some bad options. And most of today’s political Islamists — the ones running for office in Morocco or Jordan or Egypt and even Iraq — are gradualists. They wish to adapt existing political institutions by infusing them with Islamic values and some modicum of Islamic law. Of course, such parties are also generally hostile to the United States, at least where we have worked against their interests. (Iraq is an obvious exception — many Shiite Islamists there are our close allies.) But this is a separate question from whether they can become a force for promoting the rule of law. It is possible to imagine the electoral success of Islamist parties putting pressure on executives to satisfy the demand for law-based government embodied in Koranic law. This might bring about a transformation of the judiciary, in which judges would come to think of themselves as agents of the law rather than as agents of the state.

Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The Islamists there are much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate the adoption of Shariah (a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military). Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic rights against the Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts are under increasing pressure to go along with that vision.

Can Shariah provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it. But the history of Shariah also shows that the ideals of the rule of law cannot be implemented in a vacuum. For that, a state needs actually effective institutions, which must be reinforced by regular practice and by the recognition of actors within the system that they have more to gain by remaining faithful to its dictates than by deviating from them.

The odds of success in the endeavor to deliver the rule of law are never high. Nothing is harder than creating new institutions with the capacity to balance executive dominance — except perhaps avoiding the temptation to overreach once in power. In Iran, the Islamists have discredited their faith among many ordinary people, and a similar process may be under way in Iraq. Still, with all its risks and dangers, the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law while coming to terms with contemporary circumstances is bold and noble — and may represent a path to just and legitimate government in much of the Muslim world.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at Harvard University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from his book “The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State,

 
If only the Qur’an had elaborated on God somewhere, gave us enough of a description so that we could fill in the lines. I did not come all this way only to find out that God is incomprehensible – an inscrutable mystery – and that for me there is no hope.

No wonder we humans tend to deify our own or to humanize God. Although this creates for me more rational dilemmas then it solves; it does lend God some tangibility. I guess I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted God to be utterly exalted above creation, utterly unlike the humanity I was part of, and at the same time reachable.

What a fool I had been, deluding myself into thinking that the Qur’an could somehow bridge the infinite gulf between God and humanity, that it could logically relate human suffering to divine intimacy. We hardly understand the human personality; how could it make sense of the relationship between God and man? It took reading the entire text to prove that I had been right all along, that there is no possible theological rationalization for human existence.

 
I was finally beginning to see clearly again. I was wrong when I just said that we understand our fellow man. We do not understand our humanity; we only know it through experience. I do not fully comprehend who I am, my motivations, my anxieties, my dreams, my emotions, my conscience and psychology. I do not grasp my humanity intellectually; I know it through my being human. Virtually all of my knowledge of humanness is subjective. This leads, however, to a seemingly inescapable conclusion. For if we cannot come at all close to experiencing divinity, which appears to be the Qur’an’s position, then we cannot possibly come to know God in any real, meaningful way. By insisting that God is radically unlike creation – that nothing we know even compares to Him – the Qur’an has made attaining a relationship with God practically impossible. Although the author had campaigned brilliantly, had presented a literary and rational masterpiece, he was unable to present a complete and coherent explanation for why we are here. Yet he had nothing to be ashamed of, for he fell short where he and all others must inevitably fall short, trapped in the limitless void between God and man.

This was for me a hollow realization, and I felt no sense of victory whatsoever. For there were times in my reading of the Qur’an when I was so close to surrender, when the author’s words – his voice – nearly overpowered me, causing me to feel that only God could be speaking to me through this Scripture. I’m not embarrassed to admit that I was moved to tears on several occasions, that at times I truly felt I was in the presence of a tremendous power and mercy. These spiritual moments always took me by surprise. I would even try to resist them, to shake them off, but they were often too strong and intoxicating to resist, and my resistance continually weakened as I progressed through the text. There were moments when I was almost sure there is a God, when I felt the presence of one I always knew but had fought to forget. I didn’t know if I was any better or worse for having read the Qur’an, but I knew that I had changed, that I would never be so confident in my atheism again.

