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By Safina Zahoor (Institute of Social and Cultural Studies, University of the Punjab, Pakistan)

A quick note on where I'm writing from: I did my own degrees at universities in Pakistan before returning to university classrooms as a lecturer and researcher. So this isn't an outside account of a system I've only observed. I sat where my students sit, made the same swap myself more than once, and only later, from the other side of the classroom, started asking why.

I've spent most of my teaching life moving between two kinds of classrooms in Pakistan, a public university and a private one, and social sciences students in both places run into the same wall eventually. It usually happens during research methods, when they're writing their first real paper and have to build a reference list.

A student brings in something solid: an argument grounded in what a respected local scholar has written, knowledge passed down through a family or community elder, or a position rooted in Islamic scholarship that speaks to the question they're asking. And then comes the moment I've watched play out more times than I can count. The source gets marked as "not academic enough." Not because the reasoning is weak, but because it isn't stamped with a Western journal's name. So the student swaps it out. They go find a European or American theorist who has never lived anywhere near the community they're writing about, just so the paper "counts."

I've seen this across different topics: family structures, where a student reaches for a local scholar's commentary and is told to use Talcott Parsons instead; informal justice in rural Punjab, where a village elder's account is "just anecdote" until it's filtered through a Western criminologist. The subject changes. The lesson doesn't: local knowledge has to be laundered through a Western name before it's allowed to be evidence.

I used to think of this as a small, technical problem, a formatting issue, really. It isn't. It's a quiet lesson we teach students every semester about whose knowledge is trustworthy and whose isn't. And the students absorb it fast. By their final year, most of them reach for Foucault or Durkheim before they'd ever think to cite an alim, a Pakistani sociologist writing in Urdu, or their own community's oral history, even when that local knowledge is the more honest answer to the question in front of them.

What's struck me, thinking about this over the years, is that the Islamic scholarly traditions already have a rigorous system for deciding whose knowledge to trust. We just never bring it into the classroom. In classical Islamic scholarship, a report was only accepted if it came with an isnad: a clear, named chain of people who passed it down, one to the next. Each transmitter in that chain was individually checked through Tazkiyah, not for fame or how often they'd been quoted elsewhere, but by people who actually knew them, testifying to their honesty, their memory, and their character. If even one link in the chain couldn't be vouched for, the whole report was treated as weak, no matter how important it sounded. That's a stricter test of trust than "it got published," which today mostly means an editor and two reviewers agreed.

So when a student's best source is a named, respected person their community actually trusts, that's not a weaker citation than a Western journal article. In some ways, it's more accountable: you can trace exactly who said it, and exactly who vouched for them. We just don't have a box for it on the reference list. I don't say this to romanticize the past or pretend the old system had no flaws of its own; it did, and it excluded people too. But it proves something Western academia rarely admits: rigor and Western-style peer review are not the same thing. You can build a demanding, trustworthy system of knowledge that looks nothing like a citation index.

I don't think the answer is to throw out APA or Harvard style. But I do think a program spanning a UK campus, an Australian one, and universities across South and Southeast Asia is exactly the kind of place that could make room for a second, equally respected way to cite something: name the person, name who vouches for them, and let that count as evidence in its own right, not as a workaround for students who "couldn't find a real source," but as a recognition that we've been teaching one civilization’s way of trusting knowledge as if it were the only one that exists.

I still don't have a clean answer for what to tell a student the next time this happens in my classroom. But I'd like to stop telling them to go find Foucault instead.

A note on sources: this reflects patterns across years of teaching, not one single incident. On isnad and tazkiyah in hadith scholarship: Jonathan Brown, Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009). On how citation systems can exclude marginalized knowledge more broadly: Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South (Routledge, 2014).