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Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Neuroscientist: On Imitation, Child Psychology and Education
By now, most of us are probably at least somewhat familiar with the “case” of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. It involves a Pakistani woman who was engaged in Islamic activism that has been thrown into an American prison based on spurious charges.
She was convicted in 2010; and has been sentenced to 86 years in prison. However, even prior to this peculiar trial, she had been given a taste of American liberalism and democracy in Afghanistan, at the Bagram Air Force Base. It is a widely known fact that the occupying US forces would torture prisoners at this location (to the extent that a scandal was exposed in 2005, when the New York Times uncovered the disturbing events leading up to and resulting in the deaths of two inmates). The mistreatment experienced by Dr. Aafia at this infamous base, in 2008, had been described as follows in an academic article published in 2016:
The article goes on to quote Yvonne Ridley, the British journalist who accepted Islam after her detention under the Taliban (it appears they’re nowhere near as bad as the American liberals and democrats!):
It should be noted, however, that this same Yvonne Ridley is now a rabid liberal and self-professed proud feminist. (May Allah guide us all; keep us firm upon the truth; and safeguard our faith from being corrupted by the misguidance of all modern ideologies. Amin.)
RELATED: [WATCH] Taliban Gives Safe Haven to Pregnant Feminist
Just a few days ago, Dr. Aafia finally experienced the most miniscule, fleeting form of relief. After almost 20 years, she was finally able to meet a member of her family, Dr Fauzia Siddiqui, the only sister of Dr. Aafia, who is herself a neuroscientist that also studied in the United States and even taught there at the university level.
The Express Tribune describes the meeting:
These few short lines paint a very vivid picture, showcasing the tragedy of Dr. Aafia’s situation in its most raw human aspects. She has been deprived of all the joys of seeing her children grow up, and, after nearly 20 years, she was only permitted to speak to her sister from the other side of a glass screen for a little over 2 hours.
Imitation, Child Psychology and Education
But let us now take a brief look at her life, beyond Dr. Aafia the prisoner or, even prior to that, Dr. Aafia the Muslim activist. In 1999, she founded a nonprofit organization, Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching. Dr. Aafia is also a neuroscientist, having studied at the famous MIT (graduating with honors) and later earning her PhD at Brandeis University. Her 2001 thesis was titled Separating the components of imitation.In Western thought, Plato was known to have written about mimesis (imitation). In fact, it was the reason he was against poetry in his Republic (as poets don’t create, they merely imitate). Yet, in modern Western philosophy, we had to wait for the emergence of Félix Ravaisson in France and his 1837 book De l’habitude (“On Habit”) to see imitation become a field of its own (for Ravaisson, a habit was basically something spiritual, a set of unconscious mechanisms that ultimately become part of our essence over time).
Ravaisson had a direct influence on Henri Bergson, the most important French philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, who had in turn influenced key Muslim thinkers, such as Mohammed Iqbal in South Asia and Nurettin Topçu in Turkey.
But it was someone else who took Ravaisson’s idea to its fullest expression. This was the sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in his 1890 book Les lois de l’imitation (“Laws of imitation”). Tarde argued that imitation is a social phenomenon, both on the individual and civilizational level, to the extent that it defines existence itself. For example, he maintained that, if a civilization doesn’t imitate another (even one that is inferior; or through making modifications), it its more or less a dead civilization.
Tarde was also a pioneer of criminology, and he opposed the dominant school, i.e., that of Cesare Lombroso, which pushed the idea that criminality was principally physical. Lombroso, as an anthropologist, said that a criminal has a certain type of face, even inferring racial stereotypes. Tarde, on the other hand, argued that criminality was instead psychological.
In psychology—child psychology in particular—, the significance of imitation in learning was brought to light by Lev Vygotsky (an underrated Soviet scholar) and Jean Piaget, who is considerably more well known for his work in the field as compared to Vygotsky.
