In several of my lectures and seminars, I’ve argued that Western Shi’i communities struggle to prioritize what the Islamic tradition actually expects of them in terms of religiosity because of a long-standing negligence of the practical intellect. For the last few centuries, we have attached ourselves almost exclusively to the theoretical intellect; to knowing rather than to becoming. I’ve made this same point in my education-themed talks, where I try to explain why a year-round consumption of just lectures rarely produces real transformation in our communities.

Recently, while researching this phenomenon further, I’ve come to believe that part of the problem runs even deeper. It lies in the largely unnoticed denial of the final cause from our entire system of thought.

Classical philosophy held that everything which comes into being can be understood through four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. The final cause – the ghayah – is the purpose, goal, or function for the sake of which something exists or takes place. It is the “why” that gives the other three causes their direction.

I opened my pre-marriage course with exactly this idea. Before any discussion of compatibility, finances, or family, I asked participants to articulate the ghayah of marriage itself. In my experience, the absence of a clear final cause in a couple’s mind before they commit to marriage is behind a great many of the problems that follow.

The denial of the final cause – and its consequences for modern education, curriculum design, and teaching method – is far more widespread than most people realize. Most Muslims never notice how deeply this habit of thought has shaped them, simply because it is the only way they have ever been taught to think.

Modern thought has largely replaced purposeful causation with mechanical explanation: a thing is understood by what produced it and how it operates, not by what it is for. Spinoza is perhaps the clearest philosophical expression of this shift. Having rejected the idea of an end existing outside of and prior to a thing, he relocates “purpose” entirely inside the acting subject, identifying it with appetite and desire. On his account, we don’t pursue something because we judge it good; we judge it good because we already desire it; desire itself becomes the only “end” there is. Strip away the final cause and all that remains is a thing’s own inherent drives, which shift with temperament and can even pull a person in contradictory directions at once.

Once this mechanical picture becomes the unconscious default, it is not surprising that a community absorbs it too, not as a philosophical position anyone consciously holds, but as a background assumption about how learning, growth, and even religious life are supposed to work.

The Same Debate in Education

This same tension shows up directly in the history of Western curriculum theory. Ralph Tyler’s (1902 – 1994) influential Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction argued that clear objectives must be defined before a curriculum is designed. A final cause fixed in advance, toward which everything else is built.

Constructivist educators pushed back hard against this. Elliot Eisner’s (1933-2014) 1967 paper “Educational Objectives: Help or Hindrance?” is a good example. Eisner opens by acknowledging that the objectives-first view in curriculum theory appears logical, but then spends the paper dismantling it. He concludes that educational objectives don’t need to precede the selection and organization of content at all; that curriculum-building and by extension the teaching process in class, is closer to an artful, open-ended process whose results – most of the times – we do not know and cannot predict.

It’s an interesting debate within education theory. But when it is imported wholesale into how a religious community plans its programming, something is lost. A curriculum without a final cause thought out will still produce activity. It just won’t reliably produce the kind of human transformation Islam expects, because no one has stopped to ask what the activity is actually for.

This is precisely the gap I keep encountering in community education and transformation: plenty of theoretical intellect, very little practical intellect; plenty of programming, very little purpose behind it. Lectures accumulate information. They rarely, on their own, produce the practical wisdom that the tradition actually asks of us. Without a clear final cause held in mind, for a course, a program, a relationship, a year of communal life, we default to the same mechanical mode Spinoza describes: activity driven by whatever appetite or habit happens to be present, rather than by a deliberate end we are moving toward.

Once you start looking for it, this pattern shows up constantly in Muslim community life, good, sincere, often well-intended actions that continue year after year with little collective clarity about their actual purpose:

  • Annual programs, fundraisers, and other fixtures on the community calendar that continue simply because they’ve become fixtures, until the event itself eclipses the purpose that originally justified it.
  • Communal ritual gatherings and religious anniversaries that expand in frequency and scale all year long, well beyond what their original formational function required.
  • Events run for the sake of running them — filling a slot on the community calendar because the calendar expects something to be there, rather than because the event serves a clearly held end.
  • Programs and talks that never move past the talk itself to the practical stage, where we feel we’ve discharged our responsibility on a topic simply because a lecture was delivered on it.

In each case, the action itself is not the problem — mourning, reciting, gathering, giving, and teaching are all praiseworthy in themselves. The problem is the absence of a clearly held final cause governing how the action is designed and what it is meant to produce in the people who participate in it. Recovering that habit, asking “what is this for?” before we ask “how should we run it?”, may be the most overlooked steps in our communities.