Mujaawarah: Being Together in Wisdom or Reclaiming Life for Mathematics
Proposal for an Open Forum
Munir Fasheh, Yasmine Abtahi, Anna Chronaki
Abstract: In this forum we want to stress the importance of ‘being together in
wisdom’ in mathematics learning, teaching and researching. This necessarily means
reclaiming life for and in mathematics through unsettling subtle issues of knowledge,
power and authority and through troubling existing hierarchies, hegemonies, myths,
truths, canons or orders. As the field develops into endeavours for curriculum and
policy reformations, we wish to stress the importance of wisdom and rootedness with
cultures, natures and siblings. Mujaawarah -which takes different names in different
cultures- has been throughout history and much prior to industrial, modernist or
neoliberal times the main space for learning by encountering the value of
emancipatory experimentations with knowledge, as knowledge to act with. We see
this forum as a bridge to the last MES at Portland, Oregon, where Munir Fasheh
placed the seeds of this conversation in his keynote, but also to create a collective
amongst equals not as a goal to be reached, but, primarily, as a standpoint.
What is Mujaawarah?
Mujaawarah is the Arabic word for being together –a collectivity. It forms a most
basic natural ‘unit’ in society, an ‘assemblage’formed and owned by people with no
internal or external authority. It embodies wisdom and functions without the need of a
permit, budget, hierarchy, rule etc. It is based on collective thinking and acting
situated in specific conte xtual concerns, instead of merely abstract analytical or
critical thinking. Every person joins the mujaawarah with what s/he does well,
useful, beautiful, giving, and respectful as one’s own worth rather than being part of a
hierarchical or normative evaluation of worth. It embodies the logic of muthanna:
‘you are, therefore I am’. Of all things to be sought – via mathematics and
mathematics education in our case – the most important is wisdom (in ancient Greek:
φρόνησις, phronēsis as coined by Isocrates). The word denotes agency to act through
phronesis as the person’s capacity to discern how or why to act virtuously and how to
encourage virtue as praxis –a capacity rooted in the everyday care of self and others.
Munir has explained: ‘that’s what I became aware of and have been working on since
1971, when my search for wisdom started with regaining my arms, legs, and fingers
in living and learning. Learning started to feel as a synonym to living with wisdom.
Wisdom is the compass we need in steering our waythrough the turbulent times we
live in today. What is beautiful about a compass is that it makes sense in the place
where it is; there is no universal direction for all people. Similarly, wisdom can only
be lived locally, personally, and communally’. Our modest, yet dramatically
ambitious, aim in this forum is to share what might the practice of ‘mujaawarah’
mean today by tapping into what might ‘being in wisdom’ mean for each one of us.
How could ‘mujaawarah’ ever be possible, and what is its emergence, in the presence
of risky neoliberal governing has become a globalized agenda normalizing a
continuous endemic uncertainty and configuring the precarious subject?
Munir: Teaching with wisdom: roots, soils and memory
Meaningful teaching requires being personal about what one teaches. A rooted
teacher is one who has gone through a long period of diverse experiences, reflected
upon them and put an effort to make sense out of them, and who is ready to share
one’s experiences, doubts and concerns with others as open matters – rather than
delivers them as ready information and skills or fixed capacities to be
consumed.Teaching any subject wisely (and not only math) requires reclaiming two
other ignored aspects in living and learning: soil and memory. Community consists of
several soils that enrich one another and nurture the intellectual growth in
community: earth soil; cultural soil; social soil; and economic soil – all of which
necessarily embody memory. Nurturing these soils and memories, and being nurtured
by them, is our vocation as teachers. The difference between a screen on a computer
and a sheet of paper is that the latter is closer to soil: when you write on it with a pen
or pencil, words and thoughts will be like seeds that one plants and become nutritious
to others who harvest them. This means handwriting is more precious than typing on
keyboard: it includes feelings and connectedness with the words and thoughts (which
become part of one’s memory). Reflective books are connected to these soils and
memories; textbooks are more like hard rocks.