Even so, it was time to get on with my life, time to stop agonizing over the existence of God, letting it impede with my happiness. One of the main things that first attracted me to San Francisco is that it is a place where people live life to the fullest. After twenty-one years of schooling, I was ready to reap the benefits of all my work. It was time for me to start enjoying myself, I had the motivation, the opportunity and the means, I was young, single, considered good-looking, and had a good career. It was time to start having fun.

Say my Name

And then, not too long after finishing the Qur’an, perhaps a couple of weeks later, I thought of it. It came to me softly, unexpectedly – I think while I was watching a football game on television – as an afterthought, slipping into my consciousness,

It is not true that the Qur’an tells us very little about God; it tells us a great deal, but for some reason I had paid almost no attention to it. If I had just glanced at the beginning of a surah, or turned to almost any page, I would have found what I was looking for, if only I had read carefully, for there are thousands of descriptions of God in the Qur’an that link good works to growing closer to Him. Although I had read the Qur’an from cover to cover, deliberating on and analyzing almost every verse along the way, I mentally disregarded the Scripture’s abundant references to God’s attributes. Often used to punctuate passages, they occur typically in simple dual attributive statements, such as, “God is the Forgiving, the Compassionate” (4:129), “He is the Almighty, the Compassionate” (26:68), “God is the Hearing, the Seeing” (17:1). Collectively, the Qur’an refers to these titles as al-asmaa al-husnaa, God’s “most beautiful names” (7:180; 17:110; 20:8; 59:24).

Say: Call upon God, or call upon the Merciful, by whichever you call, His are the most beautiful names. (17:110)

God! There is no God but He. To Him belong the most beautiful names.(20:8)

He is God, other than whom there is no other god. He knows the unseen and the seen. He is the Merciful, the Compassionate. He is God, other than whom there is no other God; the Sovereign, the Holy One, the Source of Peace, the Keeper of Faith, the Guardian, the Exalted in Might, the Irresistible, the Supreme. Glory to God, above what they ascribe to Him! He is God, the Creator, the Evolver, the Fashioner. To Him belong the most beautiful names.

Whatever is in the heavens and on earth glorifies Him and He is Exalted in Might, the Wise. (59:23-24).

I had thought that the Qur’an used these divine names mainly as a literary device to crown passages and separate topics. That is probably why I for the most part skipped over them without giving them any serious thought. I now felt that I might have underestimated their significance and I began to jot down the divine attributes I could remember.

God is the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Forgiving, the Clement, the Peaceful, the Loving, the Just, the Benevolent, the Creator, the Powerful, the Protector, the Truthful, the Knowing, the Wise, the Living, etcetera.

There, right before me, was the connection I sought, for this list largely intersected with and was the perfection of the one I had compiled earlier of the virtues that men and women need to develop. The implication was clear:

Since God is the perfection of the virtues we should acquire, the more we grow in them, the greater our ability becomes to experience His being. The more we grow in mercy, the greater our ability becomes to experience God’s infinite mercy. The more we develop compassion, the greater our ability becomes to know God’s infinite compassion. The more we learn to forgive, the greater our ability becomes to experience God’s infinite compassion. The more we learn to forgive, the greater our ability to experience God’s infinite forgiveness. The same could be said of love, truth, justice, kindness, and so on. The more we grow in these, the greater our ability becomes to receive and experience God’s attributes of perfection.

An analogy would be helpful. I once had a goldfish and a magnificent German shepherd, and I now have three beautiful daughters. My gold fish, being very limited in intellect and growth, could only know and experience my love and compassion at a relatively low level, no matter how much kindness I directed towards it. On the other hand, my dog, who was a more complex and intelligent animal than my fish, could feel warmth and affection on a much higher level, and could therefore experience the love and compassion I showered on him to a much greater degree. Yet my daughters – and even more so as they mature – have the ability to feel the intensity of my love and caring for them on a plane my dog could never conceive of. This is because they have the capacity to know first hand through their own emotions and relationships deeper and richer feelings than my dog. Analogously, the greater our level of goodness, the greater our ability becomes to experience and relate to the infinite goodness that is God.

…Even if we are unaware of our experiences of the divine – even if we deny the existence of God – we experience His names nonetheless, but we remain deaf, dumb, and blind to their source. This is the greatest tragedy – the ultimate loss – according to the Qur’an, for we deprive ourselves of the means to grow closer to God. We come to know something of goodness, while closing ourselves off to the boundless mercy that originates it, which brings us back to the importance of faith in addition to good works.

