When learning had a soul

The American university is facing what many now call an existential crisis.

Federal research funding has become a political battleground. Open online courses carry the same lectures far beyond the campus, and artificial intelligence is eroding the value of the degree itself. Public confidence in higher education fell from 57 percent in 2015 to 36 percent in 2023.

A crisis is a fork in the road, and so an opportunity to ask what learning is for. In April 2025, I gave a lecture at MIT on the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (ʿa). This guide, adapted from it, puts that question to the academy he built.

Sunni, Shia and Sufi traditions alike honour him as the scholar par excellence of his age. Set beside the modern university, his academy shows what learning looks like when it has a soul.

Fourteen years between two dynasties

Imam al-Ṣādiq was born in Medina in 83 AH to Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir, whose title means “the one who splits knowledge open”. He grew up in a household devoted to learning, and succeeded his father in 114 AH at the age of thirty-one.

For decades, the Imams had taught under Umayyad surveillance. His grandfather, Imam Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (ʿa), taught his students at night on his farm, so that no trace of a lesson remained by day.

The opening came as the Umayyad dynasty collapsed and the Abbasids rose. For about fourteen years, from around 740 to 754 CE, neither was watching the family of the Prophet ﷺ closely. Imam al-Ṣādiq seized that window to build an academy that stretched from Medina to Kufa.

The academy took no patronage from either dynasty, so no ruler could shape what it taught. The modern university depends on government grants and corporate sponsors, and every funder has a stake in which questions get asked, and which do not.

What knowledge is for

Set side by side, the two institutions differ on nearly every question that shapes a student’s life.

The first row shapes all the others. The modern university largely treats knowledge as a commodity: acquired, certified on paper, and interchangeable like wheat or oil. One university, advertising its facilities, featured the water slide it was building. It did not lead with its professors or its library.

In the academy of Imam al-Ṣādiq, knowledge was a means of tazkiya, purifying the self so that it can draw near to God. Its second aim was service. A well-known tradition teaches that everything has its zakāt, and the zakāt of knowledge is to share it.

One circle, many disciplines

The modern university divides knowledge into departments. Each is hierarchical and highly specialised, and its boundaries are hard to cross without a dedicated interdisciplinary programme. A student can finish a degree without ever asking how their field fits with the rest of what is true.

Imam al-Ṣādiq held knowledge together. He sought to unite revelation with reason and with the illumination of the heart, so that none was pursued apart from the others. Jurists, theologians and seekers of the inner life learned in the same gatherings.

That is why so many traditions trace themselves back to him. The jurists who sat in his circle went on to found schools of law. Theologians such as Hishām ibn al-Ḥakam became masters of reasoned argument. Many Sufi orders trace their spiritual chains through him, for the deep, inward knowledge he taught his followers.

His students did not have to choose between the mind, the law and the heart. In his academy, all three belonged to one education.

A teacher, not a data deliverer

In the modern university, the undergraduate instructor is too often a deliverer of content and a cog in a machine. Full-time faculty chase grants, and student ratings help decide who earns tenure. The safest course is to please students rather than stretch them.

The academy of Imam al-Ṣādiq had a different model: the teacher as murabbī, one who nurtures both soul and intellect and has a stake in the student’s growth. Mālik ibn Anas, the jurist of Medina, remembered his visits this way:

“He would offer me a cushion, honour me, and say, ‘O Mālik, I love you.’ That made me happy, and I would praise God for it.”

Mālik ibn Anas, on Imam al-Ṣādiq

Mālik added that the Imam was always fasting, praying or remembering God. Kahlil Gibran, who lived in Boston, described this kind of teacher in The Prophet. If he is indeed wise, Gibran wrote, “he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

A few years ago, on the Day of ʿArafa, my father and I were given thirty minutes with Sayyid al-Sistani in Najaf. We came with no agenda, and he spent half the meeting on teaching. Traditional Islamic scholarship, he told us, rests on the bond between student and teacher: the student respects and loves the teacher, and the teacher respects and loves the student. Teach in that way, he said, and the path of the Ahl al-Bayt will always be clear to people.

Knowledge that unites

The modern university measures its output in grants, rankings and citations: publish or perish. The academy of Imam al-Ṣādiq measured it in people who served the community and stood for justice.

Knowledge can divide as easily as it unites. The Qur’an observes that communities often split after knowledge reaches them:

Imam al-Ṣādiq lived among many emerging schools, and could set out the views of Medina and Kufa on any question. Yet he used knowledge to bring people together. When companions complained that their masjid’s prayer leader opposed them and hated their associates, he did not tell them to pray elsewhere. “By God,” he said, “if you are truthful, you have more right to the masjid than he does. Be the first to enter it and the last to leave. Improve your character with people, and speak well.”

Nor would he set himself apart by his dress. During the ṭawāf, ʿAbbād ibn Kathīr tugged at the Imam’s garment and objected that it was too fine for a descendant of Imam ʿAlī (ʿa). The Imam replied that ʿAlī’s dress suited his own time; if he wore the same today, people would call him a show-off, like ʿAbbād.

Knowledge that benefits

What Imam al-Ṣādiq built was not a better university. It was something different: founded on love between teacher and student, and aimed at the wellbeing of society. The modern university is no longer sure whether its purpose is revenue, enrolment or forming people of conscience. His academy never had that confusion.

He taught that knowledge is not measured by how much one learns:

“Knowledge is not gained through much learning. It is a light that God casts into the heart of whomever He wills to guide.”

Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (ʿa), to ʿUnwān al-Baṣrī

Degrees and credentials are not the measure. The task is to cultivate the light God has placed within us, and to follow it wherever it leads. A supplication preserved in both Sunni and Shia collections asks for exactly this: “O God, I seek refuge in You from knowledge that does not benefit, a heart that is not humbled, a soul that is never satisfied, and a supplication that is not heard.”

Five questions for anyone who learns or teaches

1. What am I learning for?

   A credential and a career, or a self that is growing closer to God?

2. Does what I study connect to the rest of what I know?

   Knowledge kept in one silo rarely shapes a life.

3. Does my teacher want me to grow, or only to pass?

   Seek the one who challenges you out of care.

4. Am I paying the zakāt of what I know?

   Share it with someone who needs it.

5. Does my knowledge bring people together?

   Or does it set me apart from them?

Then ask the question that matters most: is this knowledge that benefits? If it is not softening your heart, it may not be the knowledge you need.

Study these questions further

Much of what we know of Imam al-Ṣādiq’s teaching reached us through the students of his academy. The Science of Hadith course with Shaykh Azhar Nasser traces how such teachings were transmitted, written down, collected and authenticated, in both Sunni and Shia collections.