I learned precious little about the coronavirus during our month-long acquaintance, but it taught me much about the regime of numbers that it has casually usurped. We’ve accepted numbers as our rulers, but rarely do we perceive their rule. Now, a medieval insurgent has come for the throne— that virus with the crown— and our counterattack has exposed the promises and pathologies of our numerical order.
Counting accounts for modern life itself. Our technological prowess largely depends on ever-greater, ever-escalating feats of counting. Our miraculous computers—our iPhones, Surface Books, and Amazon Alexas—are but the sums of ones and zeroes.1 Everything from the stock exchange on Wall Street to the microwaves heating our lunches are measured and measuring. We are fish and measurement is our water, so fundamental to our existence as to be invisible.
The coronavirus has stripped our numerical overlords of their Invisibility Cloaks. In the silence and sickness of quarantine, I discovered that I was no longer numb to modernity’s fusillade of numbers. The extent to which they ruled my existence became acutely apparent. Prescribed quantities divided my days: a 200 mg pill of benzonatate every eight hours, a puff of an albuterol 90 mcg inhaler every four. When my nightly coughing fits threatened to smother me, I stumbled out of bed and slipped on my blue-white oximeter, breathing—to the extent that I could—a sigh of relief when I saw that my SpO2 still hovered above 90. When I awoke, I reached for my thermometer before my phone, checking whether my sizzling temperature had crossed the febrile milestone of 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit. When I drank a bottle of Gatorade Zero to restore the electrolytes vomited into my toilet, my keto-addled mind couldn’t help but absorb the fanatic exactitude of its nutrition label: the serving size of 591 milliliters and the five calories per serving, the two grams of carbohydrates and the 270 milligrams of sodium.
This proliferation of numbers has reset our epistemic standards. We expect measurements for everything and dismiss everything that can’t be measured. Stephen L. Carter has called this prevailing ideology “measurism,” which he defines as follows: “That which can be measured is of greater importance than that which cannot.”2 This definition is essentially correct, though I would suggest an addendum: “That which can be measured is more real than that which cannot.” The unquantifiable strikes us as irrelevant at best, imaginary at worst. We determine a country’s economic health by its gross domestic product and consumer price index; a person’s biological health by their calorie intake and body mass index. What can’t be captured by such metrics can’t be considered. Whether or not we realize it, we now regard numbers as the arbiters of reality.3
Our obsession with numbers stems from our need for yaqeen—certainty. That need undergirded a central aim of the European Enlightenment: to use human reason to discover objective truth and thereby domesticate nature. Numbers, with their aura of untainted impartiality, seemed ideal instruments for such a task. We see them as epistemic saints, holy men withdrawn from the profane realms of cognitive bias and irrational prejudice. Having descended from a transcendent realm, their authority is unimpeachable. How can one challenge knowledge itself? “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it,” wrote distinguished physician William Thomson in 1883. “But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.”4 One can blaspheme with numbers, but one cannot blaspheme against numbers.5 The measure of modern man is how well he counts.
The coronavirus crisis is so existentially destabilizing, in part, because it is a crisis of counting. Epidemiological models, from the Imperial College of London to the University of Washington, duel in a battle of literal life-and-death—not theirs, but the billions who pledge fidelity to the victor. Yet these models, these shapers of this historical moment, lack the most cherished virtue of scientific modernity: epistemic certainty. Since March 2020, estimates of American fatalities have fluctuated from 2.2 million to 100,000 to 60,000 back to 180,000, with deaths under- and over-calculated, daily adjustments trying and failing to tame reality. We have struggled to determine the number of anything: of infected individuals and of asymptomatic carriers, of the basic reproduction ratio and of the infection fatality rate. This twin display of ignorance and helplessness, of failing to comprehend nature and thus failing to control it, is the nightmare of the Enlightenment made manifest. Our recurring, staggering failure to model the coronavirus confirms a taboo truth: there are limits to what we can count—and, therefore, limits to what we can know. The laymen in our society, whether consciously or unconsciously, are likely to find this preposition heretical.6 Science, they insist, will find a way.7
But modern science, the Enlightenment’s grand hope for opening the door to nature’s secrets, has turned on its maker. It has locked the door and hurled the key into the abyss. The foundation of quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, describes an inherently unknowable universe. In simple terms, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot measure both the position and the velocity of a particle with absolute precision. There is an inevitable trade-off: the more we know about a particle’s position, the less we know about its velocity, and vice versa. Certainty in one realm will always generate uncertainty in another. This uncertainty results not from the inadequacy of our measuring equipment, but from an inviolable rule of reality.8 In other words, no matter how technologically advanced our civilization becomes, we will never know everything about a quantum system.