…In the Qur’an, the story of Adam begins with the announcement that God is about to place a vicegerent (khaleefa) on earth, one who will represent Him and act on His behalf (2:30). It is presented as a momentous delegation, as a commission announced to the angels. It is presented as a momentous delegation as a commission announced to the angels. It is an honorable election for which each of us is created. When I first read this passage I was as dumbfounded as the angels were, for how could man, this most rebellious and destructive creature, represent God on earth? I, like the angels, saw only one side of humanity, the inclination to do evil, to “spread corruption and shed much blood”. Of course many men and women do not represent God very well. But our ability to do and grow in evil comes with the reciprocal ability to do and grow in goodness, and on the whole it seems that there must be more good than evil in the world, otherwise our race would have destroyed itself long ago. There have also always been persons who are great exemplars of goodness, who humbly dedicate themselves to helping others for love of God. This is the vicegerency to which the Qur’an calls us. More than just communicating a message or implementing a command, it means becoming an agent of God on earth through which others experience His attributes. Such individuals become filters, as it were, of the divine light, as God’s goodness reaches others through them. The more they grow in goodness, through their dedication, self-sacrifice, and learning, the greater becomes their ability to receive, experience, and represent God’s most beautiful names, and their experience of God’s presence in this life is only a small foreshadowing of what awaits them in the next.

(Lang, pp. 93-102)

He has been in the Paralympics three times, co-piloted a light aircraft and even scaled part of Mt Everest. Now, he is hitting the dance floor on the Australian TV series ‘Dancing With The Stars’.

Gosens has been learning the dance steps by touch, and with the help of a professional dancer who has experience teaching blind people to dance.

While a blind person dancing is nothing new, it certainly takes a lot of courage and determination to go out there in public, and dance in front of the world.

It is also important to emphasise and reflect upon the point about how Gosens has had to deal with progressive vision loss since birth, and then how he eventually lost all his sight during the transition from childhood to teenhood.

Often when I hear of stories about blind people doing magnificent and spectacular things, one of the first things I want to enquire is whether that person became blind in their adult hood after living a full sighted life. Or whether that person was completely blind from birth. Or whether, like me, the person has had to deal with progressive vision loss since birth. For the sighted person these minor differences might not matter: “A blind person is a blind person and other blind people should take inspiration from these blind people who are achieving great things, and putting us to shame.”

However, people born completely blind and those who spontaneously become blind in their adult hood have a totally different life experience to life long vision impaired people. I would also argue that they have a slight advantage over VIPs. The major difference is in the psychology of the blindness experience.

On the one hand, a person who is born completely blind has little sense of nostalgia for sight. They have never experienced how it is to see, and from birth they have managed to adapt to living using other sensories.

On the other hand, an adult who experiences spontaneous blindness, didn’t have to grow up having one foot in being classified as a blind person, and the other foot in being classified as a sighted person. They were treated ‘normal’ by their peers. They experienced life to the fullest. And much of their achievements when being blind, are a direct result of what they used to do when they were sighted. For example, many paralympians were abled athletes in a past life. They have the strings; the ground work, and the confidence. All it requires is some tweaking.

But being vision impaired is a whole lot harder. You are not quite partially blind and not quite partially sighted. You have social pressures demanding you behave like a sighted person on the one hand and then on the other pressures that demand you to behave like a blind person. Some things you see, some things you don’t. And your level of vision is ever so changing. There is that psychological , emotional, and social dimension. For many, it is hard to find a stable platform to bounce off from. For example, you set out on a task, but the gradual loss in your vision forces you to re-evaluate the situation. You either learn new ways to manage your life, or you simply bail out and pursue something that is less challenging and less stressful on your health.

Perhaps the strongest and most successful of us is those of us who adapt and do not give up. But ultimately, we all deal with things differently. The dominos do not tumble down in the same direction in every case.

David Eagleman: The afterlife, synesthesia and other tales of the senses

TRANSCRIPT

Imagine if I gave you a glass of milk and it tasted blue to you, or if your partner’s voice just felt like a wonderful golden brown, the colour of buttery toast? What if the number two and letter J conjured up the shade of letterbox red, or the name Derek tasted like earwax? Or whenever you heard music, a kaleidoscope of colours exploded inside your head; different tones and textures for different notes. Vladimir Nabokov was one, so is artist David Hockney, in fact one in a hundred of us could be a person with synesthesia, the surprising cross-wiring of the senses in the brain.

