Eqbal Ahmed Lecture by Kofi Annan

The First Annual Eqbal Ahmed Lecture at Hampshire College, delivered in Amherst, 16 September, 1998

KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION

President Prince,
Professor Ahmad,
Students, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you for that generous introduction.  It is a very special
pleasure  for me to deliver the first Eqbal Ahmad lecture here at
Hampshire College. Professor Ahmad is known to you in the five
colleges as a distinguished teacher whose intellect and example have
enriched your lives.

I know him as a public intellectual who crossed many boundaries to
engage in struggles for liberation and human rights; a fearless thinker whose analysis of world events has helped me to understand some of the issues with which the United Nations must grapple every day.

Among those issues, as this audience will know, is the threat of the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.  Last June, the world
witnessed with deep apprehension the decisions of India and Pakistan
to conduct nuclear tests.  A new and dangerous source of instability
was introduced to an environment in which sentiments of rivalry,
suspicion,  and mistrust were dominating all discourse.  To the
outside world, it appeared that within those two nations, nuclear
nationalism had won the day.  Voices of dissent were few and far
between. But Eqbal Ahmad's voice was heard by all who wished to
listen: warning Pakistan of the perils of following India down the nuclear path; urging leaders and citizens alike  to choose reason over rage, moderation over might, the future over the past. It is that commitment to putting knowledge to the service of human kind, that example of learning infused with a moral conscience, that we honour  today.

As students, you have been told, no doubt, by parents and teachers
that education is a great privilege; that you should be grateful for
the chance to improve your minds; that you should seize this
opportunity to expand your horizons.  I do not fault you for sometimes
thinking that this is just a  way of getting you to study. Sometimes
it is. But there is a deeper, more lasting truth to what they are
saying. Throughout history there has existed an essential linkage
between knowledge and the growth of civilizations. The relationship
between knowledge, its communication, and progress -- be it economic,
political or social -- has been permanent and organic. The educational
process as formalized through schools and colleges is at the heart of
civilization.

Moreover, throughout history knowledge has been universal. Only with
the  age of nationalism and imperialism was knowledge invested with
hard boundaries. In fact, knowledge has never recognized boundaries,
but rather defied all notions, past and present, of civilizations
clashing.

The roots of Greek civilization lay deep in Africa. And we know how
the Arabs learned from Greece, India, and China, making their own
advances in science, mathematics, aesthetics, and philosophy; how the
European renaissance was assisted by the intellectual achievements of
the Islamic civilization; and how modern western art has been
influenced by the African and Japanese impressions.

History is witness to the fact that ambitions, interests and,
sometimes, ideologies clash.  Civilizations rarely do. In fact, they
are based on the exchange of knowledge and artistic influence and, in
turn, nurtured by that exchange.

Today, therefore, I wish to draw your attention to the crisis of
knowledge in the Third World; to how that crisis feeds the view that
civilisations inevitably must clash; and to why restoring a global
culture of knowledge must and will be a priority for the United
Nations system of the next  century.

The crisis in education in the Third World is, above all, a crisis of
priorities facing states with increasing responsibilities in an era of
decreasing resources.  This is partly a problem of history.  Third
world plans of education were drawn up, by and large, by colonial
powers whose outlook and needs were different from those of sovereign
states in the last years of the 20th century.

Yet, in the post-colonial period, expenditures on arms have far
surpassed those on books and teachers.  Practically no attention has
been paid to reformulating educational objectives appropriate to the
requirements of these societies.  What little attention has been given
to the educational enterprise has gone into the physical output of new
campuses and school houses.  The need for renewal and reform is
greater than ever.

Our age -- the age of Globalization -- offers a unique opportunity to
reverse course.  Globalization, as you all know, is a subject of much
discussion and research today. But there is a tendency still to view
the matter largely in economic terms.  Globalization is affecting all
aspects of our lives, from the political to the social to the
cultural.  Only knowledge, it would seem, is not being globalized. In
an age where the acquisition and advancement of knowledge is a more powerful
weapon in a nations arsenal than any missile or mine, the knowledge
gap between the North and South is widening.  Alas, education often seems
the last priority, leading too many third world students to leave for
the West to acquire knowledge and education.

That is the tragedy of far too many Third World countries striving to
escape poverty and establish democratic rule.  Too many regimes and
too many rulers govern by the gun.  They allow only those investments
that will prolong their rule rather than provide for their peoples
progress.  Indeed, education is often seen as the enemy of tyranny,
for it is the means of dissent and a tool of resistance.
We are all consumers of the products of modern science and
technology. However, a large part of the world has had no part in the
process of their discovery, invention and production.  Unless we
embark urgently on a program of globalizing the generation of and access to knowledge, the unequal development of the world will only continue.