Memory has been a most important tool in my understanding and moving along the
path of wisdom, whether in relation to math, religion, politics, or working with youth.
In relation to education, the American University of Beirut (established in 1869)
which was the first ‘knowledge base’ in our region (followed by smaller bases in the
form of schools) preceded military and financial bases, and paved the way for both.
Those ‘knowledge bases’ decided for us (for the past 150 years) what is allowed in
knowledge and what is not; they wiped out wisdom, for example, from our
consciousness and memory. Wisdom cannot flourish outside local soils. They wiped
wisdom despite the fact that the first university Arabs built was the House of Wisdom
in Baghdad more than 1100 years ago, where various civilizations (Arab, Persian,
Greek, Egyptian, Indian…) interacted and produced a lot of what we lack today, but
very much needed. It is worth mentioning here that, unlike military and financial
agencies, academicians and educators who came to our region produced also a lot of
harmdespite their good intentions. They were not aware of the ‘viruses’ in their
thinking. In this case the ‘virus’ is the passion for controlling, measuring and
imposing knowledge mastery. Living without wisdom robs people of their internal
immunity.
Yasmine: Rooted-ness of mathematics, its education, and its research
“Maybe we are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots?”
(Molavi, 1253). But where are my roots? Why do I need to be aware of them? Why
does this matter for me and for mathematics and its education? There is a saying in
Cree, an Algonquian language spoken by groups of Canadian indigenous
communities: “You need to know where you are coming from to know where you are
going, to give you hope to move forward”. My roots are in the culture, history and the
soil of where I am coming from. They carry within them the perception and wisdom
of generations who have lived and created the knowing(s) that, throughout thousands
of years, was passed on to me as my culture. Among many, I am a branch of such
roots -roots that not only give me hope to move forward but also guide my living and
my actions.
In Masnavi-e Ma'navi, Molavi (1253) likened living to a compass with one of its legs
fixed while the other wanders around, drawing circle(s) around the rooted leg. That
is, in our living we have a part that is strongly based in our local roots (our cultures
and history) and a part that moves to connect to others people around us and, to
feelings, and places. As it is the case of a compass and its two legs, if our rooted leg
is not strong enough in the soil of our past, the circles created by the other moving leg
– to connect to others and to places – will not be beautiful, or useful. Likewise,
mathematics needs to be rooted in the soils of our cultures and histories – but also
within cultures where we move and seek to create new roots. Anon-rooted
mathematicscan be neither beautiful nor useful –just because it is too detached, too
impersonal. Mathematics that detaches itself from the realities of local communities –
or that is treated to be detached from the local values and needs – and tries constantly
to abstract and standardize, could be hurtful. Hurtful for people, nature, culture and
children are the communities. As a new generation to come, our childrenare growing
up having one leg strongly rooted in their places, with their local culture, history and
beliefs and are growing up learning mathematics as a way of thinking, about their
values and concerns. Munir’s presentation at MES8 in 2015 at Portland, made it
clear, for me, that laying out paths for a journey towards having wiser and rooted
mathematics is everybody’s responsibility, including mine. Munir’s talks reconfirmed
how privileged we are, having access to thousands of years of accumulated wisdom,
through our diverse cultures and available texts.
Anna: Polis, autonomy, paideia: Reclaiming life for mathematics
Working with Gypsy children, early years’ children or student-teachers one cannot
avoid but to observe the fresh ideas they offer. Being outsiders, they question boldly
-beyond the ruling canons. In fact, their stance serves to trouble essentialist identities
and to interrogate the normative as the only possible image for a school-subject’s
economy. The same is not experienced with ‘well’ trained educators or ‘highly’
qualified experts who turn into methods for quick fixes of conceptual problems.
Teaching as such can be a violent act reproducing social inequality, enslavement or
obedience and remains an elitist posture assuming that only certain expertise support
us think, speak and make decisions. A blind obedience to ‘disciplinary knowledge’
make us distrust the assumed ‘naïve consciousness’ of those subjected to oppressive
systems (Ranciere, 1991). The result of this distrust is a ‘syllogism of suspicion’ that
reinforces the stultifying practices they are arguing against. Expertise might serve,
with all good intentions, to create a relational space where authority becomes the
measure for betterment, development or progress. Through this line, the ‘virus’ of
‘distrust’ gets into the skin and runs through blood infecting our research choicesand
writings. Distrust becomes the basis for a continuous need for speculative proof,
reason or rationality, as well as, for improvising the ‘syllogism of suspicion’ game as
exemplified in the well known Socrates-Menon sophist dialogue. But, this ethic can
be catastrophic for ‘mujaawarah’. Instead, one needs to trust the ability of all to think,
speak and act without calling the need for explication.
In Ancient Greece, polis (πολιτεία:city) was built on the idea of a continuous
autonomy where common people (δήμος:demos) had not only to vote on matters of
government and law, but they had to create their own laws (i.e. auto- means by itself
and nomos means law). Common people, although being primarily the free-born male
citizens, spent much of their time discussing politics in the agora -an open place of
assembly and a meeting space for craftspeople, merchants, traders or philosophers.
Crucial to developing autonomy politics was the notion of paideia. Paideia, as
discussed by Isocrates (353 BC), is in contrast to a sophist view of education, and is
conceived as a process of character growth in which political activity is not a means
to an end, but, an end in itself. Emphasis was placed to re-create the aesthetic
possibility of acting ‘as if…’. Could we, take seriously an ‘as if…’ posture. As if…
we have invited a risky experimentation of thoughts, ideas and acts with our siblings,
with our soils and memories of our past and future virtualities, as well as, with our
own mathematics or the mathematics we owe. As if… such rootedness can help us
re/configure the subject itself in mujaawarah.
Living Mujaawarah
We suggest living mujaawarah in our contribution as a group at MES9 in Greece
where every participant shares one’s reflections on experiences of how to deal with
math more wisely in a globalised world where soils, roots and memories take a
different form for each one. We aim for living conversations, and just like yeast in
dough: our aliveness will be ‘contagious’. We will come out with rich diverse ways
of how to embody wisdom in perceiving and working with math. By following this
path, we will use a value that is ignored namely wisdom and a space that is ignored
namely mujaawarah. This means that our contribution to the conference will not be
an outcome as much as reminding people of and reclaiming two extremely important
aspects in learning: wisdom as a governing value and mujaawarah as space for
learning. For the first part, we start the mujaawarah by Munir’s story, followed by
Yasmine’s and Anna’s. We share segments of our stories to show that the most
important conviction in living wisely is that every person is a source of meaning
making, sensing and acting (including that of math). This short introduction will be
followed by some of the participants who would wish to come in-dialogue in our
mujaawarah and will continue with their own stories (i.e. a small number of
colleagues will be contacted upon acceptance of this proposal). This will be then
followed by small group discussions in which colleagues who are in mujaawarah
with us will be part and support the story sharing process through examples and
expansion. The last part of the session will be devoted to bring up issues related to
wisdom, rooted-ness and ethics within mathematics, its teaching, learning and
research. We encourage participants to bring along their own stories that would
support us to reflect on two questions: what does mathematics mean to us? and what
does learning mean to us? But, also: why, where and for whom?
This open forum will take place at the outskirts of the academic program after the
agora or during lunch-time. In this sense, the living mujaawarah as conceived by
Munir could be seen as working along or within other events in MES9 for creating
collectivity. Lastly, some material might be uploaded at the website or distributed at
the conference space to include information that would give the participants a chance
to think about and feel some of the issues we are going to bring forth.
REFERENCES
Isocrates. 353 BC. Against the Sophists. Isocrates Speech (Antidosis).
Molavi, J. (1253). Masnavi Manavi.
Ranciere, J. 1999. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation.
(transl. Kriston Ross). Stanford University Press. Stanford. California.