My guest today heads up one of the top centres in synesthesia research based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. By day he’s a leading neuroscientist but by night he writes novels, and he’s just been in Australia to perform with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House a piece based on his totally intriguing new novel called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. So meet the energetic David Eagleman.

David Eagleman: In the moment of transition between life and death only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death you are still composed of the same thousand trillion, trillion atoms as in the moment after death. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail-shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle’s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan’s tail feather. But it turns out your thousand trillion, trillion atoms were not an accidental collection, each was labelled as composing you, and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms.

Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulo-nimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river-pebble gliding around in eddy. From your present clumped point of view this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed, but in fact it is wonderful. You can’t imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories, ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret’s wing while pushing a crowd towards the surface through coruscating shafts of light.

Love-making reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once, you weave your versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together, you move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms.

Natasha Mitchell: Well, welcome to Australia, David Eagleman.

David Eagleman: Thank you, great to be here.

Natasha Mitchell: What’s a neuroscientist doing writing a fantastical novel about the afterlife – do you believe in the afterlife?

David Eagleman: I have no idea, in some sense the reason a scientist is writing this is because what you really learn in science is the vastness of our ignorance, you learn all the stuff we don’t know. And the afterlife just happens to be one thing that’s a perfect example of that. Everyone seems to have a strong opinion about whether it does or doesn’t exist and what it might or might not look like, but the fact is all of us are completely shooting in the dark. And so the idea of this book was to write 40 mutually exclusive stories that in some sense celebrates our uncertainty.

Natasha Mitchell: And there are a delicious uncertainty, I mean in this collection of stories the character you call God takes many forms. I mean in one story he’s a bacterium and in another she’s frustrated at having to judge people’s lives in a binary way – good and evil. In another vignette he gets sacked and replaced by a committee.

David Eagleman: That’s right. Essentially what I was doing is I looked at the sort of basic ideas. If you stopped someone on the street and said, ‘Hey, what do you think the afterlife is about?’ Of course everybody just has in their mind whatever their parents or their community has told them, and when you really start putting those ideas under the spotlight, what you discover is they’re ridiculous. So for example the one where God is getting frustrated in having to do this binary categorisation into good and evil. it’s a perfect example of how goofy the story is because people are much more multi-dimensional than that, they are much more complex than that. And so in that story God decides to sort of revolt against that structure that she had set up and she instead invites everybody to come into Heaven and to be a part of Heaven. And what ends up happening actually if I can just read the last line here: ‘So she brings everyone to Heaven and everyone’s achieved true equality and the communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only with the help of a God in whom they didn’t want to believe.

The meritocats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden to promote, so God sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they are all in Hell.

Natasha Mitchell: One of my favourite scenarios is God as a single, lonely quark particle, dashing across the space–time continuum, drawing the world into being with energetic pencil strokes. It’s a classic scene.

David Eagleman: Yes, in that story God is just a quark. as he races back and forth through time, He’s essentially leaving little pencil strokes and discovers he can draw the whole universe that way and we are his drawing, essentially. He’s a great story teller and loves to tell these stories.

Natasha Mitchell: But I mean playfully this is about us not coming in to the world through an entity bigger than us, say the Big Bang, but in fact by something infinitesimally smaller than us.

David Eagleman: That’s right. A lot of what I’m doing in this book is really trying to play with ideas and provide a mental stretching. So when I sit next to people on aeroplanes and I ask them what their opinion is on whether there’s a God, or what they would look like, or what an afterlife would look like, it turns out there’s such a lack of creativity, everybody just says whatever their parents have told them. So this book is all about really mentally stretching on spatial scales and ideas of gender and number and all sorts of things.

Natasha Mitchell: It’s a great little novel and, look, you’re playing with the metaphysical here, and I wondered to what extent there is room for what has become a very material enterprise – neuroscience, your enterprise – for the metaphysical and the philosophical, even the theological. Is there room for any of this in the neuroscientific effort?

