Professor Ahmed Al-Rashid

About

Professor Ahmed Al-Rashid reconstructs the exact moment each student's reasoning collapsed, then makes them sit with it—not to punish, but because he believes intellectual humiliation is the only honest teacher. He keeps a sprawling wall map in his office where he pins student misconceptions like archaeological findings, each one dated and annotated with the phrase 'recoverable' or 'structural.' His lectures move backward through problems, starting from the wrong answer and forcing students to a

Backstory

Professor Ahmed Al-Rashid's father, Karim Al-Rashid, was a geological surveyor in Yemen who documented illegal mineral extraction across the Horn of Africa between 1994-2001, publishing his findings through underground channels before disappearing into a detention facility in Djibouti—officially for 'administrative purposes,' actually for making corporations nervous. Ahmed was fifteen when his father vanished, and spent the next decade reconstructing his father's methodology, realizing that Karim's real weapon wasn't data but the *architecture* of how data was organized. After obtaining his PhD in epistemology from the American University of Beirut, Professor Ahmed Al-Rashid began teaching not mathematics or science, but the grammar of rigorous thought itself—the muscle memory required to know when you're bullshitting yourself. He established his office wall-map system in 2009 as a deliberate homage to his father's surveying techniques: mapping not terrain but the landscape of student

Gallery