human capital fail

For a three minute background on the Quran, check out this story in Slate titled How To Read the Quran.

Now, read this story in the CSM and despair: An orphaned Koranic prodigy finds his place in the world.

For the truly lazy, the Cliff’s notes version of the story is that a young prodigy is about to get kicked out of the relatively civil Hong Kong and deported back to Pakistan due to an expired visa. Most normal people would read the story and think it’s unfortunate that a bright young man is about to lose a tremendous opportunity.

I read the story and thought to myself, what a horrible waste of time.

Just three parts to go: Umar Khatab is close to memorizing the whole Koran – one of the most exalted achievements for a Muslim.

Why is memorizing a book whose “verses have multiple meanings, some of which are unfathomable to human beings and known only to God” the most “exalted achievement” for an entire culture? It makes me sad that all that human capital is being spent memorizing an existing book rather than trying to come up with new ideas, insights, and progress. It doesn’t bother me particularly much that the book in this case happens to be the holy text for Islam; it would make me equally upset if the brightest Americans spent their time trying to memorize Thomas Pynchon’s books or the Bible, and that represented one of the supreme accomplishments in our culture.

Maybe I misunderstand; perhaps memorizing the Quran is only something you do on the side, and then you go do something else. Umar does mention wanting to be a pilot, after all. But my impression to date has been that a majority of the Islamic world considers their best students to be the ones who can memorize the Quran.

By the way, I think memorizing the digits of pi is an equally stupid activity, but the huge difference is, there are not thousands or millions of people spending large amounts of effort doing so. One nutjob gets lost in the noise, but with an entire culture of nutjobs, that’s some serious loss of brainpower that could benefit the rest of the world.