Subjectivism & Pragmatism vs. Comprehensiveness & self-negation

Two other hinders of truth discovery are subjectivism and pragmatism. Both of them mean adapting the truth so that it fits the self. This adaptation, in regard to whether it is conscious or unconscious, results in two modes of subjectivism: A random subjectivism in which the self unconsciously rejects or modifies the truth to fit its emotional suspicions, and methodological subjectivism within which the self consciously opts for some evidences and excludes the remaining ones. The later- I mean methodological subjectivism- can take diverse forms, but it ultimately serves for the satisfaction of mere incidental doubts.

One of those forms is de-contextualization. It is the process of deducing whole from some parts. For instance, a Mufti in the Islamic Law (A’shariaa), and precisely in the branch of the Fatwa, which is about deducing judgements from

the legal texts (Qur’an & Sunna) about people’s daily matters, may fail to perform well his job if he deals with the Quranic script as a set of separated verses. For instance, a Mufti may come to prohibit “poetry” if he based his judgement on an isolated part of the verse in which Allah the Almighty says: “And as to the poets, those who go astray follow them…” [26.224].

A principled Mufti, in contrast, would relate this part of speech to the overall truth, by considering the excluded part of the same Quranic context wherein Allah the Almighty says: “…except those who believe and do good and remember Allah much” [26.227]. As a result, not all poets are bad and not all poetry should be prohibited.

Those false deductions are, in fact, the outcome of intruding upon Alfatwa, which normally necessitates a set of conditions and principles by which the whole faculties and intentions of Islamic Law are taken into consideration.

An other example of methodological subjectivism is translation. A bad translator would simply tend to understand a target foreign item through his own theoretical lens, resorting to word by word transfer as if all languages are identical in the form. Yet, as the Arab linguistic proverb states, “any change at the level of structure implies a change at the level of meaning». Fortunately, the degree of misunderstanding decreases when the target meaning is taken as it is culturally arranged within the father context.

In both approaches, however, translation is still traditional and misleading. A Moroccan professor teaching European or American literature to Moroccan students of English would implicitly transfer a number of European and American ism theories into his students while lecturing. These would be cognitively received and internalised by the students on the basis of their father system of beliefs and values. During this process of transfer and reception, the threat of assimilation may take place if students had not already been installed with an updated version of their belief system.

This silent suicide occurs through a series of blind applications and projection of the foreign frames of culture onto students’ own. That’s why, for example, it is not advisable for translators, be in the traditional approach or in the new perspective, to put words belonging to different civilizational contexts side by side as synonyms or even equivalents. The pair (GOD; ALLAH) is a tangible example of how truth is conceived paradoxically under the influence of random or methodological subjectivism.