To be clear, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle doesn’t say that we can’t be certain about anything; rather, it says that the scope of things we can be certain about is intrinsically limited. This, too, is the Islamic perspective on human knowledge.9 The uncertainty principle imposes a hard limit on the human capacity for measurement—a limit, the Qur’an makes clear, bypassed only by God, for “He keeps count of all things.”10 Indeed, “Not even a leaf falls without His knowledge.” 11 He can answer a basic question that we, for all our measuring prowess, still cannot: how many leaves are there on Earth? We have estimates, sure, but what are estimates but confessions that our precision isn’t precise enough?
The imprecise character of human knowledge is expounded at length in Surah 18 of the Qur’an, Al-Kahf — “The Cave.”12 It tells the true story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a famous Christian folktale about a young group of men who fled the religious persecution of the Roman emperor Trajan Decius in 250 A.D. 13 They hid in a cave and were made to sleep for hundreds of years.14 Different religious sects disagree on the number of sleepers and the number of years they slept, and the Qur’an acknowledges this dispute: “They will say there were three, the fourth of them being their dog; and they will say there were five, the sixth of them being their dog—guessing at the Unseen; and they will say there were seven, and the eighth of them was their dog.”15 The Qur’an ends the debate not by answering the question, but by leaving it unanswered and shifting the focus of the conversation. “Say, [O Muhammad], ‘My Lord is most knowing of their number.’” This point is reiterated regarding the number of years that the Sleepers spent in slumber: “God knows best how long they remained there. He has [knowledge of] the unseen [aspects] of the heavens and the earth.”16
There is, of course, nothing wrong with refining our measuring capacities. We rely on measurements to fulfill basic religious obligations, from determining the direction of the qibla to calculating 2.5 percent of our wealth for zakat. Furthermore, the pursuit of knowledge is highly valued in Islam—the pre-Islamic era in Arabia, after all, is known as Jahiliyaa, the “Age of Ignorance.” There is no contradiction between seeking to understand and acknowledging the limits of our understanding. The latter is its own type of knowledge, and indeed is a prerequisite for the former. To seek knowledge is to admit ignorance.
To tolerate ignorance, though, requires patience. The Sleepers of the Cave had this patience in spades, so they were at peace with their ignorance. After God awakens them from their slumber “to show which of them was most precise in calculating how long they had remained,” some assume that they had slept “a day or part of a day.”17 However, they quickly recognize that they simply do not know, and they resolve to leave the matter to God; “Your Lord is most knowing of how long you remained.”18 They accept that they do not know, so “We made firm their hearts.”19
This is what we might call the ‘Islamic uncertainty principle’: the more we accept our uncertainty, the more certain we become. The more we put our trust in Allah (ﷻ), the more we’ll trust ourselves to navigate the mercurial currents of life. Like the Sleepers, we must both recognize and embrace our ignorance. To take up arms against uncertainty is to begin a war that we have already lost. This is a hard truth to swallow. Tawakkul, reliance on God, doesn’t come easy to the human being, because the human being “sees himself as self-sufficient.”20 Tawakkul is hardly a passive act—it demands an inexhaustible force of will and vigilant renewal of focus. To accept impotence is not impotent; to accept ignorance is not ignorant.
A man once asked the Prophet (ﷺ) if he should tie his camel or trust in Allah (ﷻ). The Prophet’s (ﷺ) response: “Tie her and trust in Allah.”21 This is the essence of tawakkul: taking meaningful action to achieve our goals, but with the understanding that our actions guarantee nothing. The rope will keep the camel in place only if God wills it, and God’s will belongs to the ghayb, the Unseen. We can be certain only of uncertainty, and this gives us the confidence to traverse the unknown.
