The Epistemological Cry: Casting Off the Cloak of Dependency and Reclaiming the Mind
Mohammad Kawrani, 2026.10.08
Enough… enough of kneeling before the platforms of the West. Intellectuals, researchers, students who have spent their youth in the labyrinths of laboratories and lecture halls — I want to address you with a cry from the depths of the civilizational wound under whose burden we are decaying: Western universities have transformed from strongholds of knowledge into temples for imposing epistemic hegemony.
Do not be deceived by glittering degrees, nor dazzled by academic protocols and “impact factor” rankings. These are not neutral scientific institutions; they are machines for producing dependent minds and laboratories for refining elites who reproduce dependency in the name of “objectivity” and “methodological rigor.” They grant you degrees while stripping you of your identity, planting deep within you the belief that you are nothing more than junior students, and that truth can only emerge from their laboratories and libraries.
First: Exposing the Myth of Academic Neutrality
The Western university is not an ivory tower of abstract knowledge; it has also functioned as a cultural arm of imperialism. Since the emergence of higher education institutions in Europe, they have served political agendas: from providing colonial justification in the nineteenth century, to serving the instruments of the Cold War, and continuing today, when their research is funded by military and industrial institutions that do not hesitate to influence the questions being asked and manipulate the answers.
Western universities dare to present their “hypotheses” as universal assumptions. They teach us that the liberal model is the end of history, impose theories of moral relativism upon us as though they were absolute truths, and permit themselves to deconstruct everything sacred to us in the name of “Enlightenment criticism,” while maintaining their own untouchable red lines: Criticism of Zionism? Heresy. Criticism of capitalism? Deviance from the norm. Criticism of their racial and cultural superiority? An unforgivable intellectual crime.
Concepts such as “freedom of expression” and “intellectual pluralism” are applied only when they serve their orientations, and are transformed into traps for exporting the Western mode of thinking to the rest of the world.
Second: Academic Dependency — The Epidemic of Alienated Minds
Where do we stand within this equation? We are not merely recipients; we have become transmission centers for the contagion of intellectual alienation. We teach our students as though they lived in the streets of Paris or New York. We apply curricula written for societies that are historically, religiously, and psychologically different from ours, and then wonder why our graduates emerge as strangers in their own homeland — seeing their reality through the eyes of others, despising their heritage, questioning all their values, and believing themselves superior to everyone simply because they speak English fluently and can recite the titles of “postmodern theory”!
Our universities, particularly in the Arab and Islamic world, have entrenched an educational system based on methodological dependency:
We study the history of the West while forgetting our own history.
We analyze their texts while our own texts remain imprisoned on shelves.
We adopt their intellectual problems, which emerge from their own existential crises — such as atheism or the conflict between church and political authority — and impose them upon societies suffering from entirely different crises.
This is not science. It is the continuation of epistemic colonialism through new instruments. We spend enormous sums of money to build ourselves a mental cage and then call it “higher education”!
Third: The Cry of Liberation — From Transmission to Production
Our intellectual revolution begins by stripping these institutions of their false legitimacy. The time has come to declare:
Knowledge is no one’s private property. The empirical method is a tool, and mathematics is a language. But the greater question is: Who determines the priorities? Who decides what should be studied? Who directs the ethical compass of scientific research?
We need postcolonial universities — universities that begin with the concerns of our own societies:
They address our technological backwardness through mechanisms rooted in our reality, not theirs.
They offer an epistemological model integrated with our system of values — religious and ethical — rather than one that seeks to destroy it.
They produce theories in the humanities rooted in our philosophy, capable of explaining our phenomena and offering solutions emerging from our identity rather than imported solutions that only make our problems more complicated.
Young people, do not wait for permission from the West to become creative. The greatest scientific revolutions have not always emerged from the centers, but from the margins of those who dared to challenge them. Break the sanctification of “publishing in their journals” when those journals demand a particular intellectual orientation. Build your own platforms, journals, and institutes. Make your mother tongue present in rigorous scientific research. Make your heritage a source of inspiration, not a source of shame.
The New Covenant Manifesto
Western universities: we cast off your authority over our minds. We do not want your degrees if they come at the price of suffocating our identity. We do not want your curricula if they are a subtle poison that dissolves our convictions. We will no longer measure our progress by the number of our students sent abroad to study at your institutions, but by our ability to take knowledge into our own hands.
We do not reject science, but we reject guardianship. We do not close our minds to the world; rather, we open them fully so that we may read the world through eyes that do not borrow someone else’s glasses. Knowledge is light, but when light comes from another’s lamp only to burn away our identity, it becomes fire.
Our renaissance begins with the courageous moment when we say: “No, we will not be followers.” It is the moment when we create our own knowledge, draw our own future with our own hands, and declare our complete intellectual independence from every form of epistemic imperialism.
It is a revolution — a revolution of the alienated mind that casts off its chains and returns to its roots, only to launch from them toward horizons of creativity and civilization.
Today we proclaim this cry: Liberate universities from dependency. Liberate knowledge from colonialism. Liberate the mind from servitude. Knowledge is for everyone, and identity is ours.
Let epistemic guardianship fall, and let the age of the new renaissance rise.
https://mohammadabbaskawrani.com
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