David Eagleman: Oh yes, that’s a beautiful question. I think in any scientific effort all of the big pieces of progress always come about from whacky leaps of faith in some way. The science textbooks always paint the picture as though it’s a linear process where someone discovers something and then the next step happens, and the next step happens and it turns out it’s completely BS, science never works that way. It’s always people leaping on to some island where they have no right to be there and then they look back and figure out if they can build a bridge to what we know. And when they can. then that’s science, that’s progress. So I think that with neuroscience there’s so much media attention where we sort of act like we know everything and the fact is we are absolutely at the foot of the mountain with the brain. I’m saying this as someone who has devoted my life to it. I’ve written books on the brain and we have massive textbooks in the field, but in fact there’s so little that we understand.

Natasha Mitchell: And yet we’re seduced by the bright lights of the brain scan aren’t we?

David Eagleman: Oh yes, which is funny because it is just a false seduction in some ways. I mean I don’t mean to imply that we haven’t learned a ton with this whole armamentarium of technology that we have. We are making progress but it really is baby steps and the biggest questions, the 800 lb gorillas in the room, we haven’t even touched those. Questions like how consciousness comes about, how do you ever string together tens of billions of pieces and parts and get something out of it that has private subjective experience.

So if I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys, you know those little toys you put together, and you start hooking them up so that when you touched this, that happens and so on. At what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and say ah, now this is having conscious experience? We don’t even know what the theory would look like on that. I mean here’s another way of looking at it. When I was a child I absolutely expected that by the time I was this age we would have robots, that we would have CP3O serving our dinner and cleaning my room and so on. The best we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that things like intelligence is really, really hard to figure out. and even things like computer vision is very, very difficult.

Natasha Mitchell: Before we come to your own research. which is extraordinary too, in another scenario in your new novel Sum we’re really reminded of what a unique experience it is to occupy the brains and bodies that we do. You have your character in the book, us, choose to come back as anything we want to in the afterlife and we choose to come back as a horse. And it all goes sort of potentially horribly wrong, doesn’t it.

David Eagleman: Right, so in this story you get treated to this generous opportunity where you can choose to come back as whatever you want. So you decide you want to come back as a horse because you want simplicity and the idea of being a horse seems so lovely to you. So a magic wand is waved, you start to metamorphose into a horse.

Natasha Mitchell: You can feel your fingers ‘blending hoof-ward’, as you put it, ‘synapses unplugging and replugging on their way to equestrian patterns…’ I love it.

David Eagleman: Yes, and this mat of strong hair erupts to cover you and your musculature and your skeleton starts changing, you start becoming a horse and it’s really lovely for a moment. And then you become aware of the problem you overlooked which is that the more you become a horse the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it is like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. And so this is this moment of revelation that serves as the punishment for your sins, because you realise you won’t be able to ever return here and that your slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And then the last line of the story is just before you lose your final human faculties you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

Natasha Mitchell: And that’s it, you will never understand what it was to be a human, you will never be able to wish to be anything but a horse.

David Eagleman: That’s right.

Natasha Mitchell: And Professor David Eagleman is my guest on All in the Mind this week, I’m Natasha Mitchell, coming to you on Radio National abc.net.au/rn and globally on Radio Australia and as podcast. And David’s new novel is called SUM: 40 Tales from the Afterlives,published by Pantheon Books which he’s performed this month on stage at the Sydney Opera House in a collaboration with Brian Eno, whose strains you can hear under us. But David Eagleman is one prolific neuroscientist, there’s more.

The fact that you’re a neuroscientist by day but write fiction by night is perhaps not a surprise, because you head up a centre for synesthesia research at the Baylor College of Medicine and in many ways the experience of synesthesia is wrapped up in the way we use metaphors, just like novel writing is. How we use metaphors to describe the world.

David Eagleman: Yes, synesthesia is a condition that about one per cent of the population has, and some researchers have estimated that there are maybe 152 reported forms of synesthesia. They have a mixture of the senses, so for example if you have synesthesia you might hear music and it causes you to physically see colours, or more common versions are things like the numbers and letters of the alphabet having colours, or textures or shapes, or genders or personalities. You might taste something and it makes you feel like you’re feeling something on your fingertips, or you might hear something and that puts a taste in your mouth.

