To Observe Is to Understand: A Ramadan Reflection on Ghana at 69

The Quranic mandate to travel and reason has never felt more urgent than on a day when Ghana marks 69 years of self-determination

“Do they not travel through the earth and observe?” — Surah Yusuf, 12:109

There is a verse in The Holy Quran that has never functioned as poetry. It functions as instruction. “Do they not travel through the earth and observe?” Allah does not ask this rhetorically. The question carries a methodological demand: go, look carefully, and reason from what you find. That demand sits at the foundation of how knowledge grows.

The Islamic Golden Age took the verse at its word. Al-Biruni travelled to the Indian subcontinent and produced the first systematic account of its peoples, sciences, and philosophies. Ibn Battuta crossed three continents across three decades, covering more ground than any traveller of his age, accumulating observations that historians still consult today. Ibn Khaldun moved between courts and calamities across North Africa and the Middle East, and from those observations built the first theory of how civilisations rise and collapse under their own structural pressures. Each of these men was not wandering. Each was obeying a scriptural injunction to see the world as a source of evidence.

Francis Bacon arrived at the same conclusion through a different path three centuries later. His argument that knowledge must be grounded in systematic observation rather than inherited authority was presented as a philosophical revolution in Europe. Islamic scholars had been practising it since the ninth century. Jean Piaget, working in the twentieth century on how children develop understanding, confirmed what both traditions had already established: direct engagement with the world is not supplementary to learning. It is the mechanism by which genuine comprehension forms.

Today is the 6th of March. Ghana marks 69 years since Kwame Nkrumah stood at the Polo Grounds in Accra and announced that the black man was capable of managing his own affairs. That declaration was itself an act of observation. A people had studied colonialism from within, measured what it extracted and what it suppressed, understood the mechanisms by which foreign administration sustained itself, and drew conclusions precise enough to act upon. Independence was not granted; it was reasoned toward. The same Quranic verse applies. Those who observe carefully enough eventually see what others have agreed not to look at.

Sixty-nine years on, Ghana lives with the consequences of both what was seen clearly and what was not. The institutional frameworks built at independence have endured, reformed, and sometimes faltered. The economy has moved through commodity booms and debt cycles that the founding generation did not fully anticipate. The diaspora has grown into a constituency that engages Ghanaian governance from outside its borders whilst remaining shaped by everything inside them. Each of these realities reward careful observation. Each of them yields something to those willing to travel through the evidence and reason without the comfort of a predetermined conclusion.

This is the seventeenth day of Ramadan. The fast sharpens attention. It removes certain preoccupations and directs focus toward what remains. In that condition, the instruction to observe is easier to act upon. Look at something ordinary today, something you have passed a hundred times without pausing. Look at it as Al-Biruni looked at an unfamiliar civilisation, as Ibn Khaldun looked at the patterns underneath the noise of political events, as Ghana’s independence generation looked at a condition they had inherited and decided to understand before they moved to change it.

Observation is a spiritual act. It is also a civic one. A nation that observes its own systems carefully builds the foundation for changing what does not serve its people. A believer who observes the world with the attention the Quran demands builds the foundation for a life shaped by understanding rather than assumption. On this independence anniversary, and in this blessed month, the two obligations meet in the same place.

Zongo Caucus Coordinator for the NDC UK and Ireland Chapter.

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