In recent decades, international agencies have accorded some
importance to encouraging primary and secondary level schooling.  This
has some effect in shifting local priorities in favour of basic
education.  Unfortunately, higher education continues to suffer from
neglect.  Lack of resources have so drained third world universities
of good faculties that all of its  Nobel Laureates in science have won
their prizes for research accomplished in  the West.
That is why the United Nations will make universal access to
knowledge central to all our development activities.  Next month,
UNESCO will host a World Conference on Higher Education attended by
more than 100 ministers = of education.  Their mission will be to join 2,000
teachers, students and education experts in an effort to renew higher
education world-wide.

They will seek innovative ways to stop the growing disparity between
North and South in access to knowledge through higher education.  They
will strive to improve national educational systems as a way of
preserving our global diversity while opening new channels of
communication between peoples.

By complementing those efforts in our development and post-conflict
peace building work, we will help ensure that former combatants will
become future students; that for them, the first day of peace will be a day
for school; and that in those schools, they will learn to resolve
differences peacefully.

Although I have spoken so far in the context of post-colonial
societies,  in important respects the challenge is universal.  We live
in an age in which material imperatives tend to overwhelm the moral
and spiritual ones.  This affects the learning environment in ways
that are harmful to societies no less than individuals.  What can get
lost in such an environment is the essence of education -- its social
and moral imperatives. Not that one expression of knowledge is to be
implanted everywhere. Nor that one tradition of learning is to
dominate all others.  Rather, I believe that every society must
restore a culture of knowledge that encourages the pursuit of ideas
and their application in fostering a universal understanding of the
meaning of civilization.

Civilizations have always been enriched, and not weakened, by the
exchange of knowledge and arts, the freer and more peaceable the
better.  In the relations between nations, it is rather the lack of
education, and the dearth of knowledge which is a chief source of
dispute and conflict.

Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda, and in
most modern conflicts, the men of war prey on the ignorance of the
populace to instill fears and arouse hatreds.  That was the case in
Bosnia and in Rwanda where genocidal ideologies took root in the
absence of truthful information and honest education.  If only half the effort
had gone into teaching those peoples what unites them, and not what
divides them, unspeakable crimes could have been prevented.

This is not to say that ideas and interests do not clash.  They do,
and always will.  But those clashes can and must be resolved
peacefully and politically. That is why the culture of knowledge which
we seek will advance not only development, but also mutual
appreciation between cultures.  Perhaps there is no greater need for
such appreciation today than between the Islamic peoples and those of
the West.  Too often, this question is discussed only through crude,
invidious generalizations about the beliefs of one group or the
behaviour of the other.  Too often, the rhetoric of resistance from
one group or other is deemed representative of the views of millions.

What is ignored is the historic and ever-growing interaction between
peoples; the ways in which individual states -- regardless of
religious affiliation -- define, defend, and pursue their interests;
and the propensity of states as well as individuals to form alliances
and allegiances on other grounds than ethnic belonging or religious
affiliation.

What this history should and must teach us is that, alongside a
global diversity of cultures, there does exist one, world-wide
civilization of knowledge within which ideas and philosophies meet
and develop peacefully and productively.  It is a civilization
defined by its tolerance of dissent, its celebration of cultural diversity, its
insistence on fundamental, universal human rights, and its belief in
the right of people everywhere to have a say in how they are governed.

This is the civilisation for which the United Nations labours and for
whose attainment a global culture of knowledge is necessary.

Students,

Ladies and Gentlemen,


Socrates taught us that there is only one good, knowledge, and only
one evil, ignorance  In that spirit, Eqbal Ahmad has pursued a life
of moral and intellectual engagement as teacher and writer.  Not
satisfied however, to rest on his laurels, he has now dedicated
himself to narrowing as best he can the knowledge gap between North
and South.

He is working at establishing a center for higher learning in
Pakistan, to be named Khaldunia University, an institution that will
seek to build character no less than enlivening a tradition of
scholarship and critical thought.  Many of you will know the symbolism
of naming a university for Ibn Khaldun.

This last great Arab historian of the Middle Ages was a globalist
long before the age of globalization.  Born in Northern Africa, he
grew up in Spain and crossed many boundaries in search of knowledge
and service.  He defined the aims of education in a timeless fashion,
insisting that knowledge knows no boundary, that its essence is man in
relation to his environment, that a people's well-being is defined by
its level of knowledge and its ability to utilize it in the real
world.

He argued that civilisations decline when they lose their capacity to comprehend and absorb change, and that the "greatest of scholars err
when they ignore the environment in which history unfolds."

I can think of no higher ideal for scholarship, and no better model
on which to base the pursuit of knowledge.  Indeed, these are the
values that underlie all that we seek at the United Nations.  It is this
unity of ideals, this common pursuit of peace through knowledge that
has brought me here today.

Thank you.