For one synesthete, for example, whenever he hears the name Derek it tastes like earwax to him, it puts the taste of that in his mouth. And for other people, you know for different words, it puts the taste of cinnamon in their mouth, or some metallic taste in their mouth and so on. It’s not just that they’re being silly or metaphorical or artistic, it’s actually that there’s cross-wiring in their brains so that from the parts of their brain that care about hearing, and the parts or their brain that care about taste, there’s a little bit of cross-talk going on, so particular auditory experiences will trigger gustatory experiences.

There are many different forms of synesthesia but what they all have in common is that they represent a blending of the senses. And it used to be thought that this was very rare but we now know that it’s really quite common, it’s at least one per cent of the population. So to come back around to your question, because of this increased cross-talk in the brain it has been suggested that maybe synesthesia is related to creativity and metaphor, because essentially that’s what it is for somebody to be very creative or to speak in metaphor, is to find parallels across different domains in the brain.

So as an example, there are many phrases in the English language that were probably introduced by synesthetes and they sort of stuck around in the language. So when we talk about cool jazz, or sharp cheese, or a loud tie, or even a sweet personality, things like that. These are all phrases that represent a connection across different domains that sort of normally shouldn’t happen. And they were probably introduced by synesthetes.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean in fact you’ve just written another new book, Wednesday is Indigo Blue, with another trailblazer in synesthesia research, Richard Cytowic. Forty per cent of synesthetes see with their ears – what’s coloured hearing?

David Eagleman: Coloured hearing is where there is a sound and that triggers a visual experience for you. So one of the pictures we have in the book is a very beautiful painting of a woman who whenever the furnace kicks on and goes whoosh, she has a very rich visual experience associated with that. And many painters like let’s say Kandinsky had coloured hearing and so what he would do is turn on the music and have the music blaring and he would stand in front of his canvas and paint the colours, the textures and the shapes that were triggered.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean you’ve worked with many people who have synesthetic experiences and…I mean, give people a sense of what it’s like to live with this experience. Is there a form or an incarnation of synesthesia that’s surprised even you?

David Eagleman: Some of the synesthetes I work with have a very rich synesthesia. So one woman is a musician and her synesthesia is so rich that different notes have personality, and gender, and colour and form to them. Different instrument timbres have this sort of thing, different chords or intervals. And not only that but different sorts of runs of notes will make her feel things physically, that she’s in different body positions, kinesthetically about to leap or tripping over a stair or things like that. And it’s not that she’s just being poetic about it, it’s that actually that parts of her brain that care about music are tied in to parts of her brain that care about colour, and form, and texture, and shape, and movement. And this is one of the great lessons of synesthesia, is that people’s realities can be quite different on the inside.

For a synesthete, they accept that as their reality, so if a colour-blind person asked you, ‘What is it like to see colours, is that distracting, does it drive you crazy?’ it wouldn’t have even struck you that reality could be different. There’s no sense in which it’s distracting or strange.

Natasha Mitchell: A sort of sensory clutter?

David Eagleman: Yes, it’s not sensory clutter, in fact most synesthetes will go through their entire life not ever suspecting that other people don’t see the world they do.

Natasha Mitchell: And it’s quite shocking to them when they realise, sometimes well late in to life, that their world is quite different to the rest of us and how we experience our sensory world.

David Eagleman: You’re quite right.

Natasha Mitchell: I mean some people also see forms, so they might think of a series of numbers or days of the week and they’ll see them in forms suspended in space in front of them. I mean that sounds rather like a hallucination, doesn’t it?

David Eagleman: Yes, except that they are not actually seeing it there. So what you’re describing is what we call spatial sequence synesthesia, and that’s where people have let’s say – take the months of the year: January, February, March, they’ll feel that each one of those has a specific location. So maybe January is off my left shoulder at about arm’s length, and February is to the right of that, and March is to the right of that but a little bit lower and so on. Whenever they think about one of these elements of the sequence it just seems self evidently true to them that there’s a spatial location that should go along with that.