This is the key to achieving spiritual “antifragility.” The term “antifragile” comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined it in a 2012 book of the same name. “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness,” wrote Taleb. “The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” The resilient merely survives conditions of uncertainty; the antifragile thrives.22 Antifragility is a natural property of the human body—and of the ideal Muslim. Our limited knowledge and our state of uncertainty leave us vulnerable to unpredictable crises. A believer should strive to emerge from these trials stronger than before.23 “Wondrous is the affair of the believer, for there is good for him in every matter, and this is not the case with anyone except the believer,” said the Prophet (ﷺ). “If he is happy, he thanks Allah and thus there is good for him; and if he is harmed, he shows patience and thus there is good for him.”24 The Muslim is the child building a sandcastle by the sea, light and carefree, committed to his project and content knowing that, in a moment, a passing wave could reduce it to ruin.25 Whether or not the wave arrives is a question without suspense, for his sense of fulfillment is not tied to the answer.
To play on the beach of life is to internalize the spirit of “wabi-sabi,” a traditional Japanese aesthetic that celebrates the imperfect and the impermanent. Chipped porcelain, rusted walls, faded wood—all are examples of wabi-sabi. The modest is extravagant, the deformed elegant. Ugliness is beauty, unseen. Much like wabi-sabi, Islam points us to a state of being that does not merely tolerate natural limits—it affirms and treasures them.
Our circumscribed knowledge, then, is not just a source of strength, but also a source of hope. This is the promise Allah (ﷻ) makes when He tells us, “And if you tried to count Allah’s(ﷻ) favors, you would never be able to number them.”26 The blessings that we can count, from our health to our families, do not begin to encompass our privilege. Allah’s (ﷻ) favors are often like the dimensions of string theory—immense but imperceptible. Even in our worst moments, Allah (ﷻ) assures us that we are blessed beyond imagination. This is not to trivialize our hardships, but to give us the spiritual stamina to survive and even thrive through them.
Like epidemiologists everywhere, I counted a lot during quarantine. My numbers, like the daily ones on Worldometer, projected an exactitude that masked their own superficiality. In reality, my oximeter and thermometer could not begin to approximate the numberless miracles unfolding within me every second of every day, as trillions of cells coordinated to defeat a virus they’d never before encountered. Every action taken by every cell in every second of that month-long quarantine was a favor from God; favors I could not measure or even perceive. I knew only that my body, this loan from the Divine, was fighting to keep me breathing. That certainty was enough. To be infected with coronavirus—as everyone currently is, even the healthiest amongst us—is to remember the reality of existential uncertainty. In these times, as in all times, the greatest measure of ourselves is how much we trust the Immeasurable.
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1. Consider the automobile, the quintessential symbol and staple of modernity. Even a five-minute commute to work involves the careful calibration of countless calculations. The most powerful computer in a contemporary car, the engine control unit, gathers information from dozens of sensors that measure oxygen, air pressure, and engine temperature, and then uses this data to conduct millions of calculations per second to keep engine emissions low. This is to say nothing of air bags, anti-lock brakes, and traction-control systems, all of which use their own calculation-heavy microprocessors. You, the driver, are the human component of this steel computer, constantly monitoring and reacting to the measurements of your speedometer, odometer, and fuel gauge.
2. Carter, Stephen L. God’s Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2000.
3. Measurism is not the fault of measurement, which has enabled everything from air-conditioning to space travel. Every great civilization has built itself on the back of measurements, and every great civilization will continue to do so. Measurement has as much to do with measurism as science with scientism, which is to say very little. Both are articles of quasi-religious belief most commonly held by laymen that instinctively worship the sources of the technological miracles that have reshaped their lives. Scientism—the view that only scientific methods can ascertain truth—is science subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is scientists, after all, who are best positioned to appreciate the limits of science.
4. “Electrical Units of Measurement,” Institution of Civil Engineers, May 3, 1883
5. The rest of Thomson’s quote is even more revealing: “In physical science, a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. [Without measurement], it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be…the grandest discoveries of science have been but the rewards of accurate measurement.” One would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct encapsulation of the ideology of measurism, or a clearer illustration of its connection to scientism. So ubiquitous have both dogmas become that every field of knowledge, no matter how qualitative, now finds itself in the hegemonic grip of the quantitative. The journalist and the historian must perform the role of the data scientist, which they willingly will. After all, the citation of a percentage or a poll, no matter how perfunctory or slipshod, gives the citer the imprimatur of scientific legitimacy and therefore epistemic credibility.
