TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 7

legitimacy by the western Enlightenment. Traditional theory, from this perspective, was
the self-satisfied reassurance of the quality of our knowledge based on the perceived proof
of the reality before us: the very same trust in positivism that still casts a shadow over all
parts of higher education today, as its quality continues to be measured by perverse and
fickle metrics and league tables.
Critical theory explores the hidden and submerged: those aspects of lived reality
pushed below the superficial façade of a functioning society and/or higher education
sector. As such it calls for criticality not as a term of comfort and self-satisfaction, but
as one of disruption, challenge and moral, ethical and professional discomfort.
This is a call for critical disobedience: a preparedness to do more than complain about
or critique the current state of higher education. Disobedience marks a move from com-
plicity to braving an alternative to what Adorno (2001) described as ‘the passive accep-
tance of what is merely the case’ (121). Disobedience is action – not in the traditional
thought/praxis binary, but in Adorno’s sense of thinking as doing, doing as thought.
In acknowledgement of our decolonial age, we should also take head of Rivera Cusi-
canqui, the Bolivian scholar and activist, and her warning that ‘in a colonial situation …
words mask more than they reveal’ (Rivera Cusicanqui 2020, 6, from Another Bicenten-
nial). What has been going on in the academy in the name of criticality? Have sayings and
doings aligned to conceal or to transform?
As Fraser and Axel (2003) explains, critical theory is distinguished by its grounding in
the injustices of the present and its view to an alternative way of life. In higher education,
this requires critical disruption – of how we work and teach, and how our students
engage with knowledge and society. This goes beyond the now much lauded notion of
transformative engagement with knowledge, to focus more sharply on the essentially dis-
ruptive nature of genuinely radical transformation. Where our thinking is disrupted,
there must be a sense of something lost as well as gained. Some treasured beliefs and
practices foregone because of their intractable foundation within the prevailing struc-
tures of injustice we oppose.
What is necessary, therefore is critical discomfort – that impels us into action. What
responsibility do we have when we write about higher education to promote discomfort
with the status-quo rather than seeking agreement for our own ideas? The moral obli-
gations of the higher education scholar need to become part of our discourses, and
they will not, and should not, inspire comfortable engagement. Criticality erupt!

Sacralising critique (Irfan Ahmad6)

There are probably as many meanings of critique as there are its users. However, three
assumptions underpinning these usages continue to mark our understandings of it:
i) Born in ancient Greece, critique became the signature of modern Europe/Latin
Christendom, and subsequently it “spread” throughout the non-West; ii) Religion,
with Christianity largely exempted, and critique are foes (recall Marx in his critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism”)’;
And, iii) it is predominantly a literary, textual activity by educated-intellectuals. With
an alternative framework of my own and drawing on multiple sources, including ethno-
graphic research, in Religion As Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking From Mecca to the
Marketplace (Ahmad 2017), I deconstruct these three major assumptions. Using a
8 K. LUCKETT AND I. BHATT

revised concept of the axial age and focusing on the Islamic tradition, I drafted a different
genealogy of critique in which God Himself is the source of critique. The Qur’ān
describes the mission of all prophets as enacting reform (is lāh ). In this frame, to
reform is to also critique. Thus, prophets Mūsā (Moses) and ‘Isā (Jesus), in whose tra-
dition the Prophet Muhammad stands, were all critics of societies Allāh sent them to. Evi-
dently, this genealogy decentres Greece as the sole locus of critique. It also deactivates the
regnant antagonism between religion and critique. In my work, I show how the notion of
reason/rationality in Immanuel Kant was also pitted against his distorted understanding
of Islam, and thus his inability to engage with its tradition. Like Aufklärung in Germany,
les Lumières in France was thus considerably anti-Islam and markedly Christian. Finally,
by examining the K hudāī K hidmatgār (God’s Servant) movement, a spectacular collec-
tive action for peace launched by Abdul Ghaffar Khan (1890–1988) in colonial India, I
inscribed critique as a practice not limited to texts but undertaken equally by the unlet-
tered in the streets; indeed, as part of everyday life entwined with death. Inspired by the
life of the Prophet Muhammad, Khan’s mission was to secure freedom and justice for all.
His mission, moreover, was not limited to the real world of the British Empire but to a
possible world: a world to come. In Khan’s worldview, disobedient as it was to the reli-
gious-secular dualism, the true, the real and the possible formed an ensemble.
In contemporary Western and Westernising academic cultures, Khan’s notion of cri-
tique remains at best on the margins. Critique instead usually means that with which – a
position, an argument or the like – one disagrees, vehemently or otherwise. This position
often has a bearing within a discipline, verily within its subfield(s) – knowledge is so com-
partmentalised that scholars of the subcontinent rarely have a perspective about, for
example, Latin America. Critique in such sub-fields is invariably disconnected, or at
most only poorly connected, to the questions of truth and justice as trans-disciplinary
and supra-territorial idea(l).
Consider securitisation theory in International Relations (IR). Its advocates are critical
of Realism, the dominant theory in IR, and against which they adopt a constructivist
approach to study security. However, the aims of securitisation theory seldom pertain
either to truth or justice; rather, they function vis-à-vis positions within that specific/
skewed field, which it is critical of. A recent study (Howell and Richter-Montpetit
2020) argues that securitisation theory is not only Eurocentric but it also rests on ‘meth-
odological whiteness and anti-black racism’. What remains of criticality and critique,
then? Beyond disciplinary and territorial silos, when questions about the true, the poss-
ible and justice – as in my analysis, Khan viewed them – become integral to our teaching
in higher education as well as to research, we will have embarked on a journey to think
about critique afresh. Indeed, we will have become truly critical!

The thoughtless university (Pedro Tabensky7)

In a The Conversation piece titled ‘It’s important to rethink the purpose of university edu-
cation – a philosopher of education explains why’8, I argue that, ironically, contemporary
universities do not understand what they are doing. How can institutions mandated to
foster understanding through teaching and research be ignorant about the purposes they
serve? And yet they are to a significant extent. The net aim of the contemporary univer-
sity—which must be distinguished from the often-laudable work of individual scholars