“I’d rather be a comma in a sentence I believe in than a period at the end of one I don’t.” – Nobody famous. I made that up. But it felt right so I kept it.
Have you ever thought about what it must feel like to be a cool spot on the sun?
Just sit with that for a second.
Every single thing around you is on fire. Raging, blazing, absolutely committed to burning. And there you are. Cool. Still. Not broken. Not defective. Just…different. And not by choice either. You didn’t apply for this position. You didn’t fill out a form saying “yes, please make me the weird one.” You just are. And now you have to figure out what to do with that.
Does it feel like belonging? Or does it feel like being at a party where everyone got the dress code memo except you?
Kher.
I think we romanticize being different. We put it on motivational posters with pictures of mountains and sunrises. “Dare to be different!” Great. Thanks. Very helpful. What the poster doesn’t tell you is the part where you sit quietly while the world roars around you and wonder if maybe they’re right and you’re the problem.
That is the actual experience of the contrarian. Not the cool movie version. The real one.
It is lonely. But here is the thing about that loneliness…it is a loud loneliness. It is surrounded by people. People who disagree with you. People who tell you to catch up, warm up, burn up already. And there is something almost beautiful about that. Because the alternative is worse.
What is the alternative?
The alternative is this: one day all the flames burn out. And you are standing there. Right. Proven correct. Completely alone.
No thank you.
I would rather be the cool spot in the middle of the inferno, wrong by everyone’s count, than be the last man standing in a world that has gone quiet. Because what is the point of being right if there is nobody left with you? What is the point of surviving the fire if surviving means watching everything you knew go dark, one flame at a time? It is not about being right. It is about letting others be even when they tried to not let you be!
Every flame that goes out is a grief. Not a victory.
Remember that.
Now. I want to tell you that my whole spiel about being a spot of cool on the burning ball of fire extends beyond people onto systems. So let me talk about Islamic economics. And I say this with love, I really do.
For decades now, Islamic economics has been standing at the edge of the market-based system, watching it with a combination of awe and insecurity, and slowly, quietly…rearranging itself to look more like it. Adjusting the terminology here. Packaging the products differently there. Making sure the math checks out in a way that the conventional economists will find acceptable. Respectable. Legit.
It is the older sibling copying the younger one.
Which, if you stop and think about it, is genuinely bizarre. Islamic economics is not a new idea trying to prove itself. It is a tradition with centuries of jurisprudential depth, with its own account of justice and exchange and what wealth is actually for. It predates the neoclassical framework it keeps trying to impress. And yet here it is…trying to fit in. Trying to be recognized. Trying to get a seat at a table that was built on entirely different assumptions.
The cool spot has learned to perform warmth.
And that is the sad part. Because the performance doesn’t work. You can dress up a fundamentally different worldview in the language of efficient markets and you will not convince the market believers. You will just confuse the people who came to you for something real. You will call it Islamic Finance and Islamic Banking - and the true searchers will scratch their heads wondering where you went wrong.
Here is what I think. And feel free to disagree because that is, somewhat ironically, the whole point of this piece.
Stop trying to be something you are not.
It will feel exposed. It will feel vulnerable. People will say you are not rigorous enough, not modern enough, not practical enough. The flames will burn very brightly and very confidently and they will tell you that your way of thinking is quaint at best.
Let them.
Because the world does not need another framework that looks like the one already causing all the problems. The market based system has failed - the naysayers from a decade ago are now just a handful. Like some old uncle who is still dreaming of the past. They are in denial but that is okay cause they are irrelevant and not what the world needs.
The world needs the cool spot to just…be cool. To say: yes, I have a different set of assumptions. Yes, I think about risk differently, and about the relationship between capital and labor differently, and about what markets are for differently. And no, I will not apologize for that.
That takes courage. Real courage. Not the motivational poster kind.
And yes, it will be lonely sometimes. But it is a loneliness worth choosing. Because the alternative, a tradition that gave up its identity just to belong, is lonelier than anything.
Be the cool spot.
Grieve the flames.
Stay anyway.
“But I know we all can't stay here forever. So I want to write my words on the face of today. And then they'll paint it” – Blind Melon
Still burning-ly,
4Rookie
interesting and saddening to see inferiority complex (due to historical reasons) to take over a whole class of academics - once again