There is a problem throughout the long history of humanity, since man knew the taste of writing, and the flexibility of adapting the letters of the language to create knowledge from them, and to advance himself towards understanding his existence, and developing his abilities, and his endless struggle with time towards permanence and immortality and gaining time in his favor, and with place in order to create paradises for himself in life, and enjoy the vast ownership, and establish pillars on which his historical imprint is, all of this in order to consolidate his strength, influence, authority and ownership. The tools change, but the goal remains one. In ancient times, power was muscular force, and ownership was created by wars, then things developed until power became in knowledge, and authority was created by calculations and the course of the economy.
Let us leave this entrance, which may be an incomplete or unclear introduction for some, to the subject of the thorny relationship between the pen-holder and the stick, the teacher, educator, and professor, and between the student, the seeker of knowledge, and the disciple, or between the teacher and the learner, a relationship that begins with friendliness, love, sacrifice, and harmony, but sometimes, and often, it is with the most brilliant of the students, and the student outshines the teacher until it ends in abandonment, and there may be in the soul some hatred and disagreement until it develops into difference.
In human history there are many examples of this relationship or scientific jealousy or the student’s opposition to his first teacher, but there are other beautiful examples, as part of self-denial and devoted loyalty to the teacher, as we find in our Arab and Islamic history that the students wrote “the teacher’s commandments” and lessons and marginalized them or appended their explanations and interpretations to them, and those books became attributed to the teacher, not to the students, like some of the owners of the four schools of thought such as Abu Hanifa or other schools of thought.
If Ziryab had not fled Baghdad because of his teacher Ishaq al-Mawsili and sought refuge in Andalusia, he would have been killed. The teacher sacrificed his student as a result of that blind jealousy, when Harun al-Rashid praised Ziryab and expressed his extreme admiration for this exceptional student in literature and art. The teacher’s jealousy of his student arose and he gave him the choice between being killed or leaving Baghdad, the capital of the world at that time. Ziryab sided with his talent and fled towards Tunisia and then Andalusia. If it had not been for that quick decision, human civilization would have been deprived of his knowledge of music, the “art of etiquette,” and what pertained to fashion and its arts at the time.
Today, in the age of digitization, the speed of innovations, and the acceleration of the pace of technology, the student has become a teacher, and the teacher has become a student, especially in the Middle East and the backwardness of the education system in many of its countries. This is also a matter that falls under that scientific, impractical jealousy, so the teacher enters as a weaker party if he does not correct himself, because the amount of knowledge and the amounts of scientific and cognitive flow in the student has become today more than the teacher due to many circumstances, gains, and outcomes, until the owner of the pen no longer carries a pen, nor does the owner of the stick fit his hand in our current time, digital, artificial intelligence, and three-dimensional privacy, and that the leather school bag has diminished until it has become a device the size of the palm of the hand, which has a lot, carries a lot, and makes up for a lot, and we have to accept the new saying: Pay attention, teacher, instead of our old saying: Pay attention, student!
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