Day 19 Ramadan Knowledge Series: Wisdom is not what you know, it is what you do with it

The Holy Quran does not say knowledge is a blessing. It says wisdom is. The word used is hikmah, and it has never meant the possession of information.

It means applied knowledge: the capacity to take what you understand and use it in ways that produce good for others, for society, and for the generations that will inherit the consequences of today’s choices. Information sits still. Hikmah moves. It enters situations, reads their human texture, and acts from that reading.

In his work, Aristotle called this quality phronesis, practical wisdom, and placed it above every other virtue because it determines how all other virtues are used. Courage directed by phronesis becomes principled action; courage without it becomes recklessness that harms the very people it intended to protect.

Robert Sternberg, delivering on contemporary psychology, extended this into institutional life. His balance theory of wisdom holds that wise decision-making requires holding three sets of interests in tension at the same time: the interests of the person deciding, the interests of those directly affected, and the interests of the broader community over time. When any one of those three is dropped from the calculation, the decision may still be rational. However, It will rarely be just.

Ghana’s minimum wage stands at 21.77 cedis per day, the lowest in the sub-region. A young person earning that wage cannot cover transport, food, and utilities simultaneously.

The incentive this creates is measurable: it pushes working-age youth toward informal income, including illegal mining, remittance dependence, and migration. The government holds detailed economic information, growth projections, fiscal surplus targets, sectoral data. What that information does not settle is the question Sternberg’s framework forces into the open: whose interests are being balanced when stabilisation policies are designed?

When the answer is primarily the interests of creditors and bond markets, the minimum wage stays where it is, youth unemployment persists, and the information that exists about the cost of that persistence is processed without producing the structural response it demands.

The same failure operates at a global scale. Geoeconomic confrontation ranks as the top risk most likely to trigger a material crisis in 2026, with misinformation and disinformation ranked second, because states are increasingly using economic tools as weapons rather than as instruments of shared stability.

The information required to prevent this is not absent. Governments commission economic modelling, conflict early-warning systems, and climate projections that describe, with precision, what happens when multilateral cooperation breaks down. The problem is that this information is processed through decision-making systems that Sternberg would recognise as structurally unwise: systems that optimise for national advantage in the short term and assign the costs of that optimisation to populations and countries with less power to resist them.

A minimum wage set to satisfy a fiscal model without asking whether a person can eat on it is an exercise in calculation, not wisdom. An international order that circulates detailed risk assessments about famine and conflict whilst simultaneously dismantling the aid architecture that responds to them is well-informed without being just.

Aristotle’s insight holds in both cases: the information exists, but the virtue that would direct it toward the right end, at the right moment, for the right people, is what is withheld.

This Ramadan, the verse asks a more compelling question than most of us habitually answer. Ask not only what you know. Ask how what you know should change what you do.

Knowledge that leaves behaviour untouched has not yet become wisdom. It remains information waiting for the judgement, the courage, and the moral seriousness that hikmah requires.