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