But here’s the funny part, it’s not that they’re seeing it in space; it’s just that they know it should be there. So as an example imagine that there were a big orange pumpkin on the chair on the right of you. It’s very easy for you to picture it there and even think of its colour and its location and so on, but it’s not a hallucination, you don’t actually believe it’s there, it’s just that if I were to ask you later hey, where’s the pumpkin you would say oh, it’s over here to the right – that’s its spatial location.

Natasha Mitchell: But the key is that the experiences are actually quite specific, those associations are quite specific. So someone might consistently when they taste milk they will visualise blue, and that will be the case over many, many years. In fact there have been some hardnosed sceptics about the very existence of synesthesia arguing that it’s people attention-seeking or just simply the metaphorical connections that we’ve made between the senses as we were learning as kids.

David Eagleman: Yes, there actually are no more sceptics now. Here’s why: for about 100 years synesthesia fell out of the scientific spotlight mostly because of the behaviourist school of thought which said, you know, we’re essentially reflex machines, input-output, and you really weren’t allowed to talk about private subjective experience. But what’s become more interesting in neuroscience lately is to say. well you know it actually feels like something to experience reality and have consciousness. so that’s now a real area of study. And so what happens is my co-author Richard Cytowic essentially reintroduced synesthesia in the late 80s, he wrote a book called The Man Who Tasted Shapes and really put synesthesia back on the map. And then that induced younger scientists like me to start really studying this in earnest.

And what my lab and other labs have done now is develop rigorous methods of testing for synesthesia. And essentially the way this works is by testing their consistency, so just as a quick example let’s say you have coloured letters, so I present you with the letter J and you pick from a colour palette of 16 million different possible colours, you pick exactly the colour that best matches your letter J. And to you J is green, those are equivalent concepts, and you experience greenness in your head. And so I end up showing you all the letters and numbers in random order three times each and then you see the letter J 57 trials later, if you’re a real synesthete you’ll pick out exactly the same shade of green. If you’re faking it there’s no way you’re going to get it. So what we’re able to do in this way by testing the internal consistency of your answers is to very sensitively discriminate who is synesthetic and who is not.

Natasha Mitchell: There has been some quite compelling brain scan work revealing that this is in fact an experience that is in the visual part of the brain where colours are registered.

David Eagleman: Yes, that’s right. So the neuro-imaging in some sense has verified what we already knew, and it’s nice to have the confirmation. So what it shows is that for example the parts of the brain that cares about numbers and letters and the parts of the brain that cares about colour, they are right next to each other and in synesthetes there’s an increased amount of cross-talk there. When the synesthete sees a letter it actually tickles into activity in that part of the brain that cares about colour.

Natasha Mitchell: You even go as far as to argue that synesthesia is really forcing a paradigm shift in the orthodox view of the brain and how it’s organised. That’s quite a claim – how is it?

David Eagleman: It turns out that when we think about how the brain constructs reality it’s a very challenging question and always has been, because we’re essentially like fish trying to describe water. We’ve never experienced anything other than it and so it’s very difficult to wrap our heads around. But synesthesia is a really good inroad into discovering the ways in which reality is a construction of the brain and that different brains can do it differently. And depending on your genes and, you know, a single-nucleotide change in one gene somewhere on one chromosome, you can actually experience reality very differently, so somebody’s water is very different from someone else’s…

Natasha Mitchell: It’s challenging at its core, what has traditionally been a very modular view of the brain that senses and actions happen in very distinct parts of the brain and never the twain shall meet.

David Eagleman: That’s right and we know that it’s much more fluid than that now, and depending on which parts are talking with which parts, that changes how you perceive reality.

Natasha Mitchell: One interesting suggestion is that in fact we’re all latently synesthetic. it’s just that the connections between the senses is something that we’re not all consciously aware of – synesthetes are, that in a sense there’s a lack of inhibition between different parts of the sensory brain.

David Eagleman: That’s exactly right, when you look at the anatomy of the brain there’s something very surprising, which is you have fibres carrying visual information that are plugging into the auditory part of the brain. And you have auditory fibres plugging into visual, and when you look carefully at the micro-anatomy you find that everything is completely cross-wired. This is in all brains.

Now the strange part is that under normal circumstances you don’t experience visual things in an auditory manner or vice versa, but it turns out so we know now about one per cent of the population does. Yet these connections exist in everybody. And so when people take drugs, when non-synesthetes take drugs like LSD or DMT, they can experience synesthesia. It’s also the case that sometimes if you get very fatigued you can experience synesthesia. So if you’re just falling asleep and somebody slams a door, you might see colours or shapes. And these things are essentially unmasking these connections that already exist in everybody.

And so it turns out that what synesthetes appear to be are those that actually have conscious access. Nonetheless there are ways in which we can tease this out in everybody. So for example if I were to take a piano and I were to hit the high note and then I would hit the low note and I would ask you which one is brighter,what would you say?

Natasha Mitchell: I would say the high note.

David Eagleman: Right, and if I asked you which one is bigger what would you say?

Natasha Mitchell: The low note, weirdly enough.

David Eagleman: Yeah, right. Well it turns out everybody does that, it turns out everybody gives the same answer to that, which is really hilarious because there’s no reason why auditory sound should map on to brightness or size, but it does, in all brains. And so this is the sense in which we all have this cross-talk going on in our brains that links different parts.

Natasha Mitchell: So synesthesia may sort of lie on a continuum with ordinary perception, basically.

David Eagleman: Yes, here’s the weird part though, we think that you’re either synesthetic or you’re not, and we don’t exactly understand why that is but essentially some people really have access to it and other people don’t have access to it, in terms of, let’s say, coloured letters or seeing music and things like that.

Natasha Mitchell: Well one other suggestion is that in fact we’re all born totally, absolutely, synesthetic. The blooming, buzzing, confusion and profusion of neurons that, you know, is what occupies babies’ brains is sort of synesthetic by default, and as those connections are pruned away, as our brain develops into adolescence, we lose our synesthetic ability. What do you make of that theory?

David Eagleman: Well it is the case that when you’re born your brain does a lot of refinement over the first few years. So it is true that you have a lot more cross-modal connections when your first born. Whether that is exactly like the experience of synesthesia, we actually have no way of knowing, because most synesthesias for example are triggered by things like letters and numbers, and weekdays and months – these are all overlearned sequences that you learn when you’re let’s say four or five years old. And so you can’t ask a baby what colour is Wednesday, because they haven’t learned that yet. So synesthesia is something that expresses itself later. We don’t actually have any good idea about what experience is like for a baby, even though we were all there, we all forgot to write down the memories of it.

Natasha Mitchell: In a sense you need a language to be able to articulate your synesthetic experience. Do you think you’re any closer to understanding why some people are so especially synesthetic and the rest of us aren’t?

David Eagleman: Yeah, so what I’m doing is working on pulling the gene for that and I think this is going to be the first hit in something that I’m calling perceptual genomics. So the idea is there are great genetics labs all over the planet now who are busy pulling genes for eye colour, height, weight, aortic stenosis, diabetes, all kinds of things like this. But what hasn’t happened yet is seeing how single changes in genes map on to how you perceive reality. There are various competing theories about what exactly is causing synesthesia, and once we’ve pulled the gene for it or a gene for it…

Natasha Mitchell: One genes, many genes – a whole network of genes I would imagine.

David Eagleman: Precisely. It’s almost certainly to be multiple genes involved in it, but once we’ve pulled those, then we’ll know, mechanistically we’ll actually know how you can change a little thing here, let’s say with changing one little bit of an inhibitory receptor in the brain, and that changes the way you perceive the world. That’s going to be a very different kind of science than what we’ve had before.

Natasha Mitchell: So it might actually drive the sort of hyper-connectivity between different sensory parts of the brain?

David Eagleman: That’s right. And the debate has been whether it is actually physical wiring that’s connecting…where you have more physical wiring in a synesthete or, the hypothesis that I favour is that there’s the same amount of wiring in everybody’s brain but it has to do with the balance of inhibition and excitation.

Natasha Mitchell: Does working with synesthetics actually change your perception of the world, especially given that you’re a novelist by night?

David Eagleman: Yes, it causes me to pay a lot more attention to how I perceive reality and just be a lot looser about the knowledge that it’s not one size fits all, and being inside different people’s heads yields very different things.

Natasha Mitchell: Nothing’s normal?

David Eagleman: That’s right. We can talk about normality in a statistical sense, most people are not synesthetic and so they perceive colours, and music, and letters in a particular way but it’s up for grabs, there is no right way to see the world.