6. On the other hand, most of our intellectual elite now regard the Enlightenment’s dream of all-encompassing knowledge the way an adult regards his childhood aspirations: with sympathetic understanding tinged by embarrassment. The postmodern thinker (and increasingly the postmodern everyman) has realized that calculations are as biased as their calculators, because inputs will always bear the fingerprints of their prejudice. So our scholars, in their intellectual maturity, scorn grand narratives and confident truths. They reject all sweeping maxims but that of Socrates: “I know that I know nothing.” Our crisis of counting, then, reflects the broader crisis of certainty characteristic of postmodernity.
7. We might call this argument the “science of the gaps”— the faith that whatever humanity does not currently understand will eventually be understood by science, whether next year or next century.
8. In a 1927 paper titled “On the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics,” Heisenberg wrote: “It seems to be a general law of nature that we cannot determine position and velocity simultaneously with arbitrary accuracy.”
9. While the uncertainty principle is only meant to describe physical phenomena in the quantum realm, it has value as a generalizable philosophical principle. It points us in the direction of a healthier attitude toward knowledge—neither the presumptuous optimism of Enlightenment modernity nor the glib fatalism of subjectivist postmodernity.
10. Qur’an 72:28
11. Qur’an 6:59
12. Indeed, Surah Al-Kahf is in many ways an extended commentary on Islamic epistemology. It goes on to tell the stories of two men of distinguished knowledge, al-Khidr and Dhul Qurnayn, but credits everything they know to God. Al-Khidr, a man wise enough to teach Musa (pbuh), is described as a mere “servant from among our Servants.” His knowledge is not his own, but rather a sliver of Divine understanding that he had been taught. Similarly, of Dhul Qarnayn, God declares, “And We had encompassed [all] that he had in knowledge.” That we are incapable of independent knowledge —that what little we do know has been taught to us by the All-Knowing—is the bedrock of the Qur’anic epistemological paradigm. It is a principle expressed in the first verses of Surah Al-Alaq, the first revealed Surah: “[He] taught man that which he did not know.” This is always true, even if, as the Surah goes on to say, “Man transgresses, because he sees himself as self-sufficient.”
13. As recorded by Ibn Ishaq, the Surah was revealed after the Quraiysh, seeking to expose the Prophet (ﷺ) as an imposter, asked some rabbis to give them scriptural questions with which to test the Prophet’s knowledge.
14. The Qur’an more or less relays the same account of events, though, in characteristically minimalist fashion, it omits much of the historical context. This is the case throughout the Qur’an, which cautions against fixating on unnecessary details.
15. Qur’an 18:22
16. Some matters are intentionally left ambiguous in Islam. For example, the exact date of Laylatul Qadr, the blessed night in Ramadan during which the first verse of the Qur’an was revealed, is similarly elusive. The Prophet (ﷺ) addressed this ambiguity by saying, “Maybe it was better for you.” (Sahih Al-Bukhari 49 – Belief. https://sunnah.com/bukhari:49).
17. That the Sleepers could not distinguish between the slumber of a day and the slumber of centuries underlines the vast potential of human ignorance. Sleeping is a basic and intimate biological fact. By some estimates, we spend roughly half of our lives asleep. This should humble us—that we could know so little about a quotidian act so essential to every dimension of our wellbeing. How many of us, when we rise, know how long we’ve slept without consulting a clock?
18. Qur’an 18:19
19. Qur’an 18:14
20. Qur’an 96:7
21. Sunan At-Tirmidhi 2517– Chapters on the Description of the Day of Judgement. https://sunnah.com/urn/727020
22. Antifragility, at bottom, is simply a more sophisticated expression of a popular mantra originally formulated by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
23. Nietzsche, though an atheist, echoes this Islamic principle with his concept of “amor fati”: love of one’s fate, no matter how much suffering it entails. For Nietzsche, every experience must be embraced as a source of life-enhancing nourishment. This, too, is the case for the believer.
24. Sahih Muslim 2999 – The Book of Zuhd and Softening of Hearts. https://sunnah.com/muslim:2999 Another hadith emphasizes the enhancing qualities of suffering: “The servant will continue to be tried until he is left walking upon the earth without any sin.” (Sunan At-Tirmidhi 2398 – Chapter on Zuhd. https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:2398)
25. This image comes from Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “History is a child building a sandcastle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.”
26. Qur’an 16:18. See also Qur’an 14:34.
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