I have come back to the request in Fatiha: “Guide us to the straight path.” By this point, I have already acknowledged Allah Subhanahu wa Taala, His mercy, the Day of Judgment, whom I worship and where I seek help. What am I asking to understand and live by when I ask for guidance?
I keep thinking about the orientation behind an action: the beliefs through which a person understands a situation, and the intention with which they respond. What seems worth pursuing to them? What makes their response feel right? These questions matter because circumstances change. Remembering what someone did in one situation takes me only so far. Understanding the reasons and principles involved could help me recognise the same direction in a very different setting. I want to understand how the commitments of Deen become part of that judgment.
Alongside this, I am reading Judith Rich Harris’s The Nurture Assumption. I have not finished it, and I am still working out what to make of her argument. Harris questions the weight given to parents in explanations of children’s development. She draws on behavioural-genetic research to challenge parent-centred assumptions in both Freudian and behaviourist accounts, despite the differences between those theories. What has caught my attention is where she turns next: the child among other children.
Her “group socialization theory” gives peers, belonging and group patterns a major role in explaining how children learn to behave outside the home. That widens the picture I am considering. Parents are part of this wider setting too, through their involvement and choices about where children live, which schools they attend and whom they meet. Genes, relationships and opportunities also belong in the picture. I still need to examine how these influences interact and what each explains for the particular outcome being studied. For now, the book has drawn my attention to the environment in which a way of living becomes familiar.
That brings me back to the communal language of Fatiha. We worship. We seek help. Guide us. Then the path is described in relation to people. I am asking for guidance among others, and I find myself wondering how our shared surroundings enter our judgment: what earns approval, what we come to take for granted, what begins to seem natural.
I want to carry that attention into the Qur’an’s accounts of individuals and communities. Alongside their actions, I want to follow the beliefs, reasons and intentions the text gives us, and the social settings in which their choices unfold. What made a response persuasive to them? Which patterns could I recognise in another setting, including my own? Social and cognitive psychology give me useful ways to frame some of these questions; philosophy of action helps me think more carefully about reasons and intention.
The question becomes personal here. I can affirm a belief and still be learning to recognise the assumptions shaping my everyday responses. That relationship between what I believe, what I intend and how I live is what I want to follow more closely as I continue reading.
Reading alongside this entry
- Al-Fatiha 1:1–7. The plural forms in 1:5–7 are the textual starting point; the connection explored here is my developing reflection.
- Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption, publisher’s excerpt, and her group socialization theory paper. Harris’s explanation is a theory to examine alongside other evidence.
- Further directions: social psychology for social understanding and group influence; cognitive psychology for beliefs, interpretation and decisions; developmental psychology and behavioural genetics for different aspects of childhood development. Sociology widens the view to institutions and culture; philosophy of action examines reasons, purposes and agency.