وَيَخْلُقُ مَا لاَ تَعْلَمُونَ

Qur'an: Sura 16 (an-Nahl/The Bee), verse 8: "... and He creates what you do not know."

One day in the winter of 1995-1996, shortly after I had achieved moderately reliable dial-in Internet access at the Rabat house I was renting during my Fulbright grant to study the social impact of the Internet on Morocco, I had an early glimpse of how the emergent wonders of a searchable, universal data network might be experienced by sophisticated people of very different background than the Western geeks who built the early Net.  My friend and teacher Mohammed Najmi, of Taroudant, Morocco, was staying with us for a few weeks.  I had talked with him a great deal about the wonders of the Web, but we hadn't had a chance to actually look it over.  Najmi returned from the Peace Corps library with a novel that had "Xanadu" in the title.  I asked him if he recognized the word, and he said no, that he was puzzled by it, and that it appeared to be of Persian rather than Arabic origin.  I remarked that I wasn't sure it named a real place, but that if he had gone to high school in the  English-speaking world he might well have read a famous poem beginning, "In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree," and this suggested to me an illustrative exercise in Web searching.  I plugged the phone line into my laptop, logged into the local server at about 1200 baud, and pointed Netscape at AltaVista.  I typed "stately pleasure dome" in the search window and hit enter.  In a few seconds hits began to appear, and I selected one of the first couple and clicked. The screen filled with Coleridge's poem, and I turned to Najmi.  He was grinning, and his eyes were wide.  He said, "That's the thing about the Americans, Douglas.  You imagine something like this Internet, and then you make it happen.  Because you have both imagined it and made it happen, you naturally assume that you know what it's for, but perhaps that's not entirely so."  And then (as I recalled this conversation later) he quoted a line from the Qur'an, to the effect that "We have created things whose time is not yet in whose purpose you do not understand."  He continued, "I wonder if this amazing Internet isn't one of those things we are not yet ready to understand, and whose [real] purpose may be different than we imagine."  I have reflected on this moment from time to time over the past decade, but I have not spoken with Najmi about the incident nor tracked down the passage.  As we caught up on many things during my brief visit to him in Taroudant this April, I reminded him of the incident, and he quickly identified and wrote out the actual passage from Surat An-Nahl. I later found the context, in one of the many Qur'an resources on today's Net [Pickthall translation]:

The commandment of Allah will come to pass, so seek not ye to hasten it. Glorified and Exalted be He above all that they associate (with Him).

He sendeth down the angels with the Spirit of His command unto whom He will of His bondmen, (saying): Warn mankind that there is no Allah save Me, so keep your duty unto Me.

He hath created the heavens and the earth with truth. High be He Exalted above all that they associate (with Him).

He hath created man from a drop of fluid, yet behold! he is an open opponent.

And the cattle hath He created, whence ye have warm clothing and uses, and whereof ye eat;

And wherein is beauty for you, when ye bring them home, and when ye take them out to pasture.

And they bear your loads for you unto a land ye could not reach save with great trouble to yourselves. Lo! your Lord is Full of Pity, Merciful.

And horses and mules and asses (hath He created) that ye may ride them, and for ornament. And He createth that which ye know not.

And Allah's is the direction of the way, and some (roads) go not straight. And had He willed He would have led you all aright.

He it is Who sendeth down water from the sky, whence ye have drink, and whence are trees on which ye send your beasts to pasture.

The context of the passage mentions banal examples readily understandable by pre-modern folk: domestic animals are contrasted with willful humans, and there is a specific contemdation of those who “associate” other beings with God.

In our conversation about the state of today's Net and my current enthusiasm for nudging the way young Moroccans are using it I described:

· the current state of Google, with its searchable books and scholars' resources, its translation facilities and advanced email, and its attempts to include multimedia material;

· the "blogosphere" as a place where individuals can articulate and aspect of their lives or interests in confidence that this material will be findable and linkable by all other interested persons; and

· the Wikipedia and related projects, allowing all of us to become participants in the project of making good data available to the human species

I used with Najmi, as I have with other Moroccan friends, the experience of sitting with Yassine in the Zawiya cyber as he was setting up his practice blog and illustrating the Wikipedia by bringing up the English entry for Ibn Khaldoun, showing how it can be edited by anyone, pointing out the list of other languages in which entries for this topic exist and clicking the Arabic and then suggesting that anyone with some skill in both languages -- or a teacher who had such skills-- might work to give each of these parallel entries some of the factual detail and completeness of the other.

I did with Najmi what I have often done at the blackboard with my classes.  I wrote the words about which I was talking -- Google, Wikipedia, Xanadu -- and explained that (unlike the blackboard entries students merely copy down in their notebooks) all he had to do was get himself to a cyber and feed these terms into Google, and he'd be able to reconstruct the conversation and avail himself of the richnesses I have been describing …