al-Ghazālī on memory and knowledge

It is a cliché to note that the modern telecommunications revolution has utterly transformed the relationship between human beings and facts, or “information”, more broadly speaking. It is also a cliché to note that the last such transformation took place with the invention of the printing press that resulted in easy and rapid dissemination of books. I need hardly elaborate on these developments; they’re clichés, after all! But this easy access to vast oceans of information should not be confused with actual knowledge and understanding of this material.

In his book Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, Ebrahim Moosa recounts a fascinating anecdote from the life of Imām Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī. The young genius had just completed an advanced dissertation on Islamic law and was returning to his hometown of Ṭūs (near Mashhad in northeastern Iran) when he was waylaid by highwaymen. Moosa provides a translation of an account by Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī, Imām Ghazālī’s biographer, in which Imām Ghazālī is said to have said to the chief thief:

I plead with you in the name of Him who keeps you safe to only return to me my dissertation [ta‘līqa]. It will be of little value to you. The leader of the brigands asked me: “What is a ta‘līqa?” I replied: “Books in my bag. I traveled to listen and write it and to have knowledge of it.” He derisively laughed at me and said: “How can you claim to have knowledge, when I have taken it and stripped you of it? You are now without any learning!” After a while, he ordered his men to return my bag. Ghazālī said: “The leader of the brigands turned into an oracle [mustanṭaq] whom God made to speak in order to guide me.” (p. 94, Moosa)

Moosa adds that following this incident, Imām Ghazālī “memorized his prized dissertation” and “came to view memory as a treasure, something that was always available and present to him, while writing was susceptible to ‘theft’” (p. 94, Moosa).

This pre-printing press incident, from perhaps nine hundred years ago, is nevertheless deeply instructive to us, particularly in an era where memory and memorization have come to be seen as quaint, fallible storage media for information. I think the modern view is flawed for at least two reasons.

• Firstly, there is no reason why orally memorized knowledge should not be stored and transmitted faithfully from generation to generation. The paradigmatic examples are, of course, the Vedic chains of transmission that have preserved the Vedas without so much as a change of pitch accent, and the “protection” (ḥifẓ), or memorization, of the Qur’ān by Muslims. Cultures throughout human history have evolved sophisticated techniques for memorizing, accurately recalling, and flawlessly transmitting complex texts. [This is not an argument for abandoning what we possess today, of course; it is an argument for supplementing modern storage media by utilizing the astonishing human capacity to memorize.]
• Secondly, as Imām Ghazālī rightly points out, there is a world of a difference between the knowledge of a fact itself and knowledge of a fact’s location. (To put it in terms of C, this is the difference between the value of a variable a and its address &a.) Knowing that Wikipedia can answer your burning questions about the continuum hypothesis or about the length of the coastline of Britain is certainly far better than not knowing how to answer these questions at all, but knowing that Wikipedia knows is entirely different from actually knowing the facts themselves. (Having an array of pointers is not the same as having an array of values; we need *p at some stage and not just the pointer p.) It is subsequent to actual knowledge of the facts themselves that we can structure them, manipulate them, and